 Wonderful welcome. So I'm gonna start in July 2008. My wife and I had been parents for about two months, two months and some change and we were at a yet another doctor's appointment. We'd gotten all clear when my son was born everything looked great but then at the two-month checkup they came and they said something's weird we just want to send you to a specialist a surgeon craniofacial surgeon just to get a second opinion kind of deal. So there we are freshly minted parents again this is our first child and we're sitting in the waiting room or the exam room whatever waiting for the surgeon to come back and she walks in the room she had one of those smiles that sort of betrayed bad news right something bad was coming and so she launched right in she said your son has acute craniosynostosis of the posterior temporal suture and I remember thinking cool. I have no idea what these words mean right you know it's glazed over you know trying my best to have a poker face I remember glancing at my wife like does she know what that means? I have no idea what that means well the surgeon caught that cue from both of us and continued said you know how when you're born your skulls got those soft spots there's one in the front there's a couple on the back where the the bones need to grow together well one of those spots is called a suture and one of those spots specifically on the back end of your son's head has grown together prematurely and so we need to go in and fix that. Now I'm going to fast forward and totally change gears to July of 20 July of this year 2022 so my wife was dropping off or picking up rather kids from school the car started making a funny noise and she calls we had a road trip plan for like a week later so she calls our regular mechanic and says something along the line hey do you have any spots for me to come in and check out what's going on with the car and they were booked up now you know can't get you in and so she's like oh that's fine I'll just swing by another car shop and and see what's going on so she stops at a again a new mechanic never never been there before and she tells him what's going on the mechanic goes outside climbs under the car comes back out all you know typical mechanic covered in Greece and says something about rotors and something about four hundred dollars and then turns and looks at the person his co-worker sitting behind the the desk says something in a different language and they laugh the two of them and then he turns and looks back at my wife and says we can fit you in today now let's fast for actually rewind this time to July of 2019 I was a senior support technician that pictures really small so you might not be able to see it senior support technician for give WP the donation platform for WordPress and we get a ticket from a person and they said we just sent out an email to 2,500 plus people inviting them to donate on our website and when they click on the link they get this there's been a critical error on your site so we're getting flooded with people who we want to be donating and instead they're telling us they can't donate and they're freaking out about it what do we do technical support is a conversation between you as technical support people and the people that you're talking to and and like a good conversation it's primarily all about how well you can communicate one with the other and so there's two ways you can engage in a conversation you can either be actively engaged interestedly engaged or you can be flippant you can be uninterested and you can be disengaged I call that second option and for the rest of this talk I'll be referring to it is that I call that second option old school support and I'm gonna make a bold assertion old school support is killing you I don't necessarily mean literally but in a metaphorical sense absolutely and if you run out of customers and you run out of money and then you run out of food maybe it could be physically killing you but old school technical support this mentality of and I'll describe a few of the things there but what in in the old school support mentality what's the purpose of the first person you talk to and technical support to talk to the second person right can I talk to your manager you are clearly incompetent and just the person who answers the first row of tickets I need to talk to somebody who can actually fix the problem and that's a rampant thing and I'll argue it's something that we all kind of subconsciously do but there's it creates a hostile environment at least a dissatisfaction really on both ends dissatisfaction for the customer dissatisfaction internally your team does not enjoy their job as much because they spend a lot of time making people upset and I think old school technical support is really built on three faulty premises so first the first faulty premise some of you are old enough like me to remember Steve Jobs there he is around the same time with his friend Bill Gates but Steve Jobs standing on a stage in 2007 and holding a device over his head that no one had ever seen before it was called the iPhone and and I can remember one of the points that he had during this talk of launching the iPhone was it doesn't need a manual and again if you're old like me and you can remember around this time when you got a cell phone it came with a manual it was thick it was like bigger than the phone in some cases and it was written in like five languages and it taught you how to set the clock and how to set an alarm on the phone and how to configure the snake game and you could do like a little welcome message when the phone powered on that like encouraged you for your day or whatever and so cell phones came with manuals so Steve Jobs was standing there and saying this product is so good that it doesn't need a manual it doesn't need technical support so that's our first first faulty premise of old school technical support is that you can make a product so good that it doesn't need technical support I would invite all of us to go to the San Diego Apple store and let's check in on the genius bar see how long the line is and see if there's anybody there that needs technical support see it's a lie that you can make a product so good that it doesn't need technical support and we'll talk in a minute about how it can bleed into or what that looks like but I think it's super important to recognize that that's a lie that there's no such thing as a product so good that everyone will know how to use it intuitively and they'll never submit a support ticket they're never they'll never be unaware of how to use the product so that's our first premise that first faulty premise second faulty premise this is essentially that we take our product or whatever it is that we make service product plugin theme whatever it is and we have these buckets within the company there's like the sales bucket and there's a marketing bucket and there's a development slash product bucket and there's maybe finance whatever there's all of these different buckets what we view with a faulty premise here is we view support technicians as essentially in the development bucket but they're not good enough to be at the top of the development bucket they're they're like junior junior junior developers like they're developers that if they were better at their job they would have a development job and so instead we just stick them into the development bucket and we're like answer tickets ticket guy ticket girl go go over there and answer our tickets and there's it's very easy and I would argue very prevalent that we view technical support in that same lens like what you do when you read the title of my talk your technical support philosophy is killing you you're like I'm not real technical so this product taught me it might not be for me that might be why the room is half empty it might also be that COVID has kept us away from each other and the hallway track is really appealing at this conference and so it's been really fun reconnecting with folks but that's what essentially what we do with our technical support teams is that we view them in the same lens the same category as product development they're the people that mess with the code and I'm going to argue in a minute that that's definitely not but first if it was maybe a little offensive to call tech support folks like nerds that aren't even good enough to be good nerds I'm gonna maybe cast us in slightly better light again I'm talking about myself here the third premise is that tech support is exclusively holding the hose firefighting right what we do in tech support is we're the hose holders there's a fire over there you point the water at the fire until there's not a fire and then make make the fire go away when when you're done you turn off the hose and you're done that that's how we view our technical support teams and it's a faulty premise of old-school technical support is that that is exclusively what we do we just point the hose at the fire until there's not a fire and we make it go away and I would argue that so again our three premises first you can make a product so good that it doesn't need technical support second tech support is like bush league development that's a NASCAR reference and it's a dated one at this point and I'm from the south so I should probably explain junior junior junior developers with a better way of saying it so the first point you can make a product so good it doesn't second point developer technicians are essentially developers that aren't good enough at their job and then third is that tech support stops when you no longer need to hold the hose and point it at the fire and so I would argue that all of us have subconsciously internalized that those are big words so let's unpack them a little bit excuse me when I say subconscious I mean we don't think about it like I'm not actively thinking the people on my support team are just developers who aren't good enough at their job you're not actively thinking that but subconsciously on some level I think all of us do that and it works itself out in specific ways so we're going to look back at those same three points through the lens of okay how does it come out if I have subconsciously internalized that or even sometimes consciously internalized that let's look back and see how how that works itself out in our real day-to-day life if you've internalized the steve jobs premise of you can make a product so good that it doesn't need technical support now every time you open your inbox and there's 20 in there that's 20 little indictments on your product right that's 20 people saying man if you guys could make a better product we would we'd really like that you know and you'd start to take it personally so inbox zero becomes the goal if I've internalized that first premise right I want to make the support tickets go away because they're all judging me they're all telling me that I'm not good enough at my job or that our product is not good enough and so every touchpoint is a bad thing and I would argue and we say this I say this all the time with my team at GiveWP is that every single support ticket is somebody saying that they care enough about your product to want it to work exactly how they want it to work so did you see how I reframed it instead of your product is bad it's now your product is worth being angry at nobody emails angry angrily about products that they don't like they just stop using them they get a refund and they move on if it's a paid product or they just move on if it's a free product so if they're mad enough to email you about it or frustrated enough or whatever every email that you get from a customer or a user is an indication that you're doing something right and man that makes going to the inbox a lot better when you see 25 tickets or a hundred tickets piled up you can say there's a lot of people out there using our stuff and they care about it a lot and let's go and make those people's day otherwise man you're looking at mental health issues for your support technicians because if every ticket's an indictment every ticket's a problem with you or your product it's really really weighs on you to open the inbox in the morning and to see that little number up by the inbox of how how many tickets there are and you start doing things like obsessing over time to first reply or you obsess over metrics like how many replies you can get per day because the whole goal is to get to inbox zero let's get make these people go away so that my job is done for the day and that that becomes that so the second premise if they're just code folks that aren't good enough at their job to get a real coding job what that looks like the way that works itself out is heavy lines around scope where you're like we don't do that they they email with a ticket and they're like the your product is not playing nicely with xyz plug-in and you go well we we don't fix xyz plug-in sorry and you draw a heavy line around scope because after all i just told you that these are developers but they're just not really even cream of the crop developers they they can't they can't even fully make our product why do i think they could fix xyz plug-in and so it it starts with heavy lines around scope it starts to look like passing the buck when people do have a problem as soon as i can isolate it down to oh this is a problem in that third party solution that's what you're gonna say when in old school support you're gonna say sorry got to go to your host your host is blocking the ht access file and that's causing a problem we can't help with that bye you know and just you're sending them away and that eventually will result in disengaged technicians so your support techs get really tired of telling people we don't do that and they start to look for other work they start to look for ways to become a real developer because we've subconsciously told them that they're in this development bucket and they just need to keep working keep working and someday you'll have a real job um and so that's how that's going to work itself out and then finally the firefighter premise um if you've got a bunch of firefighters and their their whole focus is on just pointing the hose and putting out the fire once the fire is gone i'm good that person that technician is not going to care at all about refunds or about customers going and using different products because they took their fire with them like sweet one less ticket i don't have to answer that person because they left and so what you're doing is you're creating your isolation you're creating isolation internally with your teams so now the the things that the marketing team or the sales team or finance really deeply care about you're incentivizing your support team to not care about because you haven't taught them to um to care about that thing you've told them that they're just a hose pointer you point the hose stay over there till the fire is gone when the fire is gone go back in your little bucket and be happy you know and so what it does old school support creates enmity enmity is just a fancy word for friction you know it's creating enemies enmity it builds three teams or more essentially so you've got your support team or your product in in one team and then you've got the theme in the other team if i support a plugin so for the sake of this illustration the plugin is here the theme is another team the host is another team maybe some other third party plugin is another team and the user is stuck right there in the middle not on any team kind of waving a white flag going will somebody help me old school support creates teams and i'm from the south again so i want to teach you a phrase that that will help here and what we want to do is we want to create a team that is composed of all y'all so y'all is like two people all y'all is all y'all and so what what we want to do is create a team of all y'all and so the all y'all is the the other plugin the theme the host our team and the customer that's all y'all on one team together on the other team is the problem right what they're emailing about what it is that they actually have an issue with so we want all y'all on one team against the problem and so that that creates a better solution for your customer because now they don't feel like you're saying problems with the theme that they feel like you're saying hey theme i got a problem here i think we can resolve it together and then you all y'all on the team are going to be able to help fix the problem and so that's our better philosophy and for the rest of the talk i'm going to talk through kind of what it looks like to create that team that all y'all team that draws the parties together and aligns them against the problem but what it'll result in is happier customers it'll result in better work environment for techs support techs love being a part of solving people's problems support techs love beating a really tough bug they love being able to fix the problem and it'll it'll cause people to gush about you online if you don't believe me go look at give wp's five star reviews we got people that just absolutely love that it felt like we went really above and beyond and honestly we we didn't do much more than isolate a problem with the other theme or whatever it's just the way we treat people when they come into our support inbox is different and so i'm not telling you you need to become a theme support technician or a host support technician you just need to be a gatherer that gathers in all those other people and at the root of that is a concept that we refer to as just being an ambassador you heard it in my uh intro i view myself as an ambassador between my company my product and our customers our users and so it's ambassadors instead of adversaries that's the whole goal of good technical support is to to get us all on the same team so that we can we can help solve the problem and go through that so i'm gonna for the rest of the talk we'll talk through what some characteristics of ambassadors and put a little bit more i know this is a philosophical talk i hope to put some action points in there but the real goal is i want us to think differently about technical support i don't want it like i we can talk tactics and i would love to i'll be over at the stellar wp booth following this talk and i would love to talk tactics with you but the most important thing that you can learn is how to think differently about your technical support team so first of all ambassadors are empowered like they have actual authority the concept of ambassadors if you're not familiar is a government sends someone to speak on behalf of them into a foreign country so they have the full power and authority of that foreign country that is sending them to speak on behalf of them and and and also to speak on behalf of the the country that they're being hosted in back to their country so it it's a full empowerment and so your technical support team the people that you are having answered tickets even the first line of tickets need to be actually empowered to speak on behalf of your company like they need to be able to say you know when someone comes with a feature request that we know is outside of scope they need to be able to answer that confidently and the only way that happens is if they actually have been you've given them the right to speak on your behalf so if you're a manager if you're a supervisor whatever it is whoever it is that's answering the ticket needs to be able to speak on behalf of the company and if they can't you need to tear down whatever structure that is that's keeping them from being able to do that and it takes time a brand new support technician is not going to be able to speak with their full chest about what the the problem is and and how how our company is handling it but over time you need to be working to give them that full empowerment and it doesn't happen right out of the gate related to that as they're connected if internally you've got systems where your support text or whoever it is that's answering that first line of tickets where they aren't able to get to the answers that they need for their customers you got to get rid of whatever that internal system is and it doesn't have to be every single support technician is connected to the development team directly you know managers whoever it is but they need to be able to find the answers when they need them to be able to get them to the customers and if they can't they're not going to be able to be an effective ambassador they're not going to be able to effectively solve the problem they need to be connected to real decision makers so that they can convey that message speak on behalf of that company next up ambassadors are problem solvers i gave a talk at the last in person word camp us that goes into this more so you can go watch that and also tomorrow in the palm room michael woods is giving a talk that would be really helpful for this and michael's fantastic so go see that one as well but the the point of this one the the main point here is technical support is not development it's technical troubleshooting and so you're not asking your technical support team to be debugging javascript or doing the things that developers do you're asking your technical support team to be able to reliably isolate the problem replicate the problem and then communicate that problem so their role is not debugging it's not technical in that sense it is just getting whatever's going wrong on the customer site to also be going wrong in this other site that then i can pass along to our support team we use wp sandbox for that on our team i'll get it i'll isolate the problem get it fixed this problem is happening right here just like this and then i pass off the credentials to that wp sandbox to my team and say go go work on that here's here's the problem and all you have to do is one two three and it's it it creates that problem and so again i could do a whole talk it was a lightning talk in 2019 but i could do a whole talk on technical troubleshooting and this one isn't it but ambassadors do need to be able to solve problems but i don't want you to hear that ambassadors or that technical support reps need to be your high-level coders because that's just not true at all next up ambassadors are winsome ambassadors are the kind of folks that you like to go out and have a drink with they're people that you can hang out with you can talk to they are respectful and kind and winsome folks and so um i think it all starts with your tone we do all email based support so um there there is in our customer success department we do have some phone calls and things like that and the same principles apply but the people that i deal with every day it's all about written text and so i spend a lot of my time harping on tone in fact matt cromwell and i years ago sat down together and created what we call the tone guide and you can find links to that if it's like ben likes dot us forward slash tone i forgot to put it in the the slide but the tone guide the goal of that is to help us to have a clear picture of when we need to improve our responses and so really quickly i'm going to run through that i've got a few minutes to do that we use an acronym called crew the reason that the points that i'm going to share with you is in this order is because it spells a word that way i suppose we could have done rec without the k on the end but we decided to go with crew because it sounds nicer um is your support a rec no i can fix it no so we ask the question is it true so i'll type out a draft that i'm ready to send or my team will type out a draft that they're ready to send and then they will ask the questions of it is it true and so the the first question to ask of it is it confident as opposed to apologetic we have a positive and a negative for each of the four points um i catch a lot of flak every time i tweet about this so hopefully i'm catching flak online as we speak we don't apologize for stuff really not much at all i don't apologize even if it's a bug like we ship the bug and it's breaking sites i still don't apologize for that um first of all because it's wordpress and the in this room know the wordpress is distributed software right it's once it's on your server it's not my software anymore like there's there's a weird dynamic with open source distributed software where if i do apologize i'm so sorry for this bug now i'm sort of taking a little bit of responsibility for them not testing code that they put on their production site it's it's not really my fault and again i catch flak for it every time i tweet about it but we don't apologize i do apologize when like i promise them four business hours of response time and i'm replying to them on hours i'll i'll apologize for that so sorry for the the slow reply here um but the main reason that i don't apologize is because it doesn't do what i would want it to do what i want it to do when i apologize is demonstrate empathy demonstrate that i care like i'm a i'm a real person that cares about the fact that they're having a real bad day because of something that i'm at least in part responsible for delivering to them but when i apologize it comes across as sometimes a lot of times in my experience it comes across as um kind of weak um admission that oh i'm so sorry and it's sort of like with uh the the apology when i wanted it to make it seem like i i'm competent and i can solve their problem it comes across instead is like oh i'm so sorry and they're like i don't want you to be sorry i want you to fix the problem fix the problem like i don't need anybody to hold my hand right now i need somebody to fix my website and so that's that's generally my philosophy personally and i say it like i'm real hardcore and i never apologize and that's not the case i do apologize but i certainly don't lead with apology because what they need to hear from me out of the gate is that i'm confident you've come to the right place we can fix this problem we're going to solve it for you and so that's the c we also sometimes add calm in their calm confidence um just like with parenting when your kid scrapes his or her knee and they come to you and they're freaking out what they don't need is for you to have a temper tantrum with them or roll around on the ground with them they need calm confident we you've come to the right place buddy we're going to fix this up we're going to wipe wipe the blood off put the bandaid on you're going to be good to go your customers need to be treated with confidence and calm second up results driven or results oriented oriented didn't fit on the slide like i liked it so i went with driven results driven not argumentative if you were to make a list of all four of the points of crew and order them from things that been as best at to things that been as worst at the r is the one i'm worst at i'm i love to argue like i love it and i don't just love to argue i love to win arguments like uh my personality is the type where it's like you come at me with some half baked logic in a support ticket about something and i'm just gonna tear you up like i i love arguing and so matt who is very patient to hire me in the first place but then even more patient over the years to help me to see that even though it's fun to argue it doesn't it doesn't work it doesn't help solve the customer's problem and even if you win the argument you're going to lose the customer and so we have to focus as support technical support on solving the problem the result of the problem get their problem fixed and ignore the insults or whatever so if i get a four paragraph email from a person and paragraph one is about how terrible our product is and paragraph two is about how slow the support time is and paragraph three is about how ugly my kids are and paragraph four is about the actual problem with a workable error code in there i've got to ignore three out of four and answer that fourth one and i trust me trust me if you don't ignore even one line of defensiveness slipped in there you've derailed the whole thing now now we've got to have a conversation about how my kids aren't actually ugly like you know like we we've got to fix the problem and you've got to ignore the insults and you got to just go with it and what's fun is that there's a bible verse that's like if you answer somebody with kindness it's like dumping a heap of coals in their lap it works when when you're kind and when you're respectful to people a lot of times they'll come back and i'm so sorry that i was under the gun and my boss was chomping down on me and really mad and i'm sorry that i said the things i said in that first email sometimes i don't say it but i know it's there i know it's there so you've got to you've got to resolve the problem you got to be just relentlessly results oriented and if you're not you're just taking extra time you didn't need to take then the e educational not overly technical this goes back directly to that first story that i started with of acute craniosynastosis of a posterior temporal suture which was the diagnosis that my child received at two months old um i don't know what that means it's not helpful in fact studies have shown that the bigger words you use the less intelligent you are perceived to be in conversation because it's not about how big the words you use are it's about how well you are able to explain yourself how well you're able to educate the people that are listening and so the more educational you can be the better now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to you know dump it all down to like a third grade level vocabulary but it does mean that you have to make sure that you're being understood and that jargon is most of the time not helpful now when people reach out with uh say a developer reaches out and they're using terms like api or jQuery or whatever sure we can talk back to them but even the most knowledgeable knowledgeable developer at this conference still doesn't understand how givewp specifically works and what the decisions we made when we develop givewp and so i can still be educational to that person um and speak to them on their level but the point is the more technical you get the better you better make sure that you are educating that customer because if they walk away going like a lot of words i don't know what any of them meant um but my website's still not accepting donations like that's all they care about get the problem fixed and and avoid the jargon and then the last point this one was uh one that was explained to me back when michelle uh for shet who works now with the stellar wp team give wps in the stellar wp organization within liquid web and back then michelle was on the team give with me and she helped explain to me that thankfulness especially as an opener in an email is essentially i think that went out essentially white noise um thankfulness is uh it's it's the equivalent of your call is very important to us please hold while we get you to the next available representative like if my call is important you would have given it to a human you would not have given it to that machine like that's that's at best worthy of ridicule and thankfulness does the same thing especially as an opener thank you for contacting give wp support it's very important to us like it's just it doesn't work but welcoming being welcoming does and so sometimes we'll even personalize that welcome a lot of times i will lead with you've come to the exact right place like i've seen this before and we can get this resolved for you no problem you're being welcoming or like i said you can personalize it uh a organization that helps with autism reaches out and they're having trouble with their donations it's like man that's a really great website and a really great cause i really love what you're doing let's get you back to raising money as fast as possible and then go and pro tip don't fake it don't pretend to be excited about the cause that the website that is emailing you just skip straight to welcoming like don't don't be like i really like that organization if you don't because we don't like lying to people but we do want to help them with their problem and so uh leading with welcome instead of leading with thankfulness is uh a real pro tip so that's the um the crew acronym and so like i said we use it like a sort of a checklist uh a mental checklist when i get done writing a draft before i click send i just ask it the question is it crew is this confident that i apologize in here for something that's either not my fault or it's not going to lead them toward resolution which is the r like let's am i driving toward revel resolution instead of revolution we're not driving toward revolution at any point um resolution am i driving toward resolution or am i defending my team or myself if i am just take it out is it educational is it welcoming and so we ask all of those things and that brings us back to the the crux of the whole uh talk here is that uh the point of good technical support excellent technical support is that our technical support technicians are ambassadors so we've got to teach them to communicate with excellence so ambassadors are the ones who um can deliver the news whether it's good news or bad news uh to your customers to your users in a way that moves the whole situation forward um and helps to do that so let's return to our three stories this error message uh story is actually not just one story we get this one a lot um when people reach out and they're frantic about um what's going on on their website i've just sent a thousand people to my website and it's not working and so the the answer to that is what we've already talked about today is treating it with respect treating the customer with respect treating the issue like you understand it another thing that i harp on all the time is show the customer things don't tell the customer things i completely understand is a pretty worthless statement it's like saying calm down in the midst of a fight with your spouse it is what needs to happen it's probably not going to help it to happen for you to say it um so i completely understand don't say i completely understand demonstrate that you completely understand oh so the fact that your site is down means that's top priority so our first priority is to get that site back up by any means necessary whatever we need to do then we'll deal with why it happened and you take them back and you've helped them if they've got a backup if they got their host can help them with that again you're making an all y'all team of everybody involved and let's get this site back up and treating them with respect the end of the story with my wife at the mechanic she actually sat down and said yes you're go ahead and and fix the problem and she sat down and it just she just stewed over it for a few minutes and she was like that's just not right so he looked at the mechanic looked at the girl behind the counter and they were laughing at me and it just doesn't feel right and so she literally stood up and went outside the wheels were already off of the van and she's like i forgot i have the thing that i got to go do i don't want to do this now and had him put the wheels back on the car and leave and that's what your customers are doing some of them don't wait till you that you've pulled the wheels off of their website metaphorically speaking but when you are unclear in your communication when you are treating your customer like a problem or you're not your customer doesn't trust you that is what they're doing they're leaving sometimes they'll tell you most of the times they won't and then finally this story i'll skip straight to the punchline so he got diagnosed with acute craniosynostosis of the posterior temporal suture you have to practice that by the way he got diagnosed at two months at four months he had surgery where they literally removed the occipital bone which is that back end of your skull took it off they flipped it over and they put it back on and it opened up the suture to do that and again skipping to the punchline there he is he's a varsity athlete as an eighth grader he got a varsity athlete award and we are super duper proud of him unfortunately genetically speaking he's going to have a ginormous head because he looks just like me and i have a ginormous head but uh i am a super big fan of laura david and that's the name of the surgeon who did the surgery that's the real story here is that dr laura david wake vorace baptist medical uh center in Winston-salem north carolina um what she did by the way she treated me and my wife is she got a fan for life and she anybody that wants craniofacial surgery i'm telling them about dr laura david because she treated me with respect she was educational she answered so many questions um as we asked all of these questions of her she even advocated for us uh with the uh the insurance company when they said they weren't going to authorize the less invasive surgery um she advocated for us and then she came back to us and said hey they're not going to approve it so we're going to do the more invasive surgery but don't worry i'm really good at what i do i've done this hundreds of times you're going to be fine um and so that's what you can do for your customers by simply treating them or treating your tech support team like ambassadors that are sent out to your customers and so our goal is to create raving fans uh and i think that technical support is the best way that you can do that um on your team because they're the folks that are in the trenches every day talking to your customers and so my name is ben meredith i'm the head of technical support at give wp we are a stellar wp brand on the liquid within liquid web thank you so much for your time today i would love to answer any questions you got i finished a little early hold on a second we want to get the live stream to hear your question too all right sorry um how easy has it been to reach out to other companies theme developers and things like that to get that conversation going and get on the same team it varies i mean there's some companies out there that uh that are great and uh but the key is how you reach out to them like if i if say i've got a problem with a theme and it's doing something it's not playing nicely with our plug-in and it's causing problems if i just reach out and say hey there's a problem with your theme that's old school support right there your theme is breaking give wp they're going to feel as much like i'm building a wall between me and them as the customer does that i am and so we will go that extra step if we we get access to the theme uh if we can if it's a free theme or if it's a premium theme we'll have the customer send us a zip or whatever to get all the way down to an isolated problem that is clear and then the way i reach out to the theme is hey we've got a mutual customer who's doing this and this and this and here's their website and here's a sandbox site where we've got the same thing happening with just our theme or our plugin in your theme and it's all about building that bridge and making sure that like deliver it to them in a way that they can answer without having to do much work oh yeah you're right on line 35 we're doing this and we should be doing this and if we just added a filter there that would fix everything will that work and so it's it's really being collaborative with that other team um and not not just passing it off to the customer now i will send the customer because a lot of times with just like with our customers there's not a direct line to me from like our website it it has to go through priority support or whatever and so i will give the customer a script that says the give wp team said this you know what can we do and i'll i'll give them exact the exact words to say cut and paste this into a support ticket on their site so that they can hear it directly from me i don't know if that does that answer your question other questions comments snider marks does your company have uh your this support your technical support integrated into their overall marketing plan and then and like as a as a way down and how did and if so or if not how do you guys use your support language outside of word of mouth to promote your products does it make sense good so you're asking if the support team like if the fact that we do good support is part of our marketing yeah like is it is it an expressly a part of your marketing or and then also do you leverage it in your marketing yeah i mean yet there's a picture of me on the website and how great our support is so i mean it you clearly you know what you're working with um but no we do uh it is in the marketing materials that uh that our support is uh we we advertise the the two to four business hours first response time and the three to five days uh on average that we resolve customer issues and our happiness ratings and things like that as appropriate is definitely in there um but it's more so i would say it's bet the best marketing happens internally and and i love making my team and myself aware of how we can help the rest of the team so if a customer comes to us and they've got all of our plugins except for this one that makes lots of money for them and helps them in a really good way well i should i should probably mention that now i'm not a sales team and our team is not a sales team so priorities one through five are resolved the issue and then after that man it another great way we could help you is this other add-on or whatever and and upsells or whatever you want to call it but yeah we do we do mention our support um as a part of pre-sales calls and as a part of uh that for sure i don't know if that answered your question we've got a question over here hold while the microphone makes its way to you that's right um how do you discipline like yourself and your team to stop and go through crew because one of the things that me and my business partner on business coaching side of things we we try to remind ourselves and we tell people to use the acronym halt mm-hmm don't don't do anything when you're hungry angry lonely or tired right right but we tell ourselves this and we tell other people that but we don't always follow it yep so how do you discipline your team to yeah that that is an excellent excellent question because it and that's that's really the answer is in the question it's a discipline it's a practice the crew is not like something that we put together it's like matt and i were like we're really good at this so let's put it out there it's actually we struggle with this and so how can we be better at moving that and so one of the things that we do as post mortems so anytime there's a negative rating uh whether it's a one-star review on uh the repository or on google or wherever or it's a a negative rating of our individual support technicians um within the uh support ticketing system we'll do a post modem and we'll say what which one of the four crew points did we miss here because you can almost always even for the reviews like the tech support techs hate this but it's like you'll you'll get a review and it's like the support technician was wonderful however your product doesn't do a b c and d so therefore one star you know it's like you were rating me you weren't rating my product you know but i i firmly believe that even that review there's probably a point in crew that could have fixed that or maybe prevented that no obviously there's there's no way of knowing it and you're doing it uh after the fact so but it's always a super helpful way for us to look through and see okay i led with um jargon here or i i didn't clearly explain this thing you know like i was wasn't educational or the uh am i done done all right so i'm i'm done i didn't clearly explain the thing or whatever it's a post mormons are a huge part of that um so i think that means we're done i just got the zero over here so thank y'all again for having me