tl;dr: Take a look at our new Github support repo!

Hi 👋 I’m Rosie, and I joined Pieces in December to lead various customer-centric initiatives. Like all customer officers, I care deeply about our users’ continuing success as they use Pieces in their everyday workflow, and my role centers around solving users’ problems and anticipating their needs as the company (and user base) grows. So where did I start with this?

Customer support, of course! Because what is more important for customer retention and satisfaction than getting the help they need when they run into a problem?

In my first couple of weeks with Pieces, I observed the team in their everyday workflow. I saw deep customer empathy and an extreme attention to detail that combined to create a pretty excellent customer service experience. Every time the team received a support ticket or got feedback from somewhere, someone jumped into it with a direct, personal email and an offer to hop on a call to fix it.

But they were spending a ton of time manually triaging and discussing issues and feedback coming from all sorts of places, and they were each carrying a huge mental load trying to manage it all.

To fix this process, we considered two foundational aspects of Pieces for Developers:

1. Pieces as a product strives to make a team of developers faster and more effective at their jobs.
2. Pieces is community driven, a developer tool built by developers. We are serious about user feedback, we love our discord community, and our open source initiative is growing every day. We love developing out in public.

And we came to the natural conclusion of community-driven support. Why shouldn’t our users be a part of our company processes?

Enter our public Github support repo.

A developer-focused support hub for a developer-focused user base

When you run into a problem with Pieces, you can go search our issues and see if someone else has experienced it as well. If you’re the lucky finder of a new bug or problem, you can post a new issue and the Pieces team will interact with you right there to solve your problem. And now you’ve helped the next person who has a similar issue. And we have high hopes that our community will get in the spirit and start commenting on other peoples’ issues as well with their own insight on how to resolve it.

And this repo isn’t just for bugs and problems - we have big plans for our Github Discussions page as well. Here you will be able to post ideas and feature requests, show off something you’ve done lately with Pieces, hear about releases and other announcements from us, and generally just engage with the Pieces team and the Pieces community itself.

We want our Github support repo to be where you can become a part of the Pieces story, just by using a tool that you use every day as a developer.

Personalized support when you need it.

Don’t worry - we are still always available for 1:1 customer service and support. That will never go away. When you need private assistance or if you are not comfortable with Github, just submit a support ticket like always and we’ll get right back to you. We’ve added a new tool and several new processes to make this a better experience for both our users and the Pieces team, reducing mental load across the board and ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. I came from working with large companies and I’ve seen what the volume of support tickets can be, so everything we are doing keeps an eye towards scaling for when Pieces is in fact a big company serving big enterprises as well as millions of individual users.

You may be thinking wow, that is a big process update that was set up and into motion within one month of working, and you’re right - but it is due to this team and their extreme willingness to do what it takes to become more mature and serve their customers better. That’s the spirit of the Pieces team, and I am so grateful to be a part of it.

So please - go check it out. Post a discussion topic, upvote an issue. We can’t wait to see it.

And what’s next for me? For a little while: iterating and refining this entire process. Promoting and watching the Github repo and making sure it’s effective for everyone. Observing the Pieces team and making sure that mental load reduction is actually happening. And once I’m satisfied that we are off and running with this new process, it’ll be time to work on the next big initiative for ensuring happy users. I have several on the roadmap - but what do you think should come first?