Attending conferences often feels like you’re being passed through a series of timeshare presentations. Everyone either is selling a solution to a problem you haven’t even told them you have, or one they’ve buzz-worded up enough that you aren’t sure what they do. Support Driven Expo is not like that. Having just attended for my second year, it’s obvious that SDExpo is a conference about improving you as a customer-facing professional, not about selling your business card to anyone who owns a branded, marketing backdrop.

SDExpo offers an opportunity for you to listen to others who have solved problems that you actually have. Sure, it isn’t always earth-shattering. Most problems aren’t. It’s just common sense that we are more likely to need a bandaid than a full-body cast. Whether it is learning a simple, but unique framework to conquer rumours and false narratives in your team, or hearing best practices for Incident Management from the leaders at StatusPage themselves, each 20 minute session (or 45 minute workshop) contains, by design, a few small nuggets of gold to take back to your organization. Those nuggets will more than pay for the registration fee, which unbelievably is only a quarter of some other conferences in the same space!

People Make the Experience

The people, however, are the real highlight of the conference. Putting together a group of enthusiasts who inherently have a passion for the same topics, who are also used to talking to strangers every day of their lives, is a recipe for incredible conversations, making new friends, and having some laughs over the shared war-stories found within a customer-facing role. Given this is an online community, matching faces to names to blurry avatars can be part of the fun! Coming together allows for that moment of realization where that essentially anonymous person who helped you overcome the problem you posted on Slack is now standing in front of you, decidedly less anonymous. A hearty handshake or gracious hug expresses the gratitude that a thumbs-up emoji cannot do justice.

My Participation

I was lucky enough to be given a speaking slot. It was the first time presenting publically my thoughts on how I think those in SaaS, mobile apps, and IoT companies can be better at support. We are so used to speaking about channels as “how we support customers” we forget to ask if our customers are near our channels. Channels are our tools which need to be deployed in the right context to assist our customers. Especially in smart/connected products, why aren’t we using our data to both guide our customers and proactively notifying them that they may not be successful? We have the data to do so, so why make them contact us to tell us what we should already know? There were around 40 people in the room, my jokes got courteous laughs (thanks to those who did that) and I hope my passion for improving customer experience came through.

From there I spent an insightful hour discussing gaining buy-in from management in the HelpScout Conversation Corner where about 20 people showed up for a round table discussion on a very common problem of asking for something that has a time or money cost from people who do not have time or money to give. The ideas bounced off the walls as everyone had a chance to share their experiences or express their frustrations.

And finally I was off to join some incredible leaders on the Support Ninja panel on AI and how it will impact customer service. The four of us were moderated by their COO and contemplated, agreed, and disagreed on ideas guided by excellent audience questions. The curiosity and engagement was clear and the topic could not have been more relevant. AI is coming to customer service. We will be the leaders who get to define the experience it creates.

See You Next Year

As the expo curtain closed on Friday night, some got on airplanes, some sang karaoke, and some crashed from exhaustion, but I am willing to bet, all took away something new: An idea, a motivation, a framework, a friend, a mentor, or all of the above.  Thank you to the Support Driven team for an excellent event! I cannot wait to join next year and wish an awesome time to those going to the next event in Boston. I cannot join you, but I will be waiting patiently for the ideas to flow out from that session too!