“As a community, if we band together, we can achieve almost anything.”
With International Women’s Day right around the corner, on March 8th, we figured it was an excellent time to give credit to some of the amazing women in the customer support, success, and experience world.
With so many amazing women to choose from, it was pretty difficult, but here’s our list of the top 13 women that made the cut:
Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra might not be explicitly involved in support or success, but her books, including Badass: Making Users Awesome, have influenced a number of us in the industry. She’s consistently done an excellent job in influencing the industry with how we think of what software is and how to support it. Check out her writing or find her on her website which has her blog, her publications, links to videos of talks, and a whole page of pictures of ponies.
Natalie Keshlear
Natalie may not be immensely well-known in the speaking world nor be shouting her message from the rooftops, but that doesn’t make what she has to say any less valuable to know about. Reading through her Medium articles, one uncovers a great deal of emotional knowledge that helped make Basecamp, according to one colleague, what it is today in terms of management and emotional navigation.
Sarah Hatter
Sarah has done tons of amazing work for the modern support industry. From creating UserConf (now Elevate) and publishing The Customer Support Handbook, Sarah has done immense work in our space. Her conferences have made a community for people to get to know each other, and sparked the fire for other primarily online communities to flourish.
https://twitter.com/sh/status/1031219386139332608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Emily Triplett Lentz
Emily — originally from Basecamp and now at Help Scout — is an amazing writer and editor in the support community. Her fantastic blog posts for Help Scout help a whole userbase of support agents learn how to do support better, and her editing is, according to her colleagues, the very best.
https://twitter.com/emilytlentz/status/1054546228728356864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Sarah Betts
Sarah was effectively mentioned by almost every person that we talked to for this piece.
https://twitter.com/Sarahinapickle/status/1085982753986736128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Leah Knobler
Another Help Scout employee, Leah has a true eye and ear for excellent support. While she’s the Talent and Culture lead at Help Scout and isn’t directly involved in their support organization, she has shared knowledge on video, tips on using video for support, and how to communicate it that has helped many teams, remote or otherwise, do support better. She is truly inspiring. To check out more, here’s her twitter.
https://twitter.com/LEAHisKNOBLER/status/1081285829753032709?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Abby Armada
Abby leads the customer support team at Clubhouse and hosts the Support Driven podcast. She serves a unique perspective on the way support should be done and has years of experience in support or working with people.
https://twitter.com/mygiantrobot/status/1101717445331558405?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Sarah Chambers
Formerly the Director of Customer Support at Kayako, now the founder of Supported Content, it feels as though Sarah and her team keep many SaaS companies’ content afloat! Sarah has written tons of articles that can be found across the web. Her personal Medium account covers a number of things that range from learning to work remotely to understanding deeper emotions within yourself, while her LinkedIn sports useful shares to things written and produced by Supported Content.
https://twitter.com/sarahleeyoga/status/1078237938037768192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Alison Groves
Originally at Zapier, then Basecamp, and now part of Help Scout, Alison has amazing support work under her belt. Her documentation is unparalleled, the ebooks she worked on at Zapier are fantastic and, just in general, she’s an all-around good egg.
https://twitter.com/alisongroves/status/1101307369697480704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Andrea Badgley
Andrea is the Director of Operations at Support Driven but, before that, she worked as a support lead, and support engineer at Automattic. Andrea’s career blog on her website is one of the most useful pieces of reading that someone starting in support can find: it covers everything that she has done from beginning to end. So, it charts her journey from a support engineer to a team lead, on to the head of operations: pretty impressive. There are articles about leading a distributed team, putting on large events (and budgeting for donuts) and everything in between.
https://twitter.com/andreabadgley/status/1089650796491345920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Diana Potter
Diana has been working in the support game longer than most, and has unique insights and wide reach to prove it. Currently working at Qwilr and co-hosting the Support Driven podcast with Abby Armada, Diana keeps herself busy with writing about topics where her experience leads her: documentation, for example, is a favorite point of discussion.
https://twitter.com/drpotter/status/1101597378711154688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Lisa Hunt
Lisa is a customer success champion for Geckoboard that has recently started her own Patreon to continue producing and providing amazing meetups, podcasts, and writing for the support community. She also produced the Support Breakfast podcast with some of the other people on this list.
Though the podcast is not being recorded currently, hopefully Lisa’s Patreon will help and it will soon come back into existence. In the meantime, it remains an excellent resource to refer back to.
https://twitter.com/gentlethorns/status/1091229414766067712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Denise Twum
Denise Twum gave a talk a year ago about how to create your own job in support, and it inspired a slew of support people to discover what it was that sang to them most and got them most jazzed up for work. She’s worked in support, managed in support, and now she has a role that SmugMug created specifically for her: the Support Process Manager. She’s also deeply invested and involved in the Support Driven community, specifically the Leadership channel there.
Check her out on twitter for K-Pop facts, knitting, support, and the best smile on the planet.
Conclusion
All of these women are strong, powerful, capable, and amazing in their own ways.
On this Women’s Day, it is our pleasure and honor to call attention to the work that they’re each doing in their own part of the support world and encourage you to look to them for inspiration and knowledge. Similarly, know that you, too, are amazingly strong and capable of doing great things! As a community, if we band together, we can achieve almost anything.
