In today’s speaker interview, meet Matt Cromwell, head of Support and Community Outreach at WordImpress.com.
Matt is the author of many free WordPress plugins, a popular blogger at his website (mattcromwell.com), an admin of the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, co-organizer of the San Diego WordPress Meetup, and a WordCamp speaker and frequent attender.
What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?
People really should know that I’m deathly allergic to green peas — like go to hospital kind of allergic. So throwing tomatos during the presentation is fine — I get that, but throwing green peas is like throwing knives at me. Resist the urge to throw peas… PLEASE!!
As an organizer, speaker, and attendee or WordCamps, you’ve certainly seen a little bit of everything WordCamp. What’s your favorite thing about these events?
My favorite part of WordCamps is the certainty that you’ll make new fast friends. WordCamps are big family reunions, while still totally accessible for the uninitiated. Folks really want to connect with those they already know well, but are simultaneously really receptive to new faces.
But this brings up another thing people really should know. It’s some sort of running joke to say I’m a WordCamp organizer. I’m NOT. I’ve never organized a WordCamp. Bless your hearts all you WordCamp organizers. You’re amazing folks, but that’s one part of WP Community I don’t have plans to join.
What are the key symptoms a support team should look for that would suggest the team is struggling to scale?
Churn. If you’re losing your front-end support folks regularly then they’re probably overworked and unhappy and not feeling like they have a future in your company. Secondly, unhappy customers. Thirdly, sagging sales. When Support suffers everything else follows suit. Support is the glue of your organization and if the glue cracks, things start to fall apart quickly
Tell us a little more about WordImpress! What are you all about and how’d you get involved?
Devin Walker is the founder of WordImpress. He started it in order to have an umbrella to put his premium plugins under as a side-job to his thriving freelance work. At one point he wanted to level up WordImpress, so he reached out to me to join as a partner. Together, with our Business partner Jason Knill, we’ve seen we’ve seen the existing WordImpress plugins grow leaps and bounds, and we rolled out our pride and joy: The Give Donation plugin. It’s seriously an absolute pleasure to work on that plugin, to support these customers and to see a real international community growing up around the project. We love it.
What’s one small thing support teams can start doing today to provide better support?
Small support teams (like my own) have to start collecting data on their support. You can’t understand the effectiveness of your support team without data, and you can’t know the importance of when to hire new folks without data. So if you are providing support on a system that doesn’t make tracking your support data easy — find a new system, today.
Matt will be presenting on Scaling Your WordPress Support for Growth at WordCamp Los Angeles on Sunday, September 11 at 2:10pm in Club Alabam and stick around for the Afternoon Business Panel (Moderated by Steve Zehngut) with Matt, Libby Barker, and Alex Vasquez in the same room at 3:30pm.