Coming Soon: Resources, Advice, Oh My!
Many, many years ago, before CoSupport was a twinkle in my eye, I met my friend Mathew Patterson at SXSW. At the time I was doing customer support for a web company that didn’t care about customer support, and Mathew was all the way across the world running support for a company that was figuring out how to put customers first. We were both on a team of one, and we huddled together at a crowded coffeeshop and traded tips and tricks with each other so we could do our jobs better. How do you reply to this kind of question? What do you say when you’re asked this? What about this scenario?
The things I learned from Mathew that day are still things I use to train others on how to provide amazing support. His language advice is still in the back of my mind when I run into sticky subjects. The influence one coffee date can have on a persons career is truly remarkable.
It’s been years since then, and I still think our world needs more influential and educational coffee dates. That’s why we produce UserConf– the only conference for customer support – twice a year, and why we wrote a handy handbook for anyone doing customer support on the web. We want to help grow the support community into a place of encouragement, learning, and, well, support! It can be a rough job sometimes, and it’s difficult to educate yourself when there’s not a lot of resources to guide you.
But that isn’t enough for us anymore. There’s too many people needing help and advice and not enough resources all in one place. There’s too many cool kids networks that exclude great and less-known voices from rising up. We’re going to change that.
Right before UserConf SF, we’ll be launching a new site full of support resources, tips, helpful guidelines, links to amazing reading, and profiles of support experts you should look to for help and enlightenment. We want you to be involved. You don’t have to be a famous support guru, and you don’t need a huge twitter following. You don’t have to speak at UserConf or have a website dedicated to support. That’s what we’ll provide, you just provide your voice.
Get in touch if you want to submit a blog post, article, link to something you’ve written, a video you’ve made, a podcast feed, an interpretive dance, or any other kind of statement you’ve put together about the world of customer support. We’re here to give you a voice.