We have all faced it at some point in time. If you are a developer, you might have looked for the path of least resistance to get your project up and running. But on the other side, customers are frustrated when a user interface doesn’t turn out to be intuitive enough, or after sales support is falling short of promises.

The fact is that developers wouldn’t exist without customers! We need to empathize deeply with customers, and Karen Arnold is going to help us deal with precisely that subject.

Karen’s talk is titled “Great Support Matters: Bridging the Gap between Developers and Customers”.

Developing software without giving support to customers is like building a house without a foundation. So you have created a plugin or a theme for WordPress. Awesome! It doesn’t stop there.

Karen will give us simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing our time or effort.

Karen leads the Happiness Engineer Hiring team at Automattic, the team responsible for hiring support staff for Automattic’s products. She has worked remotely for Automattic since 2012. Karen has spoken at a number of events including SupConfNY 2016, WordCamps in the United States, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, and various WordPress meetup events.

Prior to Automattic, Karen ran a business creating WordPress sites for small businesses. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States, with her husband and four children.