In the last 30 days, I had an opportunity to speak at two local WordPress meetups in Serbia – WordPress meetup Vršac and WordPress meetup Zrenjanin. I held the same talk both times and the title of it was WordPress support – 700+ 1:1 sessions with WordPress users.
WordPress 1:1 Support
I’ve been with Automattic for 4 years now and during this time, I worked on providing support for various products like Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress, Sensei, WP Job Manager, Gravatar but since two and half years ago, I’ve been working as a WordPress.com Happiness Engineer.
Anyone can create a free site at WordPress.com. However, with the paid plans, lots of additional features get unlocked. With the top tier plans (Business and eCommerce), WordPress.com users get two complementary 1:1 sessions. A session lasts for 30 minutes but it can also be purchased with any WordPress.com plan (a session will then last for 45 minutes).
During these sessions, a WordPress.com user can ask any questions they have and a Happiness Engineer is there to assist. We’ll help folks build their site from scratch, set up a store, improve SEO, find the best plugin or theme for their needs etc.
After the session, a Happiness Engineer provides detailed instructions on what was covered during the call and a list of the next recommended steps for the site. A recording of the whole session will also be available.
1:1 Sessions Takeaways
So far, I’ve completed over 700 of these sessions. In my humble opinion, this is the best way of providing support for a product. During these 30 (45) minutes, the amount of information that gets shared can be an equivalent of ~50 email exchanges. Also, seeing and hearing a person’s voice beats the email exchange at any time. And as a cherry on top, the user can always look at the video recording.
WordPress Meetups in Vršac and Zrenjanin
I’m super happy that I had the privilege to share my experience from these sessions at two WordPress meetups. I provided the details on how the sessions are conducted, the various topics that can be covered, and the solutions to certain problems that WordPress users might face.
In the end, I also shared my list of the WordPress plugins I recommend and the slides and videos from the WordPress workshops I held last year in Novi Sad.
The talks were in Serbian and the slides are available here. I’d be thrilled to have an opportunity to hold this talk in English at a WordPress meetup or WordCamp in the future 😎
P.S. I used the WordPress app to write this post on my phone. If you like writing on the go, definitely take the app for a spin!
