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
My name is Andrea Badgley, and I lead a distributed team of 12 Happiness Engineers (customer support professionals) at Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. I am based in Virginia in the eastern US, and my 11 teammates are based in Canada, the US, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, and wherever they happen to be … Continue reading Daily Routines of a Distributed Support Team Lead
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
Growing up, I did well in math and science -- areas I was told repeatedly I was special to do well in. I felt a sense of rarity, and thought, "If I'm good in these, when others struggle, then this is where I should direct my life." By the time I arrived in college, it did not occur … Continue reading Ecologist to… Happiness Engineer? The evolution of one career in support.
Photo credit Lance Conzett. Several months ago, Scott Tran of the Support Driven community asked me some questions about an internal mini-conference I had organized for Automattic's annual meetup. He was thinking about organizing a conference for support professionals, and he'd never organized a conference before. I was excited to share what I knew, as … Continue reading SupConf: a conference organizer's dream come true
Andrea Badgley 