In May 2024, I presented at my first conference – the Support Driven Expo in Las Vegas. My talk was part of their Knowledge Management track titled: So leadership just learned about ‘Self-Serve Support’ – now what?
It was truly one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I met some amazing people and learned a lot! Here’s some basic details if you’re interested in my talk or the conference.
Talk details
This talk, especially its title, is largely based on my own journey of getting into support content. Even if support teams already know the content is needed, it often takes someone in leadership to hear the right buzzword to get something off the ground.
Slide deck:
I used Canva to create branded slides – some slides are minimal, but most include images that I actually ended up using in the course. While I had started creating some graphics prior to the presentation, creating this slide deck definitely helped me find my style!
While the official recording of my talk is part of the Expo archives, I also have a practice recording of the talk tied to Canva. If you’re interested in the full recording, feel free to contact me for a link!
Submission description:
It seems increasingly common that folks are working with non-technical, support-centric content in sudden bursts. In my case, I was managing a support team and feeling the need for this type of support for our customers. It took two years and my COO learning the term ‘self-serve’ support to get the content published.
When I researched support content best-practices, I found the majority of guidance about ‘self-serve’ support content comes from CMS marketing teams. If I’d had access to more actionable guidance, I could have spent much more time doing the work rather than questioning it. I plan to answer the questions I had when I first started out, like what types of articles are best, what grammar rules matter, or is there a benefit to structuring articles a certain way? I can’t cover everything, but I plan to sum up the foundation that’s made me more confident in my work today.
Key takeaways:
Ultimately, the very most important things for any help center project are those that I outlined from the very beginning of the talk:
While I outlined some of the more specific points at the end (see slide image below), I’ve found that doing this work well really can come down to following those 3 ideas.
I also made sure to better polish the templates I’d begun creating around the time of the talk. I’ve continued to work on these with that ultimate goal of providing folks with some of the knowledge and resources I wish I’d had when I started doing the work:
About the Support Driven Expo
The Support Driven community centers around embracing support as its own career path. The SD Expo is intended to offer a variety of learning tracks for support professionals at any point in their career.
My talk was part of the Knowledge Management track, and seven other tracks meant that attendees could choose from a variety of different talks and topics over the 1.5 day conference. There were also a variety of networking opportunities with event sponsors and space for deeper conversations with other attendees.
For those in the support world, it’s definitely a conference worth learning about!
And even if conferences aren’t your thing, they have a very active Slack community full of helpers that I highly recommend anyone working in or around support join!
