Freelancers- The Secret Sauce to Scalable Support OperationsDownload Working with freelancers is a hands-on approach to outsourcing that offers you agency, flexibility, and the potential to make great hires from a pool of folks who have on-the-job-training at your company. Outsourcing adds elasticity to your support team: it helps you flex quickly with changing support … Continue reading Freelancers: The secret sauce to scalable support operations
Tag: customer support
Sometimes you just have to do the thing
There's a lot going on at work. At any job. And often some of the things that are going on are prime for automation. They are tasks that don't require powers of deduction, that don't require a human touch, and so we put them off. "Once we have a process for this thing ,we can … Continue reading Sometimes you just have to do the thing
Moving from individual contributor to team lead: how do I measure success?
Moving into a new role is a time of both excitement and terror. Omg, so much is new 😀! Omg, so much is new 😫. One element I found challenging when moving into a lead role is that success is measured differently from how it was measured when I was an individual contributor. As an … Continue reading Moving from individual contributor to team lead: how do I measure success?
Customer Support Skills Tree
A perennial topic in the customer support industry is "What does a career in support look like?" As support professionals, we want to see a path before us and want to know how to develop along that path, especially if our interest does not lie in managing people and climbing a leadership ladder. There are … Continue reading Customer Support Skills Tree
On the Freshdesk blog: How WordPress.com handles over 2000 support requests each day
After reading recent posts about my daily and weekly routines as lead of a distributed support team at Automattic, Arun Sathiya reached out to ask me more about WordPress.com support for the Freshdesk blog's "Secret Sauce to Customer Support" series. I was happy to spend a Saturday afternoon chatting with him via Slack. On top … Continue reading On the Freshdesk blog: How WordPress.com handles over 2000 support requests each day
Take Control! Techniques for Efficient Live Chatting
I gave a workshop this past weekend at SDX Portland on tips for controlling and ending chats. Here are the slides, handouts for the exercises, and the script 🙂 https://cloudup.com/cYIs_hUqUwt Take Control! Techniques for efficient live chatting Workshop printouts (pdf) Live chat is fast. That’s why it’s great for customers, and that's why it's a … Continue reading Take Control! Techniques for Efficient Live Chatting
A day in the life of a live chat Happiness Engineer
I lead a WordPress.com live chat team at Automattic, and as we expand our live chat offering into the weekends, I work a couple of weekend days each month. Today is one of those weekend workdays for me. On weekends I do more customer-facing-support and less team-lead stuff than I do during the week, and I'm … Continue reading A day in the life of a live chat Happiness Engineer
Andrea Badgley 