 All right Afternoon so Welcome to second day working. This is room 8 and traditionally standing in this corner Weighing a salt 150 pounds soaking wet Parallel from Raleigh, North Carolina representing Give WB Get it up for the senior sport technician and Dream of mine to be a hundred and fifty miles again, so Thank you for that So this is Walter Walter graduated from local college with a degree in finance and After interning for two summers with the local financial planning group Got a job with him straight out of college loves his job and when he's not working he loves to Volunteer of local animal shelter One day they're sitting around this like five people that volunteer and then the one person that's getting paid to be in the meeting sitting there and Looks around the room and says Walter You're the techiest person we've got here. Can you make us a website? A little bit of background as techie as Walter gets is he has successfully installed the email on his phone And he has an Amazon Prime membership This is the extent to which he is taking but he's the one in the room who works all day on computers And his job is a financial planner and so therefore by the fault he is the web master now for the animal shelter So he looks around the room. He's like, yeah, I guess you're right. I sure I'll give a shot website and so the the current website exists on WordPress. It's really old Has been updated in a while Whoever designed it has since moved on from volunteering with the animal shelter And so he Googles around finds a theme that markets itself to animal shelters and he says So by his premium theme and Sets about the process of setting up You guys might have been here before so he he sets it up and And Eventually runs into a problem making it look exactly like it's supposed to look It's not exactly right and so he's he's like, okay, I can I do this and Immediately a thought crosses his mind. I will do anything to not to contact support Why because support tax? Uniquely I think in in the world have the ability to think otherwise completely competent humans like Walter and make them feel stupid Right and he doesn't want to play the game He doesn't want to be that because you know what's what is the sole purpose of the first person you talk to in support? To talk to the second person right like I need to be escalated to your manager because you're not gonna be able to solve my Problem and so you play the game. You're like, okay. I did this. Yes. I turned it off from back on Yes, I did this. Yes, I did that. Can we please talk to somebody you can fix my problem Right. Nobody wants to play the game. I'm altered it won't play the game. So he's like, I'm not gonna play the game I'm gonna figure it out. So five hours later Walter is still trying to figure out how to move the pick me and other header like two pixels to the right to look just like The demo and he is losing his ability to form complete sentences, right? And so he finally submits the support ticket, and it's like a cave person Me website broke that fix spider like at some point And so today my goal with this talk is to teach you how to short-circuit the game I'm gonna give you the cheat codes for the sport game And it's by the way not going to be get escalated to a manager because in wordpress It doesn't work exactly like that. There's generally only like three people in the whole team in the support world and wordpress So the front line person is really good In most cases and so but before We talk about the solution to caveman syndrome Time for a much less fictional story I graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a degree in religious studies I lovingly call it pre unemployment That was like perfect But anyway, so that gave me my focus was in early American religious history So I can fairly confidently hold a conversation about the Amish or Mormons or shakers or Quakers I tend to say came to preachers like these are things that I can have a fairly reasonably intelligent conversation about Completely absent from my formal schooling was anything to do with the web no no code no no anything and so Fast forward a few years. I like Walter in my fictional story was working for Well, I was working for a nonprofit and my boss looked at me and said you just got a new computer Can you make us a website? Which is fun now we've come like full circle now. It's like I'm a web developer Oh, you're a web developer and you fix my printer These two things are not related So, yes I own a new computer, but in his defense. I also told him that I wanted to get into web development. So I Said sure I'll create a website and like Walter. I got premium theme Which gave me access to a premium support channel And I started asking dumb questions and I don't need that to sound like self-deprecating or like they were really dumb Questions and in retrospect looking back. I see how poorly I Would about the process I went about the process of getting good support and so There I was sitting Trying to figure out how to make websites and I really had no No clue what I was doing. There's some basic HTML So fast forward again to 2013. I began using my degree in pre-unemployment I became unemployed and I decided that I was going to Learn web stuff, you know, I've been kind of down one in it since 2009 or so And I was like, I'm gonna learn everything there is from the server to the browser like what all these technologies are So Linux and Apache and Internet and MySQL and all this stuff just kind of learning it On the fly I was also doing some freelance work because my children have this nasty habit of eating like they just They keep wanting to eat and I keep having to buy food and give it to them So I was just kind of taking any work I could get in those even just Tangentially related to the web and to WordPress because I kind of started to you know, that's where I started with web stuff so where I ended up and I'm a Client that I was working for was asked asked me I was kind of doing project management She was a entrepreneur and had her own content marketing business and wanted me to add one of those click-to-tweet Boxes to her posts and pages. And so, you know, it's like a pre-fills the tweet text for you to send away And she said can you find me a good plugin to do that? So I said sure so when looked at the Various options at that time in 2013 late 2013 They were available in WordPress repository and I found a couple that were doing some cool stuff And I just learned enough about WordPress to learn about the shortcode API Which none of the existing options for click-to-tweet plugins were using and so I found one that I like the most And it was called click-to-tweet and because I'm great at naming things. I'm I forked it and created better click-to-tweet Which is again, I'm wonderful at the naming process, but that plug-in quickly became the most popular Click-to-tweet plug-in in the repository and I don't say that because I think it's the best coded or I'm the best developer or any of that But I made a decision very early on that better click-to-tweet was going to be the best Supported plug-in in Reebok. I kind of viewed it as a resume like either. I'm gonna get a job Spoiler alert, that's the next slide But either I'm gonna get a job or I'm gonna grow my free nights business with this plug-in and so I'm gonna prove that I can Support products and just was maniacal about it. My wife knew that if My phone dinged while we were at dinner And it was a support tech support ticket for better click-to-tweet that I was gonna get an answer If I wanted people to get answers in minutes not even hours to support tickets and so it really was a Proving ground. Well in 2016. I got a job with give Largely important to better click-to-tweet I think and some friends of mine that I'm telling you I should apply Give is the donation platform for WordPress. The headquarters is here in San Diego. And so My job with give is senior support technician. So another full circle. I've gone for being the one who asks The whether or not they're good is available questions to support technicians to now be the one who answers support questions Before I get into the solution to Support game. Here's a little bit more about me. That's my wife and two of my children My wife Jacqueline Benzman's wearing the UNC national champions shirt over here and Theo is the children on there I also have a foster baby with which for obvious reasons. I can't put into the slideshows But if you find me after the talk I'll inundate you with photos of my foster job He's one. He just turned on this week So where we're going today. Oh, and I live in Kerry North Carolina. So I'm 100% remote for give Where we're going today the WordPress way and what matters How not to do what I did and then we'll end with the perfect support ticket so The WordPress way this might feel like I'm taking a little bit of a detour but I promise it matters Because in the WordPress world support works differently than in some other tech industries and that's because the WordPress is different in certain ways And so WordPress since the beginning you might see the tagline in certain places democratizing publishing The goal of WordPress is to give a voice to people who otherwise would not have a voice And to give them the ability to be their own gatekeeper Right no longer do you have to be the editor of the New York Times to decide who gets to say things into the world No longer you have to be the editor of Penguin books to say into the world. This is a fault that matters So WordPress the goal is to democratize Publishing which again is decentralizing taking the gatekeepers away and making each one of us as website owners Our own gatekeeper and that's awesome for democratizing, but it's really difficult for support Because now no longer is that one person that you can send a support ticket to like you can with some other tech Industries who has full control over all of the elements going on the plugins the themes The hosting environment, there's no one person other than you who has control over all that and so that dramatically affects How you have to approach support if you think of WordPress like an airplane your WordPress website like an airplane You're both the pilot and the owner You you're the one who's flying the plane at best the support technician He'd come alongside as like a flight attendant or an air marshal or maybe an airline mechanic But at the end of the day Even if I fly the plane for you for a few minutes while we fix the problem You have to go back to being the one flying the plane as a support technician I'm just here to help You'll often see and I think I even did on that first thing that I bought back in 2009 You'll see the words easy in WordPress marketing materials It's easy makes making a website easy or simple and so WordPress is easy like Flying a plane is easier than building a plane WordPress is easy. I'll say it again like flying a plane is easier than building a plane There's still a learning curve, right? You cut yourself some slack Or maybe if you like music and you're into musical metaphor WordPress is easy like playing piano is easier than building a piano Nobody's ever cycled up to a piano and accidentally play Beethoven's Beethoven's piano concerto number two in D flat major which I had to Google to figure out a tough piano concerto Nobody's ever accidentally played that or played it right on the first try, right? And so there's still a learning curve with WordPress And so it is much easier than starting from scratch and building your own content management system But it's still gonna take Take some time. So that's the first point there cut yourself some slack Imagine a young couple that recently got married and went on their honeymoon. They came home from the honeymoon and The husband starts working out and and warnings of go and work out super early he comes back and takes a shower and goes to work and He starts a terrible habit of throwing his dirty gym socks sweating gym socks And he's aiming for the hamper that's beside the bed for the dirty clothes and he keeps missing he keeps landing the Sop on her side of the bed So sweaty nasty gym sock and so the first time it happens He's like, you know, whatever she's losing and the next time it happens. They have one of those cute newlywed fights And it's sort of like a halfway fight it's like passive aggressive fighting and then Eventually though as these things tend to do if he keeps Making a mistake and so it becomes a fight, right? It's like a big deal and he's like, okay, I'll do better I'm sorry, and he does for a little while. He does better But he falls back in a bad habit so fast for like six months a year later this is still happening it's kind of a recurring pattern and She just loses it one day. She's like, that's it. You need to clean it up. He's like, whoa We need to go to counseling And she's just like And he's like, okay, so he books an appointment with this $500 an hour marriage counselor I'd like that top cream of the crop best marriage counselor. There it is and He gets there and he sits down and as counselors do they say so what brings you here today and he crosses it on My wife blew up at me for no reason Now I don't care if this guy's the Michael Jordan of marriage counseling like he's he's not going to be able to get to the problem immediately right, I want you to view you Going to support text for your WordPress website like taking your relationship with your website to counseling Support for WordPress is like finally taking your relationship to a website counseling and unlike where the metaphor falls completely apart Unlike counseling where it's kind of expected that there's gonna be some back and forth I think there's gonna be like he's paid for an hour. He's gonna sit there answer a lot more questions with support That folded arms my wife blew up at me for no reason is Not as helpful because now he's gotta Figure out without it taking 15 times back and forth What was wrong? Here's what that you know arms folded My wife blew up at me for no reason looks like in the WordPress world We referenced it in Walter's case But here's what the actual ticket looks like and I have both submitted this ticket and gotten this ticket as a support technician countless times It's broken please fix right Broke it please fix and I've been there and I've been a guy that's been five hours trying to avoid at all costs having to send in a support ticket and then eventually by the time I'm Give up. I'm like how last thing I'm gonna do is explain to you what's actually broken like your website or your theme Is terrible and it's the worst thing ever and it's broken fix it or your plug-in is terrible And it's the worst thing ever you fix it There's there's one thing that there's one ticket that might be even more frustrating and it's subtle and it's this I read all the docs and still broken Please fix that feels better as the person submitting the ticket right because you're you're like insistant You're you're trying to play the game right because the game is the next thing they're gonna say is have you read the instructions? And so you're able to kind of free it now like So I've already read the docs But now what this ticket does to me as a support technician and it's almost never intentional you were trying to be helpful You were trying to sort of clue me in that you know, I played this game before I've read the dogs Now I have to be like a I have to be a detective as I'm figuring out where either the docs are wrong or incomplete or Which step you skip or whatever So this is really close to a great ticket and for the rest of the talk today We're going to take the space after that first comma We're gonna add four paragraphs And we're gonna make it into an excellent ticket And so here's the four things that you need to do in between I read all the docs and it's still broken Please fix you need to tell me four things What you're trying to do What specific steps you took What you expected to happen and what happened to say those are the four things that you gotta put into the ticket and The reason why it's so helpful is not just because it helps the support technician But as I'll show you this can help you solve the ticket yourself It's a process called It's a process called rubber ducking and this is a real thing that developers do and they take a rubber duck physical rubber duck And they put it on their desk. I use the wapoo from where came to us a couple years ago And he's it's on my desk. It's a little plush toy. That's it's on my desk and when I'm coding something You know better quick sweeter trying to debone problem with you I will read through the code out loud and I'll say well on line one It's supposed to do this and I'm like to it's supposed to do this And there's an if statement on line three that if that's true then this will happen And I with my words my dad so I can say things like you should words I use my words and I say out loud to the wapoo toy or the rubber duck as the case may be What was supposed to happen? And what happens like I'd say 50% of the time is the duck solves the problem Right and what's going on here is You're using a totally different part of your brain You're using a totally different part of your brain than you do when you did these steps when you explain the steps And so you're it's like giving yourself a different perspective on the situation To talk about what you did and what will happen is you'll say and and again the specific steps the number two here It's crucially important. I don't mean I read the doc I mean I read the docs at this URL and in point two you say to do this Here's what I did and in point three you say to do this and here's what I did And as you're explaining it again out loud, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to point four and then like oh I Didn't do that and so then you go back and do it and so it creates this loop two three and four you just keep doing two three and four over and over again where You know eventually get to the point where the rubber ducks off the problem because you realize that that you weren't doing things Things like the right so that's that's the first thing that can happen as a result of those four steps The second thing is you could show me your golf swing If I went to a ball golf professional, I prefer this golf So if I look to a ball golf professional and showed him or her my swing You know They would probably immediately be able to tell me like 10 things I'm doing wrong They were like well you're lifting your head and this arms are breaking and your wrists are all over the place And they there's they'd be able to tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong. Why? Because they seem a lot of people in a lot of golf balls a lot of times in fact they themselves The way you become a professional golfer is to hit it into the lake way more times than the average human Like they've they've done this a lot And so the way you become a professional support technician for WordPress is you break websites in spectacular ways I've broken a website in way more spectacular ways than you have taken down production websites totally by accident with a semi-colon like I We've done it and and I've got lots of support tickets And so when I get that ticket that says I took this PHP snippet from your documentation And I put it into the post editor and I clicked update and nothing happened some of you heard it Post editor is not where PHP snippets go. So if you tell me that level of detail that this is what you did I'm immediately going to go off Here's your problem, and we've actually got a documentation article for that and here's what you do with PHP snippets and bang It's like a four-character keyboard text snippet and I can answer that question and literally 30 seconds in a very comprehensive way because I've seen lots and lots of people make that mistake I made that mistake. I remember when I made it So that's the second thing that can happen You can either rubber-ducket and figure out the problem yourself which happens a lot or you could show me your golf swing And I can immediately be able to spot what you are doing wrong. The third thing is I think far more interesting in 1990 Well, the book is made to state by Chip and Dan Heath and they tell the story of Elizabeth Newton who was a PhD student at Stanford in 1990 when she made a groundbreaking discovery So her research that year what she did was she took two groups of people Tappers and listeners the tappers she gave gave them a slip of paper with a common song title Something that everyone in the listener group would know so happy birthday to you And before and never told to tap out the melody on a table So instead of singing or honing or whistling the tune for jingle bells. It would be a stable boss you all heard and so She but before they tap top melody they were asked to guess what percentage of the listeners would get it right Estimate what percentage so they already knew the title. They're looking at jingle bells And they're looking at the people across the room These people will get it right they estimated 50% of the time they said And so what actually happened was they got a right 2% of the time so tappers overestimated their own ability to communicate a message By 48% like they were way off in their their estimation. What's going on there is once you know the melody It is impossible for you to remember what it was like to not know the melody when I tap There's none of you in the room that didn't hear jingle bells jingle bells All of you heard it because you can't pull yourself out of that knowledge Here's what documentation is On our website. I'll give WP on better click to tweet dot com my documentation is me tapping on the table and I There's I know by virtue of the fact that I can't remember what it was like to not know how to install I can't remember what it was like to not know how to activate Caching or to not know how to migrate servers. I've learned lots of stuff I've got a lot of different melodies in my head. And so when I write that documentation What I'm doing is tapping on the table and so I need listeners in my life To show you where my documentation has holes and as you walk through those four steps of Here's what I'm trying to do. Here's the steps of the specific steps using your documentation. Here's what happened I can immediately go oh The documentation is not clear on this point I didn't think about that and so I'm able to go and fix the documentation And so those are those are the three things that can happen and do happen on a daily basis That actually the process of writing the support ticket is in it in and of itself Makes the whole of the product better So a customer can write a support ticket that results in the documentation getting better Or more complete or the screenshot being exactly accurate, which then More people like the product which and so it it starts with a great support to you And so submitting those good support tickets matters Before we close I couldn't figure out another place to put this in the talk So I just stuck it right in here in the middle. Here's some tips First of all all cats is yelling Don't don't yell Tangentially related to that profanity does not get you moved in the line I Translate WTF to why this first and I just Move it back. I'll answer you and you will get great support later You're in time out. I'm a father. We don't talk like that around here So that's number one tip number two never send your credentials Your login email password your credentials in Instead if you need to send credentials if the support techniques access to your site What you do is you make them a new user with their email and send them those credentials now We use one time secret comm so that people can paste in their Username and password that they just created for us into one time secret comm and then we click on one time And the server release it after that or you can just send those in the email itself as long as you're religious to delete that user after The support ticket is over. So that's two tips there and Finally my final tip rather is if you paid less than a thousand dollars for the solution that you were seeking support for It's pretty business standard to expect about one business day On a ticket now full disclosure give we try really hard to do way better than that and we advertise two to four business hours I think that's weird It's abnormal, it's good, but it's abnormal and so I would expect if you pay less than a thousand dollars One business day turn around if you pay more than that they'll probably get back to you faster than that So that's my three tips that I couldn't stick anywhere else So close with this I told you earlier we were going to talk about the perfect support ticket and then I like spoiled my own Clutchline because there is no perfect support ticket right if there's no audience Who could receive the perfect support ticket? No one person has control over your theme your plug-ins You were posting environment All of the different you know your content writers all of the people that are in your organization Then there can't be a perfect support ticket and so as we we recognize that it will go a long way I had no idea in 2008 2009 whatever that was as a religion major working for a nonprofit Organization I had no idea I was making a career transition But in retrospect what happened was pretty obvious I got wrote in my wordpress the wordpress is not just the software that Powers 30% of the internet whatever the number is these days wordpress is a community and Especially starting about 2014 when I started going to work camps and I started seeing the community Around wordpress. I got wrote in And so I could have made this talk Much much shorter like two minutes and my end with those two minutes See because wordpress how to get better support and wordpress is simple You get better support in wordpress by keeping in mind that you are wordpress the people in this room the people Here in the other rooms other tracks the people working blended Across the pond the people all around the world that are a part of this wordpress community are Wordpress and so as you submit a support ticket to a theme shop or to Software as a service company in the wordpress space or to a plug-in shop keeping in mind that you are wordpress Totally changes the conversation because you're not sending a support to get to some nameless face with other You're sending a support to get to one of your people and and I think if we can keep that in mind We'll make not only Wordpress better as I've mentioned great support makes the whole ecosystem better Great support from the ticket side and great support from the support side You'll not only make wordpress better. You'll make the world a better place. So thank you so much And I have time for questions if anyone has Also accept comments I Remain on the religion track I Think there's a lot of similarities. I think my hypothesis is the question for anybody who didn't hear it and for the camera Is do do I think that? my In had I not been introduced to work as I would continue on the religion track And I think in many ways sure I think without wordpress as a way to give out with to some of these creative tendencies and creative Technical desires and things like that. I probably would have stayed in full-time industry or stay somewhere On what would be considered more of a traditional religious path? But honestly, I feel like my job and support right now is equally sociological equally philosophical equally Spiritual in a certain sense. Now, obviously, I'm not doing any we don't talk about spiritual things I support because but my understanding of how people were that I gained and nonprofit work and religious studies I think really helps in the human side of support because I'm not dealing I have to remind myself and if this talk had been to support technicians I would have said you have to remind yourself the people on the other end of the support ticket Even though there's only cave people and they're angry because they you know can't get the stuff to work They're people and they're there's it know the boss breathing down their neck or Something like that. And so I think having that level of insight not that I excelled in it or anything, but coming from that side not being trained technically Officially but being trained, you know interpersonally and my previous stuff I think really helps in support. And so when I look for people to work with me in the support capacity That's what I want to look for is people who understand people Understanding the tech stuff can be taught understanding people and basic human decency can't really be taught when they can Have you got support tickets that where they try to get very tailed and they clearly get lost in the weeds And if so, how do you diagnose that from there? Yes A lot of times it really help There's almost no point at which more detail is bad like A lot of times if they give me a ton of detail and they get sidetracked into Something like for example, if I know that there their root problem is They're getting the spare from the payment gateway for for gear or something explicit they gave a error and I know that and they get sidetracked into and I'm in test mode and this is this and they're telling me all this stuff It doesn't really relate back to their main issue. It never hurts. It's not, you know, I'm still gonna do the same Stuff because I probably see what the problem is based on the error But yeah, I mean I think we try really hard to do less than three responses to a resolution of people's issues And so that first response our philosophy is to give me my wife called me an over explainer I'm very well seated for my first response because I Over-explained everything. I'm like, well, here's the 19 things it could be Buckle up, it's in coffee And I'll give them all everything I can because my goal is for them We say this all the time and our support means my goal is for them to never be able to say okay I did that what next Here's the 19 next things that if you get all the way to the end of it. It's probably and it's a complicated issue I probably have already asked you for staging site access or for Credentials to create a staging site for you or you know to pull Colonial site from my development environment. And so that that would be what they respond But I never want them to say to be able to say okay Try all that that didn't fix it because we've all been there again. That feels like I'm putting all the work on to the user to figure stuff out and if it's a complicated issue I don't figure out for Other questions, thanks so much stick around and have beat box competition with Matt Cromwell. He goes through the first