Our unofficial goal of empowering users to build their own sites fits with our mission to democratize the web. After all, if we want everyone to have a voice on the internet, it helps if they know how to build themselves a metaphoric megaphone for said voice.

Ultimately, I think we all believe in the idea of teaching our users to fish.

At the same time, there’s a fine line between 1) teaching someone to fish, and 2) throwing a rod and bucket of live bait at them and going, “Here, have at it.”

It’s easy to teach someone and be dismissive. It’s not so easy to teach someone and be supportive.

That’s why we have to be conscious of how we teach during live chat. We have a wealth of support documentation, and when chat gets busy, it’s easy to answer user questions by giving them links.

But is that going to engineer happiness?

It absolutely can. It just depends on how we present these links.

When we send users links to support pages, here are the three main hesitations they will likely experience:

1. They feel as though we’re blowing them off.
2. They are afraid we’ll disappear on them if they click away.
3. They are overwhelmed or confused by the support page.

In order to use support pages during live chat and still engineer happiness, we need to make sure we don’t leave the user with any of these feelings. As such, over the next three posts (in order to keep everything in bite-size pieces), I’ll go over some techniques we can use to address these concerns.

In this way, we can use support pages to increase our chat efficiency, but still leave the user feeling that we helped them.

Stay tuned!

PS: Some of you may recognize the information here as being adapted from my Productive Live Chatting Learnup.

#building-rapport, #teaching-fishing, #tips-language