I’m honored and humbled that I had a chance to write about Customer Happiness and what it means to me in an interview I gave for Bluegrid.io 🙇🏻♂️
As a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, I am able to combine my two greatest passions – WordPress and helping people – and I am forever grateful for that opportunity.
Big thanks to the folks from Bluegrid.io for the awesome questions and for adding the interview to their blog!
P.S. Automattic is hiring more Happiness Engineers!
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.
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.
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.
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!
I had a privilege of writing an article for Startit about the tools I use on a daily basis for my job as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.
The article covers the browser extensions I mentioned in the past but I also mentioned some other apps and tools that help me do better at my job.
I hope you’ll find the article useful!
https://startit.rs/kreatori-i-alati-davor-altman-happiness-inzenjer/
Want to be part of making the web a better place? Come work for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and lots of others cool products!
As a Happiness Engineer, you’ll work full-time from your home (with salary and benefits) to help people with their websites and blogs. It’s helpful to have some familiarity with HTML, CSS, and WordPress. Critical is a genuine desire to help people.
If this sounds like a job for you, you can apply by following the directions on our Jobs page:
https://automattic.com/work-with-us/happiness-engineer/
I hope to see you soon 🙂
The company I work for, Automattic, published a year in review post for 2016. I am super proud to be a part of this team and that my job allows me to work with WordPress and help making the web a better place.
P.S. Automattic is hiring 😎
