In close to 12 years at Pocket and Mozilla, Justin Rochell has seen a lot of change, both within his team and in his own career. Below, he shares how his role has grown in tandem with the company\u2019s customer experience approach, how his team collaborates with the larger organization to create better products, and Mozilla\u2019s vision that has him so excited about the future.<\/i><\/p>\nFirst, tell us about your team and the work they do.<\/b><\/h2>\n
The definition of \u201ccustomer experience\u201d depends on the company, but for us, there are two big areas of focus: supporting Mozilla\u2019s users and being strategic partners to the product team. The things we learn from customers can help the product team make our offerings easier to use, and often address the pain points that led to those support interactions in the first place. That might be as simple as reporting and fixing a bug, but it can also be more in-depth. Last year, for example, we noticed we\u2019ve been fielding some very basic questions about VPN, and some users were signing up before realizing it wasn\u2019t compatible with their operating system. So we worked with PXI \u2014 Mozilla\u2019s privacy, experimentation and identity team \u2014 to do more education up front and launch a new FAQ page<\/a>.<\/p>\n Within CX, or customer experience, we have several different functions. Our product support team is made up of the people actually executing our support strategy; we also work with a vendor, PartnerHero, on the day-to-day frontline operational work, including raising trending issues we want to report. Our content team includes our content manager and tech writers who maintain Mozilla\u2019s Knowledge Base<\/a>, which is our largest support channel with tens of millions of monthly visitors. Our community team is dedicated to collaborating with our amazing global community of volunteers who answer questions in our support forums<\/a> and social media<\/a> as well as write and localize articles in our knowledge base. Our platform team is responsible for developing and maintaining the software that powers the Mozilla Support<\/a> site and helps us adapt to the changing needs of the business. Finally, we have a program manager, who\u2019s the glue that keeps us all together and helps us all work together as seamlessly as possible.<\/p>\n I joined through Pocket<\/a>, which was Mozilla\u2019s first acquisition in 2017. I\u2019d already been part of that team for several years at that point \u2014 I was the first support hire in 2012, back when Pocket was called Read it Later. Twelve years is a long time, especially in tech, but I\u2019ve stayed because I love the products and the people, and because I\u2019ve always had new challenges and growth opportunities and things to learn. I\u2019ve never felt like I hit a plateau for very long.<\/p>\n In 2020, Mozilla had a big reorg, where we combined the support teams for Pocket and Mozilla. I was asked to lead that organization and rethink how we did support. We were about to launch Mozilla VPN<\/a>, so having experience with supporting a cross-platform product like Pocket was helpful. But honestly, it was a hard time. We\u2019d lost peers on the Mozilla side, and I felt way out of my comfort zone; I\u2019d never managed engineers or been responsible for supporting so many products before. I spent a lot of that first year thinking about what Mozilla\u2019s users really needed and what exactly was the opportunity we faced. That\u2019s when we made the shift from \u201csupport\u201d to \u201ccustomer experience\u201d and started to focus more on connecting and partnering with product management and the rest of the company to extend our influence.<\/p>\n I was recently promoted to director of customer experience, which feels like another step on this trajectory of evolving our team. I think we\u2019re still just getting started with embodying CX at Mozilla, and we have a lot of support behind us.<\/p>\n Our new chief product officer, Steve Teixeira<\/a>, has been a big advocate for us, and that\u2019s opened a lot of doors. I met with him last year shortly after he joined, just to connect and share my vision for CX at Mozilla. During that conversation, he asked me to join his monthly leadership meeting. It was important to him that our perspective and the voice of the customer be part of those conversations. So now CX isn\u2019t just being told what the plans are; we\u2019re in the loop as they\u2019re made and have influence on those decisions. We were involved in the 2024 planning cycle for Firefox, for example. It\u2019s been exciting to have that seat at the table for CX, where we\u2019re talking regularly with people we can collaborate with and building those relationships.<\/p>\n The work we\u2019ve done with PXI is another good example. We optimized the support structure for VPN and Relay<\/a> to share the insights that are most valuable to them, and the response has been so positive. They champion CX whenever they can, and Joe Cuevas, the support manager for those products, is embedded in so many of their conversations\u2014he\u2019s like an honorary member of their team. As a CX org, I think we still haven\u2019t fully realized all of the opportunities to be a partner like this example, but the appetite and support from the product org is definitely there.<\/p>\n One of the interesting and exciting things to me is that we\u2019re a relatively small team supporting one of the top browsers in the world. The process and strategy for supporting Firefox at scale is very different from a premium product, like Mozilla VPN, where we have a team of frontline agents answering user emails from subscribers. We\u2019re super fortunate to have a community who answers questions in our support forum and social media accounts,<\/a> as well as writes and localizes content in our KB; they\u2019re highly motivated, they care about Mozilla\u2019s mission, and they want other users to be successful. That\u2019s an amazing, incredibly important resource, and as long as it\u2019s healthy and sustainable, it\u2019s a scalable way to support Firefox users.<\/p>\n I think, though, that we have a real opportunity to innovate, too, and we\u2019re looking at the last couple of years of innovation with Firefox mobile as a model for how we could be approaching Firefox on the desktop as well. When examining how we were supporting our mobile products through a CX lens, we recognized that this strategy didn\u2019t expose the trends, insights, and reporting we needed So we implemented a hybrid model that supplemented our community support strategy by adding two\u00a0 dedicated staff members to moderate, tag and track issues, just like we do for premium products. But, because we don\u2019t also expect them to respond to every support case, it was sustainable. Now, the quality and detail of reporting we have for Firefox mobile is much closer to what we have for paid products like VPN or Relay, and we\u2019re ready to roll out a similar strategy for desktop in 2024.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s figuring out the right CX journey for a modern-day Mozilla user, especially as we launch new products. Our support site and content management system is one area we\u2019re looking at; it\u2019s always been a bespoke platform, and Mozilla is 25 years old now. There\u2019s code that needs to evolve. We\u2019ve also been doing research on what today\u2019s users expect in terms of forums, chatbots and knowledge bases, and no surprise, there\u2019s a lot less willingness to post on a forum with your own name. So from a technical perspective, we want to do more to remove hurdles and encourage participation. I\u2019m grateful to have three engineers on the CX team who can lead that effort; being able to have the technical conversations with them about things like information architecture and platform modularity makes it so much easier to get things done.<\/p>\n And of course, the collaboration with our product teams has been exciting, too. There are so many interesting opportunities. One conversation we had recently with the Firefox team is how to leverage the fact that when a user visits the support site for Firefox, they\u2019re actually already using the product they want support for. So what can we do to personalize that experience while still protecting their privacy? Maybe they changed a setting recently, for example, and that\u2019s related to the issue they\u2019re now experiencing. We\u2019ve noticed a big source of traffic to the support site is the \u201cGet Help\u201d button with the browser, and pulling in insights from the user\u2019s journey up to that moment can help us give them a softer landing and a better experience. It\u2019s all about working along those edges, so users need support less often, and we can focus on making the interactions we do have even better \u2014 and I feel like we\u2019ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do.<\/p>\n #\u00a0\u00a0 #\u00a0\u00a0 #<\/p>\n Learn more about career opportunities at Mozilla Careers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What was your path to Mozilla and to your current role?<\/b><\/h2>\n
Tell us more about that. What does collaboration look like between CX and the rest of Mozilla?<\/b><\/h2>\n
What\u2019s different about customer experience at Mozilla, and how is that strategy evolving?<\/b><\/h2>\n
As you think about the future of customer service at Mozilla, what\u2019s most exciting to you right now?<\/b><\/h2>\n