Working Support as a Happiness Engineer at WooCommerce

Ronald: Marcus, it’s us again. And we have a guest, would you like to introduce the guest?

Marcus: We do, I sure would. Today we have Gabriel Bonifácio joining us from WooCommerce, and he is a Happiness Engineer. How are you doing today?

Gabriel: I’m doing great. Thanks guys, for inviting me, and I’m excited to be here today.

Marcus: Awesome. What is a Happiness Engineer? Want to tell us a little bit about yourself and what a Happiness Engineer does?

What a Happiness Engineer does

Gabriel: Yeah, sure. A Happiness Engineer is basically a support agent at WooCommerce. So, that’s how we like to call ourselves. And I think it’s based on our support philosophy, because we do care a lot about our customers, what they’re trying to achieve, and we really focus on having them happy. And about me, I’ve been a web developer, and I’ve also worked with technical support, I think forever. It’s been 14 years now. Yeah, I worked with both. And then I joined Automattic, and today I work as a Happiness Engineer, so I work with direct support and helping our customer base.

Ronald: Nice. I have to admit something, I have to share something. I’ve been a Happiness Engineer for the last two weeks.

Gabriel: Oh yeah.

Joining Automattic and support rotation for all

Ronald: I joined the Automattic family. Gabriel, do you want to share a little bit of what the idea behind that is? So when you join Automattic, your first two weeks you started as a Happiness Engineer, as they call support rotation.

Gabriel: Yeah. I think the first thing you come across is the amount of information you have access to, so that’s kind of scary. I’m sure you’re in that place right now, that’s just so much to learn about. And you are kind of scared and you think, hey, how can I memorize all this? But one interesting thing is that everyone will tell you from the very beginning, that there’s no way for you to memorize everything, and no one really, no one knows everything. Even the very experienced Happiness Engineers, people that have been with us for like seven, eight years or more, even those people ask questions. So it’s normal, and the nice thing about the onboarding process and the support rotation, is that you feel so comfortable with asking questions. Everyone is so available, and that’s something very nice in our happiness division. There’s a lot of knowledge sharing, and we are aware that there’s just so much information, and we are always there to help each other. I hope you’re getting this feeling of helping each other.

Ronald: Absolutely. It’s so true that everybody, you ask a question and there’s somebody there within seconds with a full explanation. Not, “I’ll come back to that later,” screenshots, and little videos and all sorts. It’s really remarkable.

Gabriel: Yeah. We really like to help not only our users, but ourselves as well.

Ronald: Yeah. And I want to ask you a little bit more about that culture. where does that come from, that culture of wanting to help, wanting to share?

Gabriel: I think that culture comes mainly from WordPress.com. I mean, that’s where the title came from. And really, I think from all the places I worked at, Automattic is the place where I really feel that we are more focused on really helping our customers. So, there are a lot of differences in comparison to the places I’ve been before. And one thing for example, is being honest with our customers. So I’ve been in other places where we were told not to tell things to our customers, to hide certain information, and that’s not the case here. We are incentivized to be honest, to be upfront with our customers. And we really listen, and we really try to do that extra step to help them.

That’s actually one of the criteria we have when our interactions are being reviewed. So, if we embrace the opportunity to help our users, even beyond what they’re asking help for. And I think that’s where it comes from, this philosophy, this idea of really trying to not only solve the issue, but to give something extra, and make sure that the client is happy and is going to come back.

Supporting WooCommerce and the plugins

Marcus: Yeah. Speaking of the scope of your support, I know that obviously there’s WooCommerce, and then the WooCommerce team develops lots of plugins for WooCommerce and stuff as well. Seems like a lot to have to know intimately enough, to be able to support folks. Talk just a little about how it feels to support WooCommerce, and all of the plugins and all of that.

Gabriel: Yeah, you’re definitely right. We do support a lot of extensions. So, we do have extensions developed by us at WooCommerce in our marketplace. And we also have extensions developed by partner developers. And although we don’t support those directly, we do provide presales for those. So yeah, that’s a lot of extensions, and we have this ever growing catalog. And that’s actually one of the biggest challenges of the position, knowing about everything, remembering everything. And we’ve been testing some ways to make this process better.

Because WooCommerce just won’t stop growing. We’ve been seeing a huge growth lately, and I believe it’s going to keep growing. And the trend is having more and more and more extensions to support. So, we try to work on very good documentation that helps a lot, but we also have some Happiness Engineers that are like subject matter experts on certain extensions. So, whenever we are unsure about something or the documentation isn’t clear enough, we can contact the people that are experts on that specific extension. And also one other thing, is the fact that we have direct access to our developers. So whenever we need, we can just go ahead and ask them, “Hey, does this work? I’m not sure about this specific thing here.”

Marcus: That’s really cool. Yeah, I have a tiny bit of experience there. I started with the SkyVerge team. SkyVerge has 60 or so, I think, plugins on the marketplace. And when I started there, I started on the support team as well. So yeah, I know how it is to just have to know, to some level of depth, a whole catalog of plugins. And then you throw WooCommerce on top of that. Do you find that you get support outside of the WooCommerce realm that comes in? And then how do you handle those things? How do you define maybe the scope of your support is, and where that ends?

Gabriel: Yeah. SkyVerge has a lot of popular WooCommerce extensions. Yeah, and that’s a big challenge in fact, but we all have our favorite extensions to support. Besides WooCommerce, I think every Happiness Engineer has one or two favorite extensions.

Managing internal documentation and tools

Ronald: So you talked a little bit about, you get all this information, requests on how to use that information that you’ve built up. There’s a lot of documentation, but there are also lots of internal tools that you’re using, we are using. How is that managed? And I’m referring to the guilt work, which is called a snippet. And it’s just remarkable how that is put together and used by everybody else, but it’s a huge organization. It’s years of putting that into shape to make it useful, because within hours of me starting, or days, I was able to find stuff so quickly. Within almost minutes, you can answer your first support tickets.

Gabriel: That’s one of the reasons you joined us, because that’s a very basic skill set you have to have in order to work here with us, I think. And that’s the very first part of our training as well, knowing how to find information. And exactly because what I mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to know everything, so at least we have to know how to find information we don’t know. And we do have different tools so we can find information. So for example, I can find older tickets that have handled a certain problem, and see what the Happiness Engineer wrote then, and base my answer on that. But we also have our P2s, the P2 is our internal tool where we store information. It’s basically, it’s kind of a corporate internal WordPress. So, it’s blogs that we use to share information and create discussions around topics. And that’s where most of our information is stored, and also our internal communication tool. So we have different places, but mostly I personally look for information in our tickets and our P2s.

Beyond WooCommerce support

Ronald: Do you support any other work outside of the WooCommerce support?

Gabriel: Yeah. Besides the direct support work, which is basically chatting and answering tickets, we do put a lot of work on documentation. So we update, or even create new documentation, not only internal documentation, but actually the WooCommerce documentation that you see that is public facing, we work on that. And we also have a lot of bug reporting, so that’s included in our scope as well. So, if we notice there’s something wrong with either WooCommerce or an extension, and we can replicate that in our local environment, then we know it’s a bug. So we file a bug report, and we follow up with our developers until it’s fixed. So, that’s part of our work as well.

Besides, we work very closely with the developers, the marketing team, sales, customer success, in order to have our products improved. And the reason is because we are the closest people to our users. So, we do hear directly from them what their challenges are, what type of issues are happening a lot, and things like that. So, I think this is something very nice as well. The fact that our company does hear us, and does take into consideration what we bring to them, and we do generate discussions internally, and our suggestions and everything we say is heard, so that’s very nice. So that’s part of our job, these conversations about how we can make our products better. And of course, eventually Happiness Engineers may participate in events like WordCamps and talks, and maybe a podcast like this one. So yeah, to help disseminate the word of Woo.

The bigger challenges Gabriel is seeing

Marcus: Yeah, definitely from working on support at SkyVerge, that’s definitely true, that you’re that front line. No one’s going to be closer to what customers are thinking, and the struggles that they’re facing and all of that. So I don’t know, maybe you want to talk to us a little bit about what some of the biggest challenges that you’ve seen, that merchants, or agencies or freelancers, or just the folks that are writing into you, what are some of the biggest challenges that they’re facing that you see?

Gabriel: I think one of WooCommerce’s biggest advantages is the way you can customize it. I personally worked with other e-commerce platforms before joining Automattic, and I always came back to WooCommerce, because no other platform matches the amount of customization you can put in. But with that amount of customization comes the performance issue. But that’s due to the nature, not only of WooCommerce itself, but of WordPress. That’s the way it’s designed. We have hooks, which is basically parts in the code where you say, “Hey, I’m doing this. Before I go ahead, do you want to do something else?” In simple terms, that’s what hooks are for. So you can put extra pieces of code in basically any part of your site, or the backend execution. So, these hooks makes it very customizable, but the more code, the more customization put in, the more the performance is hurt. So, I think that’s kind of a big challenge to find the balance between the amount of customization and how the performance will be impacted, either on the front end or on the back end as well.

Besides, WooCommerce is a very big platform, and it’s open source and it has a huge market share there. And due to that, I think there’s a lot of information available in regards to how you can do a certain thing. And this amount of information sometimes makes it difficult for you to decide which path to follow. If you do a Google search, you’ll find a lot of different sources telling you, “Hey, you can use this plugin. Hey, you can use this custom code here,” and et cetera. And for someone who’s not very used to that kind of stuff, it may be overwhelming. So, I think that would be another challenge.

Also one other thing that I would say, is maybe finding qualified people. That’s something that I find, although it’s a very non-platform. I used to develop eCommerce sites in the past, and even today my old clients come to me and say, “Hey, I can’t find someone, please do this for me.” And I just can’t, because I no longer work with that. But yeah, that’s a struggle, finding people who are actually familiar with developing themes and plugins. And I do see a lot of people who are very good, but they mainly work with third party plugins or things like that. And sometimes that won’t work alone, and there’s a lot of customization required. And in most cases, if you find a very good developer, it would mean a higher cost. And not all these small business can handle that higher cost. So, I think a big challenge would be finding good people at an affordable cost, that really do know the platform and how to customize it, if that makes sense.

Ronald: Yeah. It’s a fun balance, isn’t it? Between too much choice and just enough choice, and too many options and enough options to satisfy everybody.

Thanks to our Pod Friends FooSales and Jetpack

Working from home, the distributed culture

Ronald: Working from home, a distributed bit of Automatic culture. How do you find that? And do you have any pro tips for that?

Gabriel: Yeah, it’s great working from home. I personally was used to it, I used to work from home even before joining Automatic so it was kind of natural to me. One thing is it may feel lonely sometimes, so it’s nice to connect with your coworkers, and try to have some conversations that go beyond the work scope so you feel like you’re not that alone. We personally have some weekly meetings with video, so that helps. We have our team meeting, and I have a weekly meeting with my leads, so we chat with video and that helps.

But besides the personal aspect, I think what helps is having discipline, having a routine. If you’re working from home, I mean having a time to start, to finish, and a very important thing is having a separate place in your home to work, so you can leave that room and you know you’ve stopped working. Because otherwise, you’re always looking at your computer and feeling like working a bit more. So it’s important to separate stuff. And also, if you have a separate room, a separate office in your house, you can isolate yourself from family and from everything else that’s going on. So that’s a pro tip, I think.

Ronald: One of the big questions is if you have cats or dogs,

Gabriel: I do have two cats. I love them.

Ronald: It’s a big part of Automattic life.

Gabriel: Did you notice? Yeah, it is. We love cats. I don’t know why.

Ronald: Apparently there’s even a two cat club. So if you have two cats, you’re part of the two cat club.

Gabriel: Yeah, yeah. What about you guys? Do you have pets?

Ronald: I’m a single dog owner.

Marcus: I don’t anymore. I had a cat for a while, but now it’s just me at home. I was going to joke that I agreed to co-host this podcast just so I could see some more people at least once a month.

Ronald: Yeah, right.

Development experience and how that helps with support

Marcus: Yeah. You’ve talked a little bit about working as a developer before joining Automatic. Do you find that that development skill has helped in being able to support the folks that are writing into you? And I guess, knowing how to develop some things, how do you know what’s out of scope, and how far to go with a customer in terms of helping customize their stores and all of that?

Gabriel: Yeah, definitely the development skill helps a lot, especially with troubleshooting. So, sometimes we’ll need to go a bit further to understand an issue like checking the database, and even understanding an error log. This tech trace, and understanding where the specific issue is coming from. So, that background really helps.

And in terms of scope, the custom code, custom development is not included in our scope. But related to what we were talking earlier about the happiness thing, we always try to at least point our user towards the right direction. So, “Hey, I can’t help you with the custom code, but here’s a page that I found that has some instructions that maybe can get you started.” Or, we do have some code snippets ready in our documentation, so we may change it a little bit to help the customer in the very first stage, and that’s as far as we can go. And if you were talking about CSS, we can provide some basic CSS to customize simple things colors and positions and things like that. And obviously, knowing code is really helpful in those situations.

Ronald: Yeah. And what about your crystal ball? Because sometimes I’ve noticed people have one sentence where they describe their problem, and you’re supposed to know what the solution is just like that. I suppose there’s nothing unique, that also happens at GoDaddy and SkyVerge.

Gabriel: I think it’s, that comes from the fact that we deal with problems a lot. So it’s more of a hunch, honestly. Sometimes, yeah, I know the feeling, “Hey, how do you know that? The person didn’t even give more information.” But yeah, that’s something that you start noticing, that looks kind of familiar to something you worked before. So that’s, “Hey, I have a hunch that this might be the case here,” and you go for it. Sometimes you are right, sometimes you’re not, but that’s how it is.

Ronald: Yeah. But that makes you such a valuable asset to the WooCommerce ecosystem. Because you see so much, you see and read so many different issues. And as you build up that knowledge and experience, you can pinpoint people very quickly to the right direction. And I think that’s something that we shouldn’t take for granted how big of a role the Happiness Engineers in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem play a part in that.

Giving the right advice

Ronald: And also what you said earlier about, if you do find a bug, if you find an issue, you can play that straight back to the developer and say, “Hey, maybe we need to make this happen.” Or between the third party developers, it’s such a fragile ecosystem, yet we all make it work because we know how quickly it can go wrong, but also how quickly we can put things right, because it’s so well connected in this small world. How do you feel about that sort of responsibility, of giving the right advice, but also middle of the night you might think, “Oh, I’m not quite sure,” or, “What if?”

Gabriel: Well, I think we do pay a lot of attention on the information we are giving to the user. It’s totally okay, you know what I mentioned earlier about being honest, being upfront. If you’re not sure we would just say, “Hey, I don’t know that off the top of my head, could you give me a bit more time so I can investigate and get you the right answer?” So, that’s totally fine. And we prefer to do that instead of giving incorrect information. We have a lot of different criteria to evaluate our interactions, and giving the right information is one of them, so we do pay attention to that.

And I think about what you mentioned earlier, the fact that we do know a lot of stuff, and that helps our users that might not know that information. I think that’s one of the most satisfying aspects of our job, at least for me. It’s so satisfying when someone say, “Hey, thank you so much. You helped me a lot,” and you know that person maybe was struggling with a certain issue, or trying to do something for a week or two. And then when you are talking with them and you see that you were able to help them achieve something, that’s so satisfying. That’s what gets me up every morning.

Communication when you are working globally

Ronald: Yeah. Just a bit more on the communication. I know it’s a big thing, Automattic’s all over the world. You live in Brazil, so how does that work for you communicating with team members who might be on the other side of the world? And do you find that difficult to maybe potentially wait 24 hours to get an answer?

Gabriel: It’s not difficult at all. I think one of the main aspects of a distributed environment like we have at Automatic, is knowing how to communicate asynchronously. And that’s something we get very used to very quick, so we do have specific tools for specific types of communication. So, if it’s going to be a long discussion that may not need input right away, we’ll probably post in our P2 and then people will comment, and that’s where we’ll concentrate our discussion.

If it’s something, if we are in a different time zone but not that different, we can ping that person, send a direct message, and the reply will come in a few hours later, so that’s fine. But we find situations where we do need to have a conversation in real time, so we might as well just schedule a conversation. So for example, my HR handler lives in India, so across the globe almost. So if I need to talk to her, I’ll just schedule a meeting and we’ll try to find the best way for both of us, probably a time that is not late in the night for either of us, and then we’ll make it happen.

But it’s very rare, because this async communication really works well. Surprisingly. It might sound for people that are not used to a distributed environment, that it can be hard. But actually it’s even better in my opinion, after you get used to it. Because instead of getting distracted the entire day with texts on your phone, or emails, or calls or et cetera, you just put the information there. And when the person is ready, they will reply to you, and it flows very naturally, honestly.

Ronald: Yeah. There’s a lot of things you can actually learn from that, for everybody, whether you are a developer or work as part of an agency. To have very clear rules on how you communicate with each other, with customers and make time for that, but also have focus time. It works very well.

Getting a chance to work on other pieces of Automattic

Marcus: The folks at home, or in their cars or wherever they are, can’t see that you are wearing a Tumblr shirt. So I just wanted to ask if you have had a chance, or you think you’ll get a chance to peek into some of the other automatic products and either help out in the happiness side there? Or I know that the communication is very open, and you have access to a lot of the different pieces. Do you get a chance to see in there, or help out, or think you might do that in the future?

Gabriel: Yeah, sure. I am a Tumblr user myself. We start our trial before joining Automattic at WordPress.com, so we do know a thing or two about that product as well, which is our hosted platform for WordPress. What else? We have so many products that we can easily lose track of, but I think I tried most of them, honestly. If not, if I’m not a regular user, at least I tried that at some point. So yeah, my test site for example ran on Pressable, which is a hosting platform we acquired some time ago, for example. So, we do use our products regularly.

Marcus: Do you think that you’ll get to maybe support some of them? Do you have rotations where you’ll get a chance to jump from product to product, and just see what the experience is like supporting those?

Gabriel: Definitely, yeah. Once a year, at least we are asked to do a rotation in another division. So that helps, of course, you expand your knowledge and you acquire different skill sets by working on different products. And that can be applied within WooCommerce as well. So, I’ve seen colleagues be participating in rotations in sales, for example, or even in Pressable that I just mentioned, the hosting platform. And it’s a good way to acquire different, diverse skill sets that can help you maybe look at your day to day work with different eyes, if that makes sense.

Marcus: Yeah. WooCommerce being a commerce platform, is going to have a different audience, different demographic than maybe something like Tumblr, or Jetpack or any of those.

Ronald: It’s also two way system, where you learn but also share with your new temporary team, or wherever you do your support rotation.

Gabriel: Right, yeah. My team specifically receives a lot of people doing rotations in support, so it’s very nice to welcome them and help them. And they are always very thankful, and they mention how the rotation helped them, and how it was nice to be in direct contact with the users and so on. And fun fact, everyone that joins Automatic has to do a rotation in support, regardless of the area that you’re joining. So, that’s how we value the rotation, and it being part of another department. But the fact that the people in Automattic are always joined by doing, I don’t know if it’s a one week or two week rotation, but in support, the fact that they need to do that is because that’s where we are in contact with our customers. That’s where we are really seeing how our products are used, and that is definitely, definitely a very valuable knowledge to have, regardless of the area you work at, like marketing, product development or even development itself. I think it’s so important.

Ronald: Yeah. Every company should really have this where you are in touch with the customer. They are your customer, understand them. Absolutely, yeah.

Gabriel: You can easily forget about your customer in your day to day work. I mean, you’re so focused on a delivery, and specific project and so on, and you forget who you are working for at the end of the day, who you are delivering that to. So, it’s always nice to be in contact with the customer and remember what they need, why they’re using your product in the first place. So, that makes total sense to me.

Ronald: Yeah. It’s so interesting to speak to you, because I don’t think we’ve had a Happiness Engineer on for quite some time, at least I’ve not interviewed anybody. So it’s really nice to hear from your side, of how you bring the knowledge and information to the ecosystem, but also internally how you communicate with each other, and keep learning, and changing teams, and teaching and learning. It’s a machine that we might all take for granted as a WooCommerce user, but actually there’s so much thought, there’s so much energy that goes into it. And passionate as well. Listening to you, how passionate you are about the product and WooCommerce itself, it’s really phenomenal. We’re going to wrap it up here. Thank you so very much, Gabriel, for your time. If people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

Gabriel: The best way is my LinkedIn, which is linkedin.com/in/gabrielbonifacio. B-O-N-I-F-A-C-I-O.

Marcus: Yeah. Thanks so much, Gabriel, for being on. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and get to peek behind the curtain once again, into the WooCommerce and Automattic world. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Gabriel: The pleasure was mine. Thank you again for inviting me, and have a good one.