A dozen Happiness Engineers, a dozen products
The “Jetpack Happiness” team name is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, our team of a dozen-ish Happiness Engineers support not only Jetpack, but a dozen-ish other products as well! We’re spread across seven different countries and even more timezones, and we each arrived at Automattic with varying backgrounds, including biology academia, psychology, the health insurance industry, and managing SEO for a startup.
Each workday comes with a lot of necessary context-switching. A typical day might start by troubleshooting a site with missing Jetpack stats after the customer changed their URL. The next customer has a charge they don’t recognize and wants to know what they’re paying us for. Then, a backup won’t complete, followed by Sensei LMS course progress that isn’t saving for a student. An enterprise Crowdsignal customer has questions about repeat engagement in the Applause Block, and a Jetpack Boost customer’s site layout changed in a way they didn’t expect. And this is only a small slice of a Jetpack Happiness Engineer’s day.
Our context-switching also goes beyond recalling product knowledge to answer customer tickets. Daily, we’re also diagnosing potential product issues that underlie customer reports, reproducing them on test sites, passing them to our engineers for fixes and improvements, and improving our public documentation. The way we work digs into not only what a customer wants, but what they actually need. We’re also committed to determining why they needed to contact us in the first place, and how we can prevent the issue from occurring for someone else. So it isn’t just the product that changes from ticket to ticket. The vibe we bring to an interaction changes, too–a customer questioning an unfamiliar charge might need reassurance and transparency, while someone whose site is down might need immediate action and clear expectations.
Context switching has a cost
Context switching is defined as the shift of attention from one task to another. The cognitive cost of switching between tasks is well studied in psychology; each time you move from one type of task to another, your brain has to let go of the context you used for the first task, then load information for the second. When you move to a new task, the switch can make you a bit slower and even a little more error-prone than you would be if you’d stayed on one thing. This cost also compounds throughout the day, contributing to increased mental fatigue. Most people reading this will know exactly what I mean.
So, how do support professionals deal with the cost of constant context switching? Standard advice typically involves significantly reducing it by batching similar sorts of support requests, or taking mini breaks as a “hard reset” between particularly challenging interactions. But for a team of our tiny size supporting a suite of products as diverse as ours, these sorts of strategies aren’t always feasible.
If context-switching has a cost, then empathy is the discount
Since we can’t always reduce the need to context-switch, we can reduce the cognitive cost by pairing it with what might seem like an unlikely partner: empathy.
Despite the vast variety of issues we see each day (combined with the diverse backgrounds, cultures, and moods of the customers who contact us), we are fundamentally people helping people. Empathy is uniquely human, and it can be both an anchor and an equalizer.
As an anchor, it gives us a constant point to return to in every interaction. When we keep empathy as our constant–this person needs something, and I am going to figure out the best way to give it to them–then we only have to “reload” product and operational knowledge when we switch to a new task, rather than starting from scratch.
As an equalizer, our ability to empathize isn’t rooted in our technical aptitude, or the different ways we might approach troubleshooting. Empathy is the core, universal thing that all Happiness Engineers bring to every interaction. Empathy is the one part of this job that doesn’t depend on which product we’re supporting, so it’s the thing we can do just as well on an issue we’ve mastered as on one we’re seeing for the first time.
We need to have empathy for ourselves, too
We also have to turn this empathy inward, and toward our colleagues, too.
All of us are in this role because we want to help people, and there are occasional situations where we simply can’t. Some tickets are heavy, too–an angry customer, a site that’s down and there’s nothing we can do to help, or we’re faced with supporting a site with emotional subject matter. We also face inevitable knowledge-gaps (I’ve personally encountered something new nearly every day of my 12+ years tenure at Automattic!), and it’s very easy to let frustration creep in, or let it chip away at our confidence. Every bit of frustration or self-doubt we carry forward is weight we take into the next interaction, and it makes the necessary context switch cost more. Being gentle with ourselves, and trusting our colleagues to be gentle with us when we need to ask for help is how we start the next round of problem-solving with fresh eyes.
Our products will keep changing, the problems will keep changing, and we’ll keep learning as we go. But empathy–for the customer, for each other, and for ourselves–is a reliable constant in our work toward engineering Happiness.
Further Reading
Monsell, S. (2003) Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 7(3), 134-140
American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Multitasking: Switching costs.
Lehnert, L. and Kuehnl, C. (2024) Empathy at the heart of customer experience: A holistic framework for understanding and enhancing consumer empathy through the lens of customer experience. Psychology & Marketing. 42(2), 332-358
Photo credits – Mikhail Nilov
Leave a Reply