Episode #138 - Providing Quality Support with Dustin Meza - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2017-09-07T01:58
Watch the video of this podcast here.
Dustin is the director of customer experience operations at WP Engine. He has seen the business grow exponentially. He began four years ago as the 47th employee, and things have taken off from there. He leads two teams that focus on customer experience and delivering quality support. It’s their goal to make sure that their customers have the best and most seamless experience possible within the platform.
People create websites to take their message to the world. They don’t create websites to get bogged down in backups, updates, and other maintenance duties. Dustin reminds his customer experience teams to understand how important the website is to the customer when it comes to sharing the customer’s message. It’s easy to forget that this website may be what puts food on the customer’s table, and how serious it is to the customer when the site is down.
He encourages his team to be empathetic and quick to help people in anyway they can. Building the client relationship through support is really important. One challenge support people deal with is when updates break something on the site. Dustin offers great tips on staying on top of things and avoiding possible issues that can happen when updating WordPress and plugins.
Quality Support and Being Proactive About Upgrading Websites Safely
- Subscribe to the releases section of the WordPress.org blog
- Release candidates are what gets launched
- Understand the new WordPress changes
- Then apply those changes back to your site and the plugins you use
Reminding support people that they are the experts and the only ones who can help the customer helps keep the support team grounded when dealing with the more difficult customers. The team has a responsibility to help the customers in the most empathetic way possible by owning the situation and being the calm, clear voice. Bringing communication and calmness to the situation is good.
It’s human nature to match communication, so by being cool and calm can help encourage panicky customers to be cool and calm. With other customers, support is encouraged to let them talk. Then support can accept the blame and own the fact that a mistake has been made. This technique can diffuse the entire situation. Telling the upset customer that they are right, and it is not acceptable makes it is easier to move forward and deal with the issues.
Dustin moved to Nashville about a year and a half ago. As someone already involved in the WordPress community, he knew about WordCamp Nashville, and he knew he wanted to get involved. You’ll want to listen around the 15 minute mark when Dustin shares how he was selected to be one of the organizers of the event. They are planning for about 2500 attendees and are in the process of speaker selection.
They are basing their selections on the survey results of last year and what people really want to hear. They are also focusing on new and hot topics that may not have even existed last year. They also know how it is difficult to navigate from a developer to an agency. Entrepreneurship is hot right now and they want help freelancers expand their businesses by “standing on the shoulder of giants” and learning how successful agencies have already done it.
Other cool and new topics at WordCamp will include headless WordPress which decouples the front and back end by using an API to connect the backend WordPress data with any type of front end. This opens up possibilities for enterprise use of WordPress along with new and innovative front end user interfaces. The technology is fun, but the people are the backbone of the event. Dustin is excited about allowing communities to interact and all of the great things to come.
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