Hi there! 👋 I’m Maring – kind of like ‘Mary’ but with an -ing at the end.
My first question – Who am I?
I live in Chicago. I’m a cat mom. I recently became someone’s wife. I love watermelon. I went to school in Baltimore. I’ve been wearing the same linen dress to paint a wall for over a week, and I’m honestly really worried I’ll ruin it but also it’s already dusty from sanding the wall and I’m not actually painting in it, so I think it’ll be fine, but we’ll see whenever I get to actually painting this damn wall.
I’m also prone to tangents, hobby addictions, naughty word choices, and procrastination – guess how long I’ve worked on this? I’m not sure! It’s however long it took me to cut a lot of content and realize that the best way to understand who I am is to understand what I care about.
I’ve worked in some form of support role for most of my career – support agent, support manager, support content advocate, and now an aspiring support content guru. I care that people can find the answers that they need, when they need them – whether that’s within a product or within an article or when talking to a person.
Throughout my experience, it’s remained clear that the words we consume have the most significant impact on our experience with the web. Especially if you’re using a product/platform that’s intended to solve a problem, like most (if not all) tech companies. A button can look so beautiful, but it’s not fun to wonder what will happen when you click or tap it. A help center can be so well organized, but it’s not super handy if you can’t search for your question. A support agent can be so knowledgeable, but can piss you off in under a second when they start sending you templated language that almost matches your question, but not really.
All of those words in all of those places should be intentional and support your experience. All of those words should also support the support people – because support people are people too!
I don’t do the sexiest, most braggable work – in fact, if I’ve done good work, you probably won’t notice the words much at all. They’ll just be where you expect them, and you’ll go on your merry way.
Fun fact, ‘unnoticeable’ is the basis for A LOT of content work – make the words so good, they’re basically invisible. It’s fun when the goal of your work is to make sure no one notices it! Please be kind to your content friends, it’s hard sometimes.
So who am I then? I’m still figuring things out! But Content and Support resonate with me the most, and that’s where I plan to focus my work and my own ~content~
With that – Where do I fit into the content space?
Great question! I’m still figuring that out too… it seems like I’m everywhere and nowhere. That seems to be how a lot of content people feel – some focus on strategy, operations, design, or simply the copy itself. I seem to touch all of those spaces.
I work mostly with support people, and I sometimes work with marketing teams or product or technical specialists. Lately, I work with Zendesk help centers, but I dabble with workflow optimization and some product components too. Views, Macros, and Triggers are just as important to me as the articles and in-app content – it’s all related! I’ll elaborate a bit more with a tangent that should come together for you, bear with me –
If you ask anyone born before 1970, they might tell you they don’t care about support content – Why not just call? Why not just ask for the answer?
If they’re asking me those questions, I’d say:
First of all, you can ask our friend named Google, and it’s a lot faster. Also, companies have been embracing ‘self-serve support’ for quite some time now – which means support teams are often scaled back, hard to reach, and usually overwhelmed with the questions already on their plate. (Basically, tell your uncle that millennials didn’t kill good customer service. It was capitalism, period.)
They might also ask: If there’s so much self-serve content out there, why are support teams overwhelmed?
Well, I can name a few reasons:
- Most of that content isn’t very good.
- Support people need support (and they’re almost certainly not getting it).
- There is more to a customer’s experience than the people on the support team!
A lot of people at a tech company, especially decision makers, are often so wrapped up in sales and big feature brags that the customer experience (and support) is often pushed down on the priority list.
This doesn’t exist everywhere – if someone in leadership is personally invested in content or the company has gotten so big that they can afford researchers and content teams, it’s pretty solid.
When using something from Google or TurboTax, you’ve likely never needed to contact support to complete a basic task on the site. If you had a question, I bet you found your answer with a quick search on their site or a search engine. You probably never even noticed the text on buttons or around your account because it just flows.
But we all interact with companies of all shapes and sizes every day, and the content that supports customers across most experiences is usually… not ideal.
Think about your cable provider or a tool specific to your industry – I’ve been confused by some of their login processes, let alone trying to figure out what to do when things go wrong.
Every interaction that you have with a website, words are necessary to get you to the destination. The marketing website, the support articles, the labels on the page, and all the way down to the buttons – someone has either put thought into those things, or they haven’t.
So where do I fit into this space? I imagine I’ll narrow my niche down a bit over time, but for now, I take Kristina Halverson’s bullet point from Confab to heart:
Content is a service for our users.
Note the period.
For now, I’m working in a space of ebbs and flows, words and extensive workflow diagrams. I will likely always focus on the support space, and I plan to share some of my best tips and tools along the way. Hopefully I can be of service (and keep up with this commitment because I’m honestly scared that this will be the only thing I ever post…)
Maring Eberlein
Some might call me a little obsessed with support content, and yeah… I’ve definitely found my niche somewhere between the support and content worlds. While growing within my first role in tech as a support agent, I saw the impacts of clear communication for users first-hand. I also experienced the challenges that come with a lack of resources for an undervalued craft. With a lot of luck and good people in my corner, I’ve been able to focus my work on my interests with the larger goal of supporting the supporters. I know you’re out there, and I hope this was helpful! Please contact me with any suggestions or requests!
