 Well, thank you for having me. This is my second time at WordCamp Pittsburgh. And I was telling him that last year, I didn't actually get to see Pittsburgh, part of it. I just stayed like here. And so yesterday, Kevin took me downtown and showed off Pittsburgh. And I get to catch a Pirates game tomorrow, so that'll be fun. This is Walter. Walter is a recent graduate, and I say five years ago, graduate from a local college. He got a degree in finance. He interned two summers with a local financial planning agency. And shortly after graduation, they offered him a full-time job. He's been there for five years. Loves his job. And in his spare time, he likes to volunteer at the local animal shelter. One day, he was sitting with how these small nonprofit organizations will work. There's the one person getting paid to be there, and then the five or six volunteers kind of in a semi-circle around. And the boss looks around and says, Walter, you're the techiest person we've got. Can you make us a website? Little background on how techy Walter is. The most technical thing he's ever done is added his company email to his cell phone, and he has an Amazon Prime account. So he's not a developer, but he agrees, looking around the room. He's like, well, I do work on a computer every day. And sure, I'll give it a shot. So he downloads, well, the existing site is on WordPress, so he downloads a theme that says it works for animal shelters and he sets about coding to tweak in the theme to try to make it work. Doesn't take long, he runs into an issue. He needs to move the header image, like 20 pixels to the right, because it's just not displaying correctly. And his first thought is, I'm not going to contact tech support. Why? Well, because tech support, I was saying earlier, tech support is uniquely among, I guess, fields, something where obviously otherwise talented, competent, educated, even people can be made to feel stupid, right? What's the point of the first person you talk to in tech support? To talk to the second person, right? Like, can I speak to your manager? I need to be escalated to somebody who can actually fix my problem. And so Walter, immediately, he just doubles down. He's like, I'm not going to play the game, I'm not going to do tech support. So he's like, I'm just not going to do it. And so he's Googling around, trying to figure out how to do this, what should be relatively simple thing and he's running up against all kinds of problems. And so fast forward five hours, he's still been doing this same simple task, can't get it to work, and he's lost at this point his ability to use words. So he's become like a cave person, so when he does finally give in and submit a support ticket, it's like a cave person support ticket. Me, website broke, you fix, header. Like, you know, like there's no, it's just a no win for anyone. And so today what we're going to talk about is kind of the cheat codes for the game, the support game. And so, and why WordPress is a little bit different from other tech support that you might have received. Now for a slightly less fictional story, I graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a degree in religious studies. My focus was early American religious history, which made me very qualified to have very intense conversations about the Amish, Mormons, Shakers, Quakers, itinerant, snake handling preachers of the early 19th century. These are things that I can hang in conversation with. What was curiously absent was any mention of websites or web technology. It was also 2002, so it would have been worthless to have learned all of that tech back then because it wouldn't have translated much. But shortly after college, I was working for a large nonprofit and my boss looked at me, and just like with Walter said, you just got a new computer, can you make us a website? Which is fun, because now we've come full circle and people say, oh, you make websites, can you fix my printer? These two things are not related. It turns out the skill sets involved are completely unrelated, but in his defense, I did want to learn website development. And so I said, sure, I said about figuring out web stuff, right? And so I'm dabbling, doing the same sort of thing. I bought a premium theme that gave me access to their premium support channel and just kind of was trying to figure it out and banging my head against it, again, with no technical background. It was at that point that I was sitting there with my coffee and my laptop learning the hard way and writing really bad support tickets. So I've come from that to where we are now. In fact, it was say, I guess fast forward, so that was 2010 that I started dabbling, making websites, fast forward to 2014, I started using my degree, which I lovingly called pre-unemployment, I started using my degree in pre-unemployment as an unemployed person. And I decided to double down on web stuff, like what all happens from the browser all the way to the server and back. So I started learning all of the technologies that are there, and Linux, Apache, Nginx, it's spelled N-G-I-N-X, but you'll see people will say Nginx. And MySQL, which is spelled MySQL, but the geeks around here will call it MySQL. And so I started learning all of that and just kind of digging in, PHP, try to learn what these technologies are. And I got enough freelance work going to support my family. And I had a client who said, she was a blogger, she needed those click-to-tweet boxes on her posts and pages. And she said, what's the best click-to-tweet plugin out there? Having just learned enough PHP to be dangerous, I went and read the source code in all of the existing options on the WordPress repository. And I found one that I kind of liked, but it was the short version is it had not been updated to use the shortcode API because it had been written before the shortcode API. And so I thought, hey, I could maybe fork that and write it using the shortcode API. And the name of that plugin was click-to-tweet, and because I'm great at naming things, I named mine better click-to-tweet. And, but that from the very beginning, I viewed better click-to-tweet as my resume. It was either going to get me more freelance gigs, or it was gonna get me a job. And so, and I also recognized because I had had enough self-awareness to know, I'm not the best developer out there. I don't think I'll ever be the best developer in the world, but I could make better click-to-tweet the best supported plugin out there. And so I was maniacal about support. My wife knew that if my phone dinged during dinner and it was a support request for better click-to-tweet, somebody having a problem, I was going to stand up and I was going to go and answer the tickets. And so, because that was, it was me viewing it as a resume. The resume worked. I got a job with Give, which is the donation platform for WordPress. So it's like e-commerce, but there's no cart. People just give you money and it accepts the money and keeps track of it with donor management tools and things like that on the back end. My job with Give is senior support technician. So I spend all day answering support tickets when people have issues or it breaks. We've got a wonderful customer success team that handles all of the licensing issues and my account doesn't work at givewp.com and all that kind of stuff. So I'm freed up to spend all of my time just fixing it when it breaks on somebody's site. And so that's the other full circle that I've come from being the guy who asks really bad questions on support tickets to fielding much better questions because our customers are smarter than I was at the time. So first, a little bit about me. That's my wife and you can't really see it because it's dark, but my wife and two of my kids, I also have a foster baby who for obvious reasons, I can't put pictures of in presentations like this, but if you wanna see our 18 month old foster baby, come find me after the talk and I will inundate you with photos. You'll have to ask me to stop for real. But where we're gonna go, oh and I live in Cary, North Carolina and I work 100% remote for give, where we're gonna go today is three steps. The WordPress way and why that 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 we just took a side turn, right? We're talking about support and now you're gonna give me this philosophy, but I do think it really matters. The mission of WordPress since the very beginning has been to democratize publishing. And what that means is, no longer do you have to be the editor of the New York Times to decide who gets a voice. No longer do you have to be the editor of Penguin Books to decide who gets a voice. It's a decentralization of the authority structure. We put you as the authority on who gets to say things because you can download this software, spin it up on a server somewhere and publish to the masses. And that makes for really great things to happen in terms of democratization, but it makes support really hard because we decentralize the authority structures. There's no one person who you can contact who can control your theme, your plug-ins, your hosting environment, the third-party scripts and other things that are bundled within themes. There's no authority that can handle all of those things except for you. So when you submit a support ticket to me with Give or me with Better Click to Tweet, I can't, you know, my hands are somewhat tied when it comes to how I can help you. And so what makes WordPress great is that you are in control. If you think of WordPress like an airplane, you are the pilot and the owner of the airplane. At best, I'm like a flight mechanic or a flight attendant or maybe an air marshal. You know, like, that's the best I can get in that metaphor in terms of like, I might even take over the controls as the flight mechanic, right? You know, okay, we got it straightened out and got the thing to stop wiggling. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna give you your seat back and you're gonna be the pilot again of your website. So I often heard, and you still see it somewhere, or some places in the WordPress ecosystem, people will say things like WordPress is easy. WordPress is easy. And it is. WordPress is easy like flying a plane is easier than building a plane. There that is. WordPress is easy like flying a plane is easier than building a plane. There's still a learning curve, right? You're gonna need to cut yourself some slack. Nobody has ever, you know, with no additional tutorial, sat down and flown a plane perfectly for the first time. Maybe try a musical metaphor. WordPress is easy like playing piano is easier than making a piano. Nobody's accidentally played Beethoven's second concerto, you know, by heart the first time they sat down at a piano. But it's way easier than starting with no piano and having to build one. And so WordPress has built you this CMS or this tool for your blogging or whatever it is you're using it for, but doing the advanced stuff, especially technical stuff, is gonna take some learning. So cut yourself some slack. That's point number one if you're taking notes. Cut yourself some slack. I want you to imagine a young couple that's recently following their wedding. They go on the honeymoon. They come back. The husband develops a nasty habit. So he likes to work out in the morning and then head to work. So he comes home after working out, showers, changes clothes, goes to work. In his haste to get to work, he begins throwing, he's aiming for the hamper with his dirty, sweaty gym socks. He's aiming for the hamper, but he keeps missing and hitting her side of the bed and it lands like on the pillow up next to her side of the bed. So the first time it happens, right? They have these cutesy little early in marriage fights where it's like passive-aggressive, if you're married, you've been there. But as time goes on, he continues to make this mistake over and over. And so as these things tend to do, it escalates. And so he becomes, the cutesy little early marriage fight becomes something more serious. And he vows to do better and he does better. And then again, as these things tend to do, he falls back into the bad habits. So now fast forward a year or two years down the road, she blows up at him one day because he's doing it again, right? And he's like, whoa, we need marriage counseling. And she just laughs. She's like, why don't we marriage counseling you Jew to stop leaving your sock on my side of the bed? And she's like, if you wanna go to marriage counseling, fine, have at it, but I'm not going. And so he does. He books an appointment at the most expensive, highest-rated marriage counselor in town and when he gets there, he sits down and crosses his arms and the marriage counselor says, so what brings you in today? He says, my wife blew up at me for no reason. Now, I don't care if this guy is the Michael Jordan of marriage counseling, he's not gonna get to the real reason from that first response to that first question. I want you to view support for your WordPress website like finally taking your relationship with your website to counseling. And your website doesn't talk. Your website's not there to say what's going on. And so where my analogy thoroughly falls apart is he paid for an hour of marriage counseling. So there's gonna be some back and forth, right? There's gonna be like some follow-up questions in the WordPress support world, especially email support, the more back and forth you get, the more frustrated the user is going to get and the support technician in most cases is going to get more and more frustrated. And so if you view this as a counseling appointment, the more information you can front-load the conversation with, the better. And like Walter from our story earlier, if you've already become a cave person, me website broken, you fix, like you gotta still dial that back and come up with some things. I'll actually show you what the cave person response looks like from my end when I get it. Now I've both sent this exact ticket and I've received this exact ticket. So this is not me casting stones at the person who has sent this, but this is exactly what that website or that ticket looks like. It's broken, please fix. Right? I bought your theme and I expected it to do this and it doesn't. Fix it. There's one more that might, from a support tech side, might be even more frustrating, but it's tricky. It's similar, I read all the docs and it's still broken, please fix. Because you know you're playing the game, right? His first question is gonna be, have you turned it off and turned it back on? His second question is going to be, have you read the documentation? And his third question, so you're skipping steps and okay, I read the docs and it's still broken, please fix. This one's really close to being a great support ticket. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this comma right here and we're gonna add four paragraphs after it. And I'm gonna tell you what to put in those four paragraphs to make it a great support ticket because that is really, really close and if you have read the docs and the docs are not right, this will help with that. If you have read the docs and you missed the step, the next four steps will help with that. So here's the four things that you need to include after that first comma. What you were trying to do, what specific steps you took, what you expected to happen and what happened instead. Now, number one and number three sounds like the same question, right? I was trying to do this thing that I just told you I'm trying to do, I expected it to happen. But it's important that you ask them in this order and you answer them in this order because of what happens mentally and we'll get into that. But a lot of times what'll happen for me is it'll become a loop. What I was trying to do is this, I took this specific step, I expected this to happen but because I answered this question, I'll say to myself, well, you dummy, how did you expect this to happen if this is the step you took? And so then I'd go back and start over again mentally. Okay, I did this and what they call this in the developer community is rubber ducking. And this is the first of three things that could happen from you submitting a great support ticket. Rubber duck debugging, I don't know who came up with the concept but it's a concept of literally putting a literal rubber duck at a plush toy. It's a WordCamp WAPU from WordCamp US a couple of years ago and it sits on my desk. I kind of give him new names every time I do this procedure. So I should probably pick a name. But anyways, there's a literal duck on the desk and you use your words, I'm a dad so I can say things like use your words, you use your words to explain to the duck and developers do it with our code. So I'm reading lines of code. I'm like on line one duck, I expect this to happen. So I did this and it calls this function which does this on this line and with your words you tell the duck what happened. What happens is the duck solves the problem a lot of times. And if you've ever explained something to someone or if you've ever been a teacher you know what's going on here. You're using a different part of your brain. It's like an out of body experience. You're using a different part of your brain when you explain something than you are when you do something. And so you'll see in those three steps or the first three steps, oh, I didn't take this specific step. I should have done this thing and so you'll resolve the problem and so it works the exact same way for support tickets. When you're submitting a support ticket if you're typing it out and you're saying I did this and using this, I did this and pointing to specific lines in the documentation. On your website you say do this and so on my website I did this and you walk through it and I can't tell you how many tickets I've started but never submitted because I solved the problem. And that I'd say it's upwards of 50% of the tickets that I start these days because I follow these steps in my own life when I'm having a tech support issue I solve the problem because I rubber duck it. So that's the first thing that can happen can rubber duck your problem. The second thing that can happen is you can show me your golf swing. Now he mentioned earlier that I prefer to call it ball golf but for the sake of the argument we'll say if I go to a golf pro and I show her my swing and I'm like this is how I swing she's immediately going to because she's a golf professional tell me like 13 things I'm doing wrong. Well you're raising your head and this back arm is all over the place and your wrists I don't even know what's going on. Like she's gonna immediately be able to tell me 10 things probably that I'm doing wrong in my golf swing. In this analogy, I'm the golf instructor as a support technician. What is it about being a golf pro that makes you able to analyze other people's golf swings? Well you've done it more, right? In fact not only if you analyze other people's golf swings you've hit more balls into more lakes than the average human. And so as a support professional what makes me a support professional for websites is that I've broken more websites than you and in more spectacular ways. In fact I've broken give specifically or better click to tweet specifically in some fancy ways. Like I've brought down entire websites production websites with just a semicolon. Like I've broken lots and lots of websites and so when you come to me and say well I took this PHP code snippet I put it in the post editor I clicked publish and nothing happened. I'm immediately going to be able to answer that question and some of you heard it too. PHP code snippets don't go in the post editor. It strips out PHP when you click publish and it's doing nothing. And so it's not going to do anything to put PHP code snippets there. So if you come to me with those three steps and say I did this, this and this I've got like a 30 second reply to it. It's actually four or five paragraphs that I can type out with a key text expander thing that expands out and shows you how using some different documentation on our site this is how PHP code snippets work and walks you through the whole process. But only because you gave me a lot of detail was I able to do it. The same sentence without that one clause in there I put it in the post editor. If you say I got this code snippet on your website and I tried it on my site and it doesn't work I gotta be a little bit of a detective and figure out what's going on or how it broke versus the more detail you give a support technician the better because they're gonna be able to immediately see your golf swing. So that's the two things so far. There's three. You could either rubber duck it you could show me your golf swing or finally you could help make the documentation better. In 1990 Elizabeth Newton the story is in the book made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath is where I read this story. It's a fantastic book if you haven't read it. They tell the story of Elizabeth Newton. She was a PhD student at the time I think it was 1990 at the University of Stanford she did what became a groundbreaking study where she took two groups of people and she put them one group she called the tappers and one group she called the listeners. The tappers were given the name of a melody that everybody in the listener group would know. So think Jingle Bells happy birthday to you something a song that everybody over here knew the tappers were given the name of that melody and told to tap the melody on the table. Can't hum it can't sing it can't whistle it just tap the melody on the table. So for example Jingle Bells would be right you all heard it. And so before they did that they were asked to guess how many of the listeners would get it right. Just estimate they had already seen the name of the song and then the listeners looking at them and they were asked to guess how many what percent they thought would get it right. They guessed 50% they said 50% of the time they're gonna be able to get this melody. What happened was 2% of the time the listeners got it right. It was later termed the curse of knowledge and what that means is it's impossible once you know the melody to separate that melody out and to remember what it was like to not know the melody. And so when the listener that the list or the tappers rather were estimating the other people's intelligence on the other end of the thing what they were misunderstanding was their own bias their own blind spot if you will and so that's the when I write my documentation on betterclickstweet.com or at givewp.com when I'm writing documentation that's me tapping on the table. And I've forgotten what it's like to not know how to install a plugin for example or to any number of advanced topics that all of the ways that I've broken give I've forgotten what it was like to not know that all of the ways that I've broken different plugin conflicts and things like that. And so when I'm writing documentation I need listeners to explain my tapping to help me see there's a big blind spot there. So if you do a great job and give me those four points I looked at this documentation on your website and I did this and it says here that I need to go to this link and do this and I did that and then I look at it and go oh that's wrong I need to fix that because tech changes you know Stripe makes a change or PayPal makes a change and I have to go in and edit my documentation to fix that. So that's the three things that can happen and do happen often is you can rubber duck the problem and solve it yourself you can show me your golf swing and I can immediately solve it or you can help me make my documentation better. So I didn't have a spot for these last three tips so I just stuck them in here. First tip all caps is yelling don't yell. Tengentially related to this profanity does not actually get your ticket answered faster. In fact I take WTF and I translate it to why this first and I move it back here and I answer your question very professionally later you get put in time out again I'm a father we don't use that kind of language around here and so just be nice it's a general principle but all caps is yelling I know you're frustrated I've been frustrated before I've probably done the same thing you've done before and I've done all caps ticket and I shouldn't have. Second point never send your credentials your username and password to log into WordPress your credentials never send them via email to a support technician ever. Your password should only live in your password manager or your brain and it should never be sent to another person because WordPress has a built in way to send people credentials. Go to add new user add a new user make them an administrator and send that potentially via email what we do and give is we have you create a one time secret URL it's called onetimesecret.com and you put in the credentials into that little box it creates a one time use URL so the first time anybody anywhere clicks on that link they see it and then it's gone forever and they won't they don't keep it and so you can send that through there because then once the support technician fixes your problem you can just delete that whole user account and your website is secure and your password has never been compromised so never ever ever ever ever send your own password via email. And the last point if you paid less than a thousand dollars for the solution that you are currently seeking support for I would expect about a business day turnaround. So what happens is you submit one ticket and then two hours later you haven't gotten a response so you submit another ticket from the support technician side now I have two tickets waiting for me which is more mentally overwhelming than having one ticket waiting for me so take that for this word now give we advertise two to four business hours response time and we generally keep to that but I think that's weird I think that community wide a good standard would be one business day turnaround. So I told you at the beginning that we would be talking about the perfect support ticket and then I kinda spoiled my own ending. So now I'll tell you the myth of the perfect support ticket right there is the reason there is no perfect support ticket in WordPress is there's no perfect audience for that support ticket. There's no one that I can send the perfect ticket to so therefore there's no such thing as a perfect ticket you are the pilot of your WordPress site you are the owner of your WordPress site and so you're the one that that needs you're the audience there. I never knew in 2008 or 2010 when I was steeped in early American religious history that I was making a career transition the first time I submitted a support ticket on that premium support theme but what happened when I look at it in retrospect is pretty easy to spot I got roped in by WordPress you see WordPress is not just the software that powers whatever percent I think it's up to 32% of the internet WordPress is people WordPress is a community and the people in this room the people in this building with the name tags on and the people around the world at other word camps is the WordPress community and I could have made this talk much much shorter like a minute and a half and I'm going to close with that minute and a half the way that you get better support in WordPress is to keep in mind that you are WordPress and so when you're submitting a ticket you're not submitting some nameless faceless other on the other end of the internet you're submitting a ticket to your people and so when you treat them like that and when you give when you do good support tickets and understand the role of support in the community I think it makes that product better it makes WordPress in general better it makes the world better honestly my name is Ben Meredith I'm the Senior Support Technician at GiveWP and thanks so much for having me and if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them I do from a support end is it easier following your formula for someone to send screen grabs or a short video rather than trying to explain it in words because I think sometimes when we try to explain it in words we think that we're telling you on the steps we talk but we really aren't yeah I definitely think video is super helpful oh yeah I need to repeat the question for the camera so the question is is it better for from a support technician side for the user to submit video or screen captures or et cetera and I think the answer is absolutely as much as you can some support ticket systems won't let you submit more than one image or something like that so make it a good one but yeah linking to a screen cast of it of you I can't every single time I've ever done a screen share call with a customer from better click to tweet or from give and I'm walking them through click here now click here okay go over here I learned something new about how someone who's not familiar with give uses our software or someone who's not familiar with better click to tweet uses the software so the more detail I can get the better it absolutely helps and so yeah making a short I use screen cast-o-matic I think as long as it's less than 15 minutes it's free and so I use that often times there's other tools out there that you can you can use to do short screen cast and and show the technician what you're doing and I think that's any extra detail is helpful for sure other questions comments Snyder marks how do you reduce back and forth after your first yeah yeah I make it my goal I'll repeat the question how do I how do I stop or reduce as much as I can the back and forth between um me and this the person getting support the customer um as much as possible I think for me I make it my goal that they can never respond with okay I tried that what next and so if I if I'm having a especially difficult time if I can't immediately spot the problem and say okay this is a conflict with this other plug-in and here's the workaround to fix it from our side and we've escalated this to our development team and we'll get back to you know that kind of stuff if I can't give them that and I'm not sure what's going on either they didn't give me enough information or the information that they gave me still doesn't get me to a resolution I never want them to be able to say okay I tried that what next because that's a wasted back and forth and so I'm my response often ends with in situations like that and if none of that works here's the way to send me credentials to create credentials for your website and then I'm happy to hop in and duplicate your site we use um duplicator to it's a plug-in to clone their site and I pull it to my local computer and spin up a test install with their stuff and replicate the problem our philosophy at give and I think it's a really good one is we don't want to make you do work that we could do for you because we've done it before and we're better at it if I tell you to duplicate your site to a staging environment I've just completely overwhelmed some users versus if I say to you can I get some credentials to log in what I'm going to do is replicate your site isolate the bug find a fix for it and message you back people are often very thankful for that and so that reduces the back and forth too but I think the more education you can do helps as well so instead of telling a user you know these 27 steps that to follow if I can say to them okay the reason the way your site is working versus how it's supposed to work it can only be this this or this that's wrong so we're going to isolate which of these three options are wrong and just explaining to the user you know it's like a a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun like some support technicians and I've done this in the past too will just sort of blast you with like have you deactivated all the plugins and done all of this and done all of that and you're just overwhelmed with why would I want to deactivate all of my plugins like and so if I instead give you here's the here's how we're going to isolate this problem and so very quickly go in deactivate this plug in this plug in then this plug in because I think it's one of those three and so then the user feels empowered and educated and so they're not going to come back with I tried that now what next because I try to not let them do that so I really want to it's my job to fix the site you know and I I take ownership even when it's another plugin I go into their code and find the line and say this is what you need to send to the support technician at this plug in that on line 29 of this file this variable was being called incorrectly and it's interfering with give and then we try to fix it from our side as much as we can but sometimes it requires some interplay between us and the other company other questions so if you find out that it is maybe a conflict with another plugin or a thing you try to give them as much information as you can to send them to say here's what we need to do next sometimes I'll I'll give it a caveat I'm like the following three paragraphs are total geek speak that I want you to translate you know pass on to the other the other developer and I'll you know go go all in on the geek language to explain the specific conflict and why and you know it's a php version issue or whatever and send this and kind of giving them a script to hand to either their host or their plugin or theme or whoever else and I you know because the decentralization of authority that happens in WordPress is is what it is you know I have to couch it with you know I might not be able to fix this in some cases because if this plugin is a deal breaker for you and they don't fix this issue it's not going to play nicely with give and so or with better click between whatever so I do though try to give them as much as I possibly can to to because they're not they're not developers they don't need to know why it's broken necessarily they just need somebody to fix it and if I can't fix it I need to give the person who can fix it as much info as I can so the question is what happens if I if a user contacts support and that support technician doesn't go out of their way to resolve the problem and you know maybe plants it off to another you know blame the the host or blame the caching or blame you know blame somebody else instead of that and honestly I don't have a great answer for that other than you know don't do business with people that don't support their product you know and I think the part of the ethos of the open source community is if it's a free WordPress repository you know the free plugin directory plugin or theme it's open source you know we can all go in and we can all as development teams see the source but there's only one person who can commit changes in some cases to these you know plugins that have been abandoned or whatever so you kind of got to use some discretion there you know the fact that it is open is great and but if it stops working you've still got somebody who's got to fix it and so if you if you're not a coder you need to get somebody who is to fix it or whatever there's not I guess an easy answer to that question other than that's why that's why some certain certain plugins are more popular than others is because there our support goes out of our way to fix it as much as we can anybody else are we over time no one more sure yeah so the question is do I have anything that any advice that I would give for other people who are providing support for products or services within WordPress first that would be a whole different talk and it would be really fun so I would like to do that one but the biggest thing and I was talking about this before we started was that support technicians have to try really hard because we don't remember what it was like to not know how to do the things that we know how to do and it is not a sign that someone is unintelligent that they can't figure out how to do a technical thing it's a sign that they're ignorant and ignorance and lack of intelligence are two completely different things it's being uninformed versus being you know dumb and not willing to learn or something and so if I were giving this talk to support technicians my main point would be treat the person on the other end of the support ticket like an intelligent human who just needs to know we have we call it the wise friend method and so like when somebody messages me with an issue I think what would I tell my friend if my friend came to me with this exact issue well I wouldn't talk to them like they're an idiot first of all right I wouldn't be like well the reason that this is happening is because the php version on your site is crap and this is crap and you're crap you know like I wouldn't I wouldn't do that I would instead put my arm around them and say hey here this is I've done that before I made that mistake here's how we fix this and so we we have a whole an internal tone guide that soon will be published externally but that the whole point is to that we are the wise friend we're their advocate with the development team we're their advocate with and we're the development team advocate to the customer you know the development team doesn't deal day in and day out with customers who are frustrated with this issue or this lack of issue or whatever and so my role is kind of jelly in between the two to be able to translate in both directions and so I would tell support technicians that they need to treat people on both sides with respect and and to to really give them education if you're not if you're not don't have the heart of a teacher you won't make a very good support technician because that's what I do all day is teach people how to use a product happens to be the same product over and over and over and so I'm getting really good at teaching people how to use it because just with practice but yeah I would say heart of a teacher and treat people with respect and answer them how you would answer a friend even the angry ones because like I said in the first story when I started out you know by the time most people come to support tech what they're expecting is to be made to feel dumb and so they come out defensively and they come out aggressively sometimes and they're angry and especially in the case of give we've got you know sites that where they're getting twenty thirty thousand dollars in donations a month and it just went down because they clicked update and something broke and their boss doesn't give a rip about PHP or MySQL or whatever the site is down and so they come to me and they're lashing out at me and so what good does it do for me to defend myself no if my friend came to me with that issue I would want to solve it as quickly as possible and that'll change their tone you know you gotta you gotta have thick skin as a support technician and not take insults personally because people do especially e-commerce they're going to get frustrated and so treating them with respect and saying you know with here's the three things that could be causing that you know let's isolate that and fix it as fast as we can is is the way to go about it one more question so the question is how to diffuse someone who's coming at you hot well first you ignore the fact that they're coming at you hot if they say you're stupid and this is the worst product ever and you know your mom was a whatever in the in the ticket but they also say my site was doing this and now it's doing this and now it's doing this and if they've given me enough information to you know my natural response my my personality if you're into Myers-Briggs I'm an ENTP which is the debater right and so my internal response to that and sometimes external is to prove them wrong like I'll give you a five point outline of how I'm not dumb and our product is not stupid and you know like we've got this many customers are doing this many things and it's your problem you're dumb you know like that doesn't help right and so the skill that I'm learning and I have learned over time you just really have to solve a problem because that changes tones immediately if if I say actually and I just ignore it you know just come at them with the same tone I would if they had not used the f-bomb you know just say hey here's when that happens on sites here's the four reasons why it normally does it's either this this this or this I can isolate these three from my side so I see that it's probably this if you try doing this it'll fix it let me know if that doesn't work if it doesn't I'm happy to hop in and take care because they're they're expecting me to blame another plug-in or all of the stuff with the support game they're expecting to have to talk to my manager they don't know that I'm the manager um you know that they don't need that that me defending myself is just a waste of time and so um and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't I'd say 90 percent of the time it does work if you solve their problem they'll come back and say you know what I was kind of a jerk my boss was breathing down my neck and I really appreciate you not taking it personally I've had that happen dozens of times now um versus you know something and then the other 10 percent of the time they just leave and they're angry and I can't you get the poor rating right yeah yes we use help scout and so they'll click you know bad rating and it comes up with a bad rating and then 15 minutes later after I've solved their problem they click great rating and I'm like yes and you know it's like you know you have to apologize friend I know I know you're sorry I know you feel bad you know you don't have to come back and so yeah I think the the key skill for support technicians is not taking it personally they're they're mad at a lot of times they're mad at themselves and I've been there too you know I am so dumb I can't figure out how to do this one thing and now my sights down and my boss is mad and the CEO's tweeting at me and you know like yeah you know I want to fix it and so empathy putting myself into their shoes and realizing they're upset and with good reason because they thought you know even though it was not technically my fault I can still fix their problem and make their day and those are my favorite great ratings in the whole world well second favorite my favorite great ratings are the ones when I say no we can't do that they'll say can you do this this or this and I'll say no we can't do that you have to hire a third party developer to do that but I say it in such a way that they still give me a great rating that's my favorite great rating that's a skill and and I'm learning I really that's fun that's my favorite challenge just to say no in a way that they're like well that was great but my second favorite is the person who was angry and then gives me a great rating at the end of the thing that's easier than saying no in such a way I think parenting comes into it a lot you never thought you were one of my tweets from years ago I said I never thought I was good at sales and marketing until I got both kids to eat a tofu hot dog and like it like I did that one time because I accidentally bought the tofu hot dogs and I wasn't going to let them get a waste because nobody's going to do that so you got to spin it man you got to make it sound like a positive once it sounded good to them they ate it and liked it and then I told them it was tofu and then they went well thank y'all so much for having me