 So, my name is Ines, I do indeed work at WooCommerce as a happiness engineer, which means that I spent the majority of my time thinking about how I can improve my communication with our users and of course answering tickets. I used to do this even before I started working at automatic because I am a volunteer at the WordPress.org forums. And I used to work as a freelance support engineer giving developers the opportunity to hire someone without actually having an employee. And support is really something that I am passionate about and I am really excited to be able to tell you something about this today. So, let's get started. Let's say that you are a developer. Let's say that you have created a product, maybe a plugin. You've spent weeks, months, maybe working on this. You've tweaked, you've thought about the code, you've dreamt about how your users are going to use your product. You've bug hunted, you've done everything that you should have and then finally the moment arrives. You get to release your product and it's amazing people are starting to use it and they're starting to buy your license and you're making money. That's nice, right? And then the emails start coming in. And these are the emails that are going to happen. It doesn't matter how great your product is, it doesn't matter how much time you spent making sure that there are no errors. These emails come from customers who are missing functionalities within your product. They are looking for customizations. They found problems that you might not even have thought of when you were actually making the product. And this is the moment where a lot of people think and realize that they've actually missed a step in their whole process of releasing their product. They spent so much time and energy on creating a product and not that much time and energy on actually thinking about answering this question. How are we going to communicate with our users? So by a show of hands, can I just ask who actually sat down before releasing their product and thought of this question? That's not a lot. So promise me this then, please. That before you release anything else, sit down by yourself or with your team and think of this question. How are we going to communicate with our users? So let me tell you why this is an important thing to do. The graphic designers amongst us here will agree with me that for a brand to work, everything has to look synchronous across all platforms. You have to use your logos everywhere, the same colors on your website as you do in your newsletter, etc. That's the way you make impact, right? So it stands to reason that you do the same thing with your communication. Your communication needs to be synchronous across all platforms. So think about what language are we going to use? What is our tone of voice going to be? How are we going to deal with angry customers? Will we give discounts or give free licenses to people like nonprofits? It basically comes down to three different areas. These are tone of voice, the platform that you're using, and your rules of engagement. So let's just go through these one by one, right? Your tone of voice is not so much about what you're saying. It's about how you're saying it. It's the same as using your logo everywhere and using the same colors. If you keep communicating in the same tone of voice over and over and over again, people are going to appreciate this. People are going to respond to this. As a human, I am a creature of habit. I like things to be the same every time. So if you as a company have a tone of voice that I can recognize, and I know that I'm talking to you specifically, it makes it easier for me to say, okay, I'm going to ask for help when I need it. Creating a tone of voice that fits doesn't have to be hard. There are a few things that you can ask yourself when deciding on one. Sorry. Are we formal or informal in the way that we talk to our users? Which words suit us and which don't? Do we use humor or do we not? And do we use long sentences or short ones? There's a long list of things that you can actually think of when deciding on your tone of voice. And one company doing tone of voice really well is Milchimp. They actually set up a site that is specifically catered towards their tone of voice. It is open to anyone and it's located at voiceentone.com. I suggest you take a look because it's awesome. So onto platform. And by this, I do not mean the platform that you use to sell your product. It's not the newsletter that you send out to get more sales. Those belong squarely into your tone of voice. What I am talking about is the software that you use to deal with incoming tickets. Well, you could use something like Gmail. You do have to keep in mind what scalability issues are going to be like for you. If you want to grow your company, you need a platform that supports the ability for multiple people to work in the same place. Gmail does not allow for that. So make a choice. These are the ones that I personally work with. You'll see Slack in there. Not because it's a platform that deals with ticketing. But with WordPress products, you have a lot of different areas where tickets might come in. And it's nice to have your emails and your WordPress.org open tickets come into the same stream. This is why I put it in there. Slack supports this. And there's a lot of different choices out there. You should really take a look at what these different platforms can do for you and try them out. Help Scout Kiyako and Zendesk are all very solid choices, but there are more of them out there. You should really take a look. So the third area that I wanted to touch upon was rules of engagement. And this covers pretty much everything from how do we engage angry customers, right? What do we say when they ask for too much? What happens then? Do we give stuff away? Or do we say no when they ask for free stuff? Having a plan to fall back on is a really great thing. Giving thought to these questions will spare you the difficulty to having to decide how to respond when big emotions come into play. I can promise you that there will come a time where you get frustrated or even very angry at your customers. And having a plan to fall back on really helps in that case. So for example, if you run into someone, a customer who is excessively angry at you, it's very easy to you yourself become angry and reply aggressively. I've seen this happen. We see it happen in the WordPress forums a lot, unfortunately. And having this backup plan, it really helps you to take a step back and take a deep breath and say, okay, I got this. And then you check your tone of voice guide and you say, okay, this is the way that we should be replying to these customers. And then you get to reply to an angry customer the same way that you reply to someone who is friendly. This is not easy to do. In fact, it is the absolute worst thing about doing support. It is the hardest thing you will ever have to do when supporting your product. But do not get discouraged. Look at your backup plan, take a deep breath and move forward. Thank you. If there are any questions, I am happy to answer them. As you said, you're introducing a product and you're so excited about it. Could you move a little closer to the mic, please? I think I'm too short. Great product, you introduced it. How do you feel about, I realize people can set up forums for your product independent of you, but being proactive about that and providing openly available user forums? Do you have an opinion on that? I do. So, forums are great and not great. It really, really depends on your product. And it depends on how many people do you have to manage that forum. Because you cannot just open a forum and say, have fun. I'm not going to deal with this. You actually need people to moderate your forum. And if you do not have those people, you are better off taking it through the platform that you're using. Does that answer your question? Thank you. Thank you for the great talk. My question is about, again, the support. Sometimes it happens that we have a product and my product, my product is a pretty much a bigger product. And it deals with a lot of aspects of a website in terms of HTML, back end, front end, database. So, it happens sometimes that my product is perfectly all right. But the customer's website is customized in a way that my product doesn't complains with that and start working well. In that scenario, customer comes back to us and even they screwed us in the rating and they yell on us. Sometimes they try to blackmail us and we have to go extra mile to resolve their issues and we even burn ourselves for that. How to deal with this situation or is there any conflict resolution policy or procedure on the WordPress forum so that we can deal with this thing? So, if this is in the WordPress forums itself, there are a lot of people working in the support team who are very willing to hammer the hell out of very negative replies that do not have a solid foundation. So, you're going to have negative replies regardless of how great your product is, all right? That's going to happen. You're not going to be able to 100% satisfy everyone. But if you need help, go to the Slack channel in Make WordPress and talk to one of the volunteers there and say, listen, this is my problem and I think we have to deal with this. Can you please help me? That's the way that we can help you with situations like this. Now, the other thing, the policy that you asked for is something that really falls under your rules of engagement that I talked about. If you sit down and think about, okay, if someone comes in and wants customizations done because, you know, it's not working as well as they want it to. How do we respond? Do we have rules for this? Within your own company? That's up to you. You know, you can put this in your terms and agreement file on your website and you can point to that and say, listen, I'm sorry that you're having problems and I feel for you, but we cannot help you because of reason. Does that answer your question? Cool. Hello. Thank you for the presentation. I have a question about the platforms that you use to provide support. You mentioned HelpScout, Zendes, Kayako, could you share your experience using them and when would you choose one over the other? I would love to answer that question, I think, outside. Not because I don't want to answer it here, but because it's a long story. Is that all right? Cool. Hi. Hi. My question is this, when you have limited time and have an open source piece of software out there, how do you communicate with the audience that you have that you can only answer questions, I don't know, let's say Monday and Tuesday of every week or every other week. Is that something that you should be putting somewhere or somehow? This is about WordPress.org, the free plugins. I would definitely put it on your page just to say, listen, I've got limited resources to help you out. I do want to support you and give you the best help that I can, but I only have time to do this at these specific times. That's perfectly fine. People will know what to expect from you. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi. Thank you. Thanks for your support. You're often the front lines for receiving requests, potentially related to feature changes and major platform updates. What would you recommend or what are best practices around how customer support can actually feedback to the development team or work with designers? What does that type of collaboration look like? How often should it happen? How do you communicate with a customer that those types of things are taking place? That's a lot of questions. Is it a question? Communicating back to your developers is really, really important because they do not hear the things that you hear as a customer support app. The way that I'm used to doing this is to open a new issue on GitHub. For example, just explain this is what the user asked for. I think it's a solid idea. Maybe we should implement it. And then if the developer needs more information, they can ask you what you've heard. I think that's a very solid way to keep in touch with your developer. And that should happen. In my opinion, I'm sure that there's going to be other opinions out there. In my opinion, this should happen as soon as that request comes in. And as soon as you go into meetings and say, we're going to talk about this once a week, a lot will get lost in the noise. Thank you. This is a little short. So thank you for the talk. I have a service that's coming up that has not launched yet, but it is going to be providing agencies a white label option. Do you have any advice or experience working with those types of services that you could recommend that would be helpful? I kind of miss what kind of service that you're offering. Sorry, setting up a service that's white labeled to other web agencies? I'm not exactly sure what that means. I'm sorry. Basically, a web agency would use our service, but use their own branding. Oh, right, right, right. I have to honestly admit that I have not had any experience in this field, so I wouldn't be able to give you any other advice than what I just did, but you're welcome to tweet at me or write me a message, and I'm happy to look into more details for you. Great, thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for your talk. My question is, besides the tone of voice link that you gave, do you have any other resources that we might look to in order to help us form a plan, a backup plan? So HelpScout is actually, they have a blog and a massive amount of resources freely available to anyone who needs it. That is my number one go-to page if I need kind of a reference point for doing certain things. They have templates that you can use. They have, you know, comparison between these are bad emails and these are right emails, and I would really suggest taking a look at the HelpScout resources for sure. Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. Okay, you're welcome. Hi, Ness. Hi, Beth. So a lot of us, when we're starting out, we've launched a thing, and we're the ones doing the support initially. At some point, if things go well, we'll want to transition into having other people help us with that support. So can you talk a little bit about what are some good signs for knowing when to start thinking about that, and then like making that transition, like for somebody like me who has some like control issues, and I want to make sure that, you know, those support people are maintaining tone, but also dealing with the, I mean, just talk a little bit about how that transition works. Right. So I've seen this happen personally where a developer creates a really beautiful product and then gets so many tickets coming in that they lose the time to actually do any development. And I would say if you're looking to pinpoint a moment where you say, okay, now we need someone else to do this, is when you honestly do not have the time anymore to do both development and support. If you follow the things that I laid out just now, if you think about these steps, these three steps in advance, during the product development, basically, it's quite easy to say, okay, this is what I have documented. Here you go, and we can train and talk and make sure that, you know, this is your following these outlines. And what we personally do is do ticket reviews, peer ticket reviews, so you can sit together and say this had a bat rating, and what can we do in the future to make sure that that doesn't happen anymore. That would be one of the key elements of making sure that everyone stays on track. Just to have that open discussion, does that answer your question fully? Hey, great talk. The question I have is you have basically preparing process for how to engage users for support in various different scenarios. Have you had in your experience to deal with the break glass scenario when you had a customer or user who just couldn't be placated or satisfied? So that's a good question, by the way. It is perfectly fine to say no to users. If at some point you've outlined your steps, you've outlined your terms, you've outlined whatever was needed to make sure that they got the help that I needed, and they're still not responsive, it's perfectly fine to say, okay, listen, I'm willing to help you, I'm willing to work with you, but if we continue this way, there's no more that I can do for you, so I would have to stop helping you, and that's a very difficult thing to do and a very delicate thing to do, but it's still okay to say no in those cases. Thank you. Hi, so thank you for the great discussion. I'm wondering if you take over support for an already established product, but there's a heavy developmental side to it, and you're not the developer? Not a developer. What would you find beyond having copious amounts of well-documented, not only code, but actual documentation, what would you say would be one or two additional ways that you can help further support the support person if there's a highly technical amount of support work that might need to be done, like you might need to know different server information or different operating environments and such. Can you clarify for me who the person is that supporting the support person? Well, in our case, it would be a member of the agency, but not the person who helped develop the code, so it's not somebody who, say, understands, I can read all the functions, but I don't know what all of them do, and I don't know all of the different dependencies, so I don't always understand, and so there's sometimes a delay while I'm waiting for a developer to be able to get back with me with where to look for more information. Communicate with your user and say, listen, honesty is always going to get you more brownie points than just staying silent, so just tell them, listen, I do not know the answer to this 100% right now. I want to make sure that I give you the best answer possible. Please hold on for a moment while I go and talk to my developer and make sure that you get the best answer. That way, your user knows what's up. Your user knows that there is a reason for you not to reply as fast as possible, and they're going to be happy with the fact that you were honest, right? So it is perfectly fine to be honest about this and just tell your user and make sure you communicate. Thanks. You're welcome. I think that's it with the questions. Thank you so much.