July 15, 2015 — This session explores how you and your organisation can provide better WordPresss support by being more conscious of each support staffer’s role as a ‘trainer’ or ‘teacher’ and each user’s role as a ‘learner’.
While support personnel have been traditionally seen as ‘fixers’, and while many contemporary support outfits still focus on this aspect of the experience, WordPress support has always been about more than just matching problems with solutions.

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July 12, 2015 — Mika Epstein speaking on how to work with hosting companies.

July 9, 2015 — Got a product? Then you probably know the headaches of sales, onboarding, and customer support. In this panel, industry veterans share their top tips when it comes to sales, onboarding, and customer support. Bring your questions.

July 8, 2015 — This talk covers great strategies for supporting your WordPress product. Learn tips and tricks on handling and even reducing your support overhead based on tried and true business principles like 5s, poka-, and more. and discuss strategies for handling problem customers without alienating them and creating goodwill through customer interaction.

June 30, 2015 — This talk will introduce the different aspects of the WordPress project, the different teams on make.wordpress.org and will hopefully convince everyone that you don’t need to write a single line of code to be an active WordPress contributor.

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June 8, 2015 — How not to give appalling user support
Franz Vitulli
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/franzvitulli/how-not-to-give-appalling-user-support
The talk touchs on the benefits and challenges of a great user support and training. I’ll share the most common problems I encountered whilst dealing with support. It will also look at how I give the best support I can and the tools that enable me to do so.

WordPress for Good
Tom Greenwood
This lightning talk presents the history and motives for the project, showcase a few “good” WordPress sites and inspire others to use WordPress for their positive projects and submit them to the showcase.

Forging a Career with WordPress: the Possibilities
Rachel McCollin
In this interactive talk I’ll inspire you to think again about the career options open to you with WordPress, and bust some myths about the kind of person you need to be or the kind of background you need to have if you want to make a living from WordPress.

Smart tips and tricks for managing freelancers
Annabel Kaye
“Freelancer is the ‘new employment’. Most organisations use freelancers for some tasks but some even build an entire business model on using freelancers.
In this talk Annabel explores the status of freelancers, how labels can be deceiving and suggests ways to approach hiring freelancers that will protect your business from harm.

5 ways to get better customers and sack the low value ones
Michael Killen
This talk is about how even small ‘1 person working out of their bedrooms’ businesses can:
no more negotiating on price, stop feeling like a bedroom business and look like a professional service, stop low value customers even getting through to you, how to feel more competitive towards other businesses, the responses you need to give to difficult customers

April 23, 2015 — This presentation covers both industry standards and my own professional experience to help you create a web form that does exactly what you want… get people to click submit.

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March 20, 2015 — Many times when we develop something new, documentation is the last thing we think about. In this talk, Jeff Matson discussed techniques to write better documentation to improve user experience and decrease support tickets.

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February 12, 2015 — At what point answering questions about WordPress goes beyond the making conversation and becomes a driver for professional skills and reputation? Our proficiency at answering questions spans over our work, our ability to learn, and how we are perceived in community. Yet we are rarely purposeful in learning how to benefit from this skill and improve at it. We can do better than that — to evolve professionally and personally.

Presentation Slides »

November 20, 2014 — Every plugin or theme developer who’s done a lot of development has learned that developing the backend often takes more time than developing the front end. Thinking about how you make your backend look and what you name options can save many, many hours on support. We’ve found in research amongst our own users that default settings often don’t get changed. What does this mean? What to do with it?