Chief Happiness Officer at Buffer (bufferapp.com). Remote worker. Knee surgery conversation enthusiast. I drink tea. Find me at @carokopp and carokoppblog@gmail.com.
This is a portion of a team-wide discussion happening within Buffer right now. It feels that we have a bit of a “pendulum” of the communication and relationship between the teams. On one end, there isn’t much freedom, and there’s a lot of structure . If an engineer wants to try something, or a customer development person wants to send a tweet out asking for feedback, s/he…
In 2014, I played with the idea of doing a few “30 day challenges.” Because my first one had felt pretty involved ( I hit 10,000 steps on my Jawbone Up each day for a month ), I chose a very easy next challenge, one that had nothing to do with physical activity! :) In the month of March, I read a book a little bit every day. That’s it. Pretty darn simple. I didn’t make any…
It started out innocently enough. A busy week of errands and a particularly fun weekend filled with dancing, and there it was. A 7 day “streak” of hitting my goal of taking 10,000 steps per day, according to my Jawbone Up. (The Buffer team + family members all get a Jawbone Up as a gift , and we share our steps and sleep stats with each other. I love this because I think it is an…
At Buffer and many other customer-centric startups, the product, marketing, and engineering teams all listen to customer questions and answer them directly . This has changed through the years as the needs and team have grown. In its current form, just about everyone in the company ends up hanging out with the Happiness Heroes for about a half day each month. It’s rad. I wanted to share a…
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I learned to tie my shoes. It came up because of a tweet from my friend Jeff. I thought of a study that I remembered from college; kids who were told that it’s hard to learn to tie shoes persisted longer than the ones who were told it was easy. Jeff’s point, of course, directly relates to customer service, which is where I spend a…
I recently got an email that asked this question, and it comes up a lot in the Support world. “I see you have a static FAQ, but why have you chosen not to have a searchable knowledge base or robust community forum for support questions?” I’d love to share why we chose not to scale support, and why we ask customers to email, tweet, or live-chat us each time instead. It’s…
Actually One of my favorite “happiness hacks” has been to attempt to remove the word “actually” from my vocabulary. This has been remarkably hard to do, and I still have to struggle not to let it past my lips or fingers. At Buffer , we have found that there is a small band of words that takes away from your message, and “actually” is their leader. It almost…
Anne Isabelle Ritchie coined a concept in the 1880s that we still use today. Modernized, it is: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The Buffer support team has been thinking about this concept a lot lately, as the conventional wisdom is that it’s *always* preferable to teach someone how to fish. However,…
Today, I gave the wrong answer to a customer. Well, let’s back up. I give the wrong answer all the time; I am often confused, mistaken, or not sure where to start. This is the nature of supporting a web app and 2 mobile apps with integrations into many third party apps. (Frankly, it is also the nature of supporting really smart customers. Quite often, the questions that come into the help…
Here’s a simple spreadsheet to help you set a budget based on a predictable income. –> Your job: Enter information in the yellow shaded cells. The spreadsheet will do the rest. Step 0: Open this spreadsheet. Step 1. Create a copy under “File." Click "File” and then “Make a Copy,” and keep “Also copy document collaborators” unchecked. Hint : Date your…
Recently, we at Buffer have been discussing the concept of “inbox guilt.” As we look for the third Happiness Hero, the volume of the inbox has gotten quite high. In fact, Alyssa and I had taken to working quite long hours, losing the usual patch of non-work hours in the evening and sacrificing the mental space necessary to wake up excited to start work every day. Alyssa actually…
In most industries, including the tech world, “support” is a piteous word. Posts like this one , while written in jest, enforce the stereotype that working in support essentially sucks. We are known for getting abused by ranting, angry customers. We can’t take a day off, because the emails never stop flowing in. We *must* just be doing this to get trained with the company, right?…