Chris "fool" McCraw's SupportFolio

I like to help. Here, I demonstrate how I like to help, and some of the results it can bring.

Helping organizations grow sustainable and effective Support organizations

Got a problem? Helping customers is my "why", but providing good customer service goes far deeper than just answering customer questions.

Starting and scaling a Support team in a growing company on a budget is a challenge, but we can build a good roadmap for it! I love helping companies start on and build that path. I am available to present and consult for companies of any size and any resource level.

Check out some points this work will touch on, as well as examples of writings and presentations on related topics.

Presentations and related writings

I like to speak on the topic of Support at conferences. I also occasionally write technical documentation and blog posts for my company. I've catalogued some of this work here.

I believe strongly in mentorship as a teaching tool. It can be challenging to apply equitably and usefully. This workflow I created was adopted by the rest of my team and I've used similar workflows at 3 companies now! I wrote up some best practices around peer reviews in this article: The art of constructive peer reviews.

I've developed or led many initiatives to improve team and company workflows, and wrote up details. Here are some examples:

How Support can be an effective liaison to other teams within the company.
Representing the customer point of view to other teams like Development, Ops, Security, Product Management, and Sales. I've written up some guidelines for gentle but effective bug escalation and I gave a talk on this general pattern in 2016: Working Across the Company.
Team growth - I presented a DIY philosophy that costs $0 and creates new leaders and growth opportunities for your team: Growing your Team: A Garden Philosophy.
Best practices for answering tickets (within limited time).
Compassion for customers: I always strive to present as a trusted advisor, rather than a technician or an employee. This often involves a frank admission of the limitations of the platform, but regardless I strive to make the customer feel like part of a community on a shared journey, rather than like someone we're just using for their money. In this vein my talk on giving good demos has some useful thoughts.

Some demonstrations of my customer-facing work and customer reactions

In my customers' words

Sometimes people bother to fill out those "was this support interaction useful?" surveys after a support contact/case is completed; here are a few choice excerpts.

In my own words

Some of my better responses to customer questions, in context, from a community forum I helped out in while working at New Relic, and again in my current role at Netlify.

And Then...

While I haven't written any public posts on these topics, I believe they are key to an effictive, holistic Support experience:

Providing internal support - helping new hires inside and outside of Support find information and understand existing organizational structure and processes. Part of this work is building maintainable internal knowledge bases that are useful to peers and colleagues beyond the Support team.
Compassion for peers: I help onboard every new tech support employee in companies I work at - and often most developers too! With training and/or pairing, I cushion their landing at a new place with a dizzying array of technologies and help them become effective quickly and build relationships across the company at the same time.