This post is part of The Supportive, Mathew Patterson’s column for customer service professionals. Learn what The Supportive is, or browse through all of the posts from this series.
Your work matters. You matter. Delivering high-quality online customer service day after day is skilled, challenging work. Sometimes people think of support as an “entry level” role, something to be moved through or skipped over, but you know how wrong they are. So do we.
That’s why we build customer service software and why we invest in our main blog, where we share lots of useful, practical information.
But most of the Help Scout blog is intended for many different audiences. Customer service professionals, yes, but also for founders in need of practical help and the people who just Googled “best help desk.” It is definitely for you, but not only for you.
“The Supportive,” this new column, is different. Here it’s just you and me, the people who are deeply and maybe a bit weirdly into online support. You might be on the front line, you might be a director or an executive, but in your heart you are all about the value of service.
So don’t visit The Supportive to learn how to make a business case for hiring, find a quality assurance rubric, or walk through a support hiring process. This is a place for a different type of content:
Quick bites of distilled knowledge, informed predictions, and direct answers to your questions.
Videos you will love that are deeply confusing to the non-support people you know.
Books you should read, jobs you might be interested in, occasional rants, and sometimes just a message to make your day better.
The sorts of things you’d talk about when you’re in a room with other online service folks, but without having to get on a plane or drink terrible conference coffee.
I hope you’ll join in, and I hope you’ll let me know what you want to see here.