On Social Customer Support

Through my work with Automattic, I’ve had the privilege of working with the guys over at Intense Debate. I’ve been helping them improve their WordPress plugin and get it ready for some new features. Along the way I made the blunder of releasing a version that had a pretty serious bug in it, and that triggered a lot of customer support issues/cases.

In the “old days” (or in a lot of big corporates today), those support cases would have been handled behind a corporate “veil of secrecy”, tucked in a back end system somewhere, responded to by anonymous “Customer Service Representatives” via a generic email account like “support@intensedebate.com”. While we’re also making use of a generic email address, the similarities between our approach and that of big corporates ends there. End to end, the differences are pretty stark.

Keep Reading about Social Customer Support

WordCamp San Francisco 2009

WordCamp San FranciscoIt’s almost time for another WordCamp event, and I can’t wait. This is the big one – the fourth annual San Francisco WordCamp! This will also be the fourth WordCamp that I’ve attended. Yes, I believe that makes me somewhat of a groupie.

There’s a new website online as of yesterday and it’s looking pretty spiffy. I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Ferriss and Tara Hunt speak in particular.

Oh, and I’m going to be helping out on the “Genius Bar” for a bit as well, so drop by and get some questions answered!

This will probably be a bit of a different experience for me than previous years because I’ve been doing some consulting work with Automattic, so I’ve met a lot of the crew now, and it’ll be good to see a lot of them again here.