In my Support Operations role, I’ve had the chance to work with almost every department at Automattic, including Legal. But this post is about one of my favourite kinds of collaboration: partnering with the Marketing team on projects that, at first glance, might not seem like “Support work” at all.
Support is and should be an integral part of every project at your company and should be included in decision making.
The Trustpilot Project
One of the projects I partnered with Marketing on was around building brand and perception for WordPress.com, specifically on Trustpilot.
The goal was to improve our Trustpilot rating and we agreed that Support can contribute to it meaningfully. But as a Support Operations person, I was thinking about something else at the same time: how do we do this without adding more process overhead for our Support team? How do we avoid asking them to work from yet another tool? And how do we plan proactively for the work this would create, in terms of hours, headcount, and forecasting?
The answer was integration. I integrated Trustpilot directly into Zendesk, so that every new review, regardless of rating, automatically created a ticket that our team could act on. No tool-switching. No separate queue to monitor. The work came to them, in the system they were already in.
The rule was simple: everything gets a reply. A 5-star review. A 1-star review. Everything.
If you look at WordPress.com on Trustpilot today, you’ll see that today 99% of negative reviews are answered in under 24 minutes. That’s the workflow in action. And the rating went from 1.4 to 3.7(current).
The AskNicely Project
Around the same time, there was another project involving AskNicely which a tool to identify whether customers are promoters or detractors of the product.
The opportunity was obvious: if we could identify detractors early, Support could step in and try to turn that experience around. But again, the operations question had to come first and that is, how much can we contribute here without impacting our existing support queues? What does sustainable look like?
I built a second integration: AskNicely into Zendesk. Any time someone submitted a detractor-level rating, a ticket was automatically created and routed to our Onboarding team. The team would then reach out to set up a call not just to apologise for the experience but to do a full review: looking at their support history, their sites, their end-to-end experience and provide an elevated level of care designed to genuinely turn things around.
The goal was to convert detractors into promoters. And the way to do that wasn’t a generic response: it was real, focused human attention, routed efficiently through a system that made it scalable.
What This Is Really About
Both of these projects were owned by Marketing. I(Support) was a collaborator. But in both cases, the Support team’s involvement made the work better by making it more responsive, more human, more measurable, and more scalable.
What I’m most proud of, though, isn’t the integrations themselves. It’s the thinking behind them: bring the work to the team, don’t ask the team to go to the work. Keep the tools consistent. Forecast the impact before it hits. Build in a way that scales.
Support has something to contribute to everything at the company whether it’s Marketing initiatives, Engineering projects, Product launches, or Design decisions which is why it’s important that Support gets the seat at every table and is part of the decision making from very beginning. Another key aspect is figuring out how to make that contribution sustainable so that saying yes to cross-functional work doesn’t mean burning out your Support team or fragmenting their focus.
That’s the balance I’m always aim to strike. And these two projects are a good example of what it looks like when you get it right!
Sandeep Kaur 