WordPress.com Happiness Engineer For Hire

Matt linked to our Happiness Engineer job posting:

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

• Patience and grace.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

This is a pretty sweet opportunity, I must say, for someone passionate about working with people and WordPress.

You will be collaborating with Mark Riley (the artist formerly known as Podz), who truly is a support maven. He is the best technical support person that I’ve ever worked with and I’ve worked with a lot. Every position in my 7 year career has been related to support: doing it, leading it, or collaborating with support teams.

At IBM DB2, I was very familar with “customer sat.”.

With Flock I enjoyed a more personalized delivery of it, but as I suggest in Flock’s Kryptonite and Flock, the Awkward Child of Open Source I ultimately didn’t feel at the time that we were positioning ourselves to support our different groups of customers well.

When I joined Automattic, I was immensely impressed that really caring about the people that are our customers is in the DNA of the organization. Support is important to every member of the Automattic team, and most have the passion and skills to contribute to it directly.

Barry, the Systems Wrangler, particularly impresses me with how much time and energy he spends caring for our customers. Not only is he the best web hosting person I’ve ever seen in action, he goes many extra miles to work directly with our customers having problems.

WordPress is a lot bigger than us, and if you join the team you will meet a lot of passionate people from all over the world and some that seem right out of it.

I was surprised by how passionate and awesome people that blog are, but I really shouldn’t have been. These are the people who have found their voice online and are sharing what is important to them.

I learn a lot of the most interesting and important things from my customers, so supporting them well is really important to me.

For many companies support is often an afterthought. Little of product revenue is invested into support. Although a support team is responsibly for customer satisfaction, they often have little influence on the product.

The sad reality is as consumers we have allowed ourselves to be trained to accept poor service and support particularly when it comes to software products.¹

The statistics showed this at IBM DB2. The DB2 Support team was always incredibly stretched, but thankfully often mediocre support was sufficient for IBM to be an industry leader in supporting “enterprise” customers. The result is that IBM wasn’t influenced to invest in the DB2 Support organization.

Luckily, leaders like Blair Adamache, Marc Wilding, Chris Fender, and quite a few others invested a lot of their own personal energy to shake it up, but it seemed like a straight up hill journey. I would love to find out how this journey is going? Are these leaders still personally involved? (This information may be locked within the IBM walls.)

Large organizations can get away with mediocre, but small teams can’t. Showing your customers you really care is how you can differentiate yourself from the competition, and that is exactly what we try and do.

This is an important piece in WordPress being the best. “We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important” sums it up perfectly.

Mark Riley is our best kept unsecret. He gets hundreds of thank yous a week and many over the top kudos.

It is a significant reason why we develop bbPress.²

How we can provide even better support was a significant part of the conversations at our “onsite”, discussing what is the next steps in technology we need and what people we need involved. It relates to the conversations we have every day.

So here we are. We are developing and experimenting with creating and refining some tools, but we also need you, a Technical Support Professional. Bring your energy, experience, and tools, and come to your new home at Automattic.

1. Satisfaction is one organization trying to shake this up by enabling public self service for any product. But without the organizations joining in, it might only provide a warning against the organizations that don’t participate with their customers. [↩]
2. Matt wrote a first version at the beginning of 2005 for WordPress.org’s support forums and for the last year Michael Adams has moved it forward into a product that is now on many sites. [↩]