If you’re reading this, it sounds like you may be considering applying to be a Happiness Engineer at Automattic! That’s fantastic. My one regret with this job is that I didn’t do it sooner!
You may be wondering what a day in the life is like so I wanted to walk through a typical Tuesday is like for me. This isn’t the same schedule that everyone has, but hopefully, it’ll give you an idea of what can happen.
One quick note, our schedules are flexible, but not really spontaneous. In order to ensure that we have coverage for our customers, we set in a scheduling tool when we are available for work about two to three weeks out.
My Tuesday starts out early with getting my three boys ready for school. So I’m up and productive for a couple of hours making lunches, getting clothes ready, and surviving carpool before I start to work.
Work officially starts at 8:30 for me today. I log into Slack and say hello to my teammates. We’re based in North America spread from Nova Scotia to Oregon. There’s always at least one teammate around when I get started.
The first order of business is to catch up on what’s happened overnight. Things change all the time around here so I look through posts on our internal blogs (P2s) and see what’s happening on Slack. I use Todoist to keep track of what I have to do so I update my list of things to work on while catching up.
My first support shift of the day is at 9 am and it’s a two-hour ticket block. During this time I log into ZenDesk and see if there are any follow-ups from customers I’ve interacted with. Since I’m already aware of what’s happening in their situations, I answer these first. Once those are cleared out, I push the “play” button on our ZenDesk queue and the system delivers tickets to me.
These can be almost anything. Customers having trouble setting up shipping zones for their store. They may be unable to log into their accounts. Others have pre-sale questions where they’re trying to find the right combination of extensions (plugins) to do a certain task on their site.
Next up is our team meeting. This happens over Zoom since we’re spread all over. We’ll spend some time chatting about what’s going on with us, personally and professionally. A few of us take turns leading the meeting. We’ll go over any important developments and our team leader will let us know about anything else that’s happening.
After that, I grab a quick bite of lunch. I typically eat by my laptop so I can keep working. This year I started working a four, ten hours per day workweek. That gives me every Wednesday off, but it does make for a bit longer workdays so I skip a more formal lunch to keep the day moving.
When 1 pm rolls around, I jump onto live chat. This is the primary way we support our customers. For the next couple of hours, I’ll chat with two or three customers at a time. It goes by really quickly because it’s so busy!
Once chat has wrapped up, I’ll make myself some coffee and let my brain recover just a bit. If I need to follow-up with anyone I chatted with, I’ll get those tickets started too. Sometimes issues brought up in chat are just a bit too much to cover in a chat. When that happens we’ll move the conversation over to an email thread so we can focus on it more closely.
The next two hours are for “escalated” tickets. I’m part of a guild that helps out with particularly troublesome issues our customers run into. I’ll spend this shift really digging into one or two issues and try to get these issues resolved for our customers.
At the end of my day, I’ll check in ZenDesk again to see if there have been any replies from customers I’ve already helped. I’ll also make a last check through Slack to see if there’s anything I’ve missed.
I’m an avid Pokemon Go player, so I’ll check the Slack channel for that to see if anything’s happening. We have lots of “water cooler” channels for all kinds of interests and hobbies. Just because your co-workers aren’t at the next desk doesn’t mean social interaction is missing. Hanging out with co-workers is important and we make space for that too.
My work day comes to an end at about 6:30 pm. One of the things I like most about this job is work stays at work. I’m not getting pulled back in to answer questions or do other tasks. When I’m away from keyboard, I’m really away.
So that’s what life is like for me as a WooCommerce Happiness Engineer here in late 2020. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments. What are you waiting for? Go on and apply!
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