Something BIG is happening.
We’re seeing new communities grow around the world of customer service and support: new people, speaking a new language.
We’re seeing customer support pros work alongside product managers, marketers and engineers to change the way their companies build relationships with their customers.
We’re seeing them talk about customer onboarding, retention, and taking ownership of better communication processes to give their customers better experiences.
The field of customer service is not evolving, it’s being actively redefined by the people on the frontlines.
Lucky for us, they’re also super social.
Here’s our shortlist of customer support pros who hold key roles in customer support at their companies by day, and spend their free time engaging in some of the best conversations on #custserv in the Twitterverse and beyond.
Get plugged into the #custserv chatter
Chase Clemons (@chaseclemons) // Basecamp
Chase is part of the 37signals support team, the people behind Basecamp. He also runs the weekly SupportOps.co podcast, a weekly talk show featuring a handpicked crew of support pros.
Matthew Patterson (@mrpatto) // Campaign Monitor
Matt heads up support at Campaign Monitor and runs a blog, Tracky Dacks about web-based customer service.
Janna Bastow (@simplybastow) // ProdPad
Janna is founder of ProdPad, a tool that helps teams capture ideas and put them on their product roadmap. You’ll find her tweeting about customer feedback and product management and writing at Mind The Product.
Jeff Vincent // (@jeffvincent) // Wistia
Jeff leads an impressive team at Wistia and in his free time, blogs about customer experience, productivity and the helpful things he’s learning along the way.
Ali Rayl (@alirayl) // Slack
Ali leads the support team at Slack, no small feat for a product that grew exponentially virtually overnight. Seriously, check out this crazy growth chart.
Mercer Smith-Looper (@mercenator) // Wistia
Mercer is part of a small but spunky customer success team at Wistia and was recently one of our favorite lady presenters at Userconf.
Hoon Park (@hoonpark) // Return Path
With 10 years of customer support under his belt, Hoon brings big picture perspective to the field. Most recently, he shared his experience implementing a culture of work transparency at Return Path.
Sarah Hatter (@sh) // CoSupport
Sarah is behind the best customer support guide we can think of, The Customer Service Handbook. She also runs Userconf, the only conference of its kind for customer support people.
Ben McCormack (@bmccormack) // Trello
Ben works on customer support at everyone’s favorite project management/task/collaboration/anything-you-want-it-to-be board, Trello. We found him recently talking about conducting user interviews over at SupportDriven.
Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy) // SixteenVentures
Lincoln regularly publishes long, juicy and in-depth customer relationship building strategies and tactics over at SixteenVentures. If you work in a SaaS product company, the chances are you’ve been here before.
Adam Herscher (@adamjh) // Has Metrics
Adam is heads down working on his startup, HasMetrics. Until then, he’s always up for chatting about customer success, metrics and product development.
Bryce Adams (@bryceadams) // WooThemes
Bryce is a developer at WooThemes, but spending three months on a customer service rotation made quite an impression on him.
Andrew Spittle (@andrewspittle) // Automattic
Andrew is a happiness engineer at Automattic who delivers great customer service, sometimes while he’s giving it.
Lou Sturm (@loutangclan) // Unbounce
Lou is a customer success manager and resident smiley face at Unbounce. She also runs all those popular demos at Unbounce.
Dennis Hong (@DennisHHong) // Automattic
Dennis supports customers at Automattic and really knows his way around the belligerent ones. He loves a good bibliography.
Robert Kranzke (@robertkranzke) // Cosupport
Robert has strong feelings about being too nice to customers.
Chase Livingston (@ChaseLivingston) // Automattic
Chase is not only in charge of keeping customers happy at Automattic, he is a regular guest on the SupportOps podcast.
Evan Hamilton (@EvanHamilton) // Zozi
Evan manages customer loyalty at Zozi, and hosts the monthly Community Manager Breakfast in San Francisco. Prior to Zozi, Evan was Head of Community at UserVoice, among other things, preaching the gospel of good customer development.
Ryan Engley (@Ryan_Engley) // Unbounce
Ryan heads up customer success at Unbounce, and also co-stars on our favorite webinar about webinars.
Greg Meyer (@grmeyer) // Pro.com
Greg helps customers at Pro.com, but also writes regularly about customer success, marketing and community on his blog, Information Maven.
Ros Hodgekiss (@yarrcat) // Campaign Monitor
Ros is community manager at Campaign Monitor, where she works at the intersection of content and relationship building with a massive customer base.
Diana Potter (@drpotter) // Customer.io
Diana helps customers at Customer.io, but also plenty into email marketing at Customer.io. You can listen to her talking about what it’s like to hire new customer support reps here.
Carolyn Kopprasch (@carokopp) // Buffer
Carolyn leads the customer happiness team at Buffer, where among other things, she talks about why Buffer doesn’t believe in scaling customer support.
Or be lazy and follow these Twitter lists:
Who else should we be following? Let us know in the comments.
