How Automattic Supported Its Users With the Help of Talent on Upwork

It’s safe to say that nearly everyone who’s used the internet will encounter an Automattic product. They’re the company behind products like WordPress.com, Woo, Jetpack, WordPress VIP, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, and Texts—and they contribute to the open-source WordPress.org platform, too. As a result, their work touches the majority of the websites online today, and helps countless people get their work done.

Karen Arnold, Global VP of Talent at Automattic, has been with the company for eleven years. She started as a Happiness Engineer—someone who provides customer and technical support to WordPress.com users—and rose through the ranks at the fully remote organization.

From interacting with customers directly to ensuring users are properly supported by the larger Happiness team, Arnold’s seen firsthand how critical WordPress.com is to many people around the world. And over the years, it’s been difficult, at times, to find exactly the right people to support Automattic’s customers.

That is, of course, until Arnold was introduced to Upwork.

The challenge: Building a multilingual support team

One of the biggest challenges for the Automattic customer support team was building a team to help all of Automattic’s customers, regardless of their spoken language.

“We needed to be able to offer support to customers in more languages than just English,” Arnold said. “We found a bunch of awesome people—customers who spoke several languages. But the complexities of maintaining this level of support felt kind of impossible.”

No matter how many resources Arnold hired, the global popularity of Automattic’s products meant the company needed to keep hiring more specialists to provide support in additional languages.

The solution: Using talent on Upwork to provide service in more languages

“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we scale up this team and find people who can support more languages than we’re even thinking of right now? People who can help us better address the needs of our customers?’” Arnold said. “And that’s where Upwork came in. It allowed us to find people in countries where we wouldn’t have had the ability to hire employees following our traditional practices.”

Because Upwork provided Automattic with easy access to a highly skilled, truly global workforce, the company was able to turn their multilingual customer service struggles into a well-oiled support machine.

Soon, Automattic’s access to talent on Upwork would become an even more crucial part of their operations.

The evolution: Relying on talent from Upwork to support a changing world of work

Automattic’s business became busier than ever in early 2020, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Everything went bananas,” Arnold said. “Everybody was at home, working on their computers, finally working on their websites that they’d been ignoring because they were too busy commuting to work every day. It's surreal.”

The company’s team of Happiness Engineers was slammed. Automattic needed to hire more help, and quickly. Their existing partnership with Upwork allowed them to make this happen in record time.

The flexibility provided by Upwork was another big benefit to the support team.

“We were engaging talent to keep pace with this demand,” Arnold said. “Over time, things did level out, and then began to calm down a bit. And we were able to continually keep pace with these ebbs and flows. If there’s a time we need fewer Happiness Engineers, we can wind down some engagements. When we need more, we wind the engagements back up.”

The experience: Customized, on-demand help from the Upwork team

Automattic is an Upwork Enterprise customer, which means they get help from a dedicated account manager. Arnold says this speeds up the hiring process.

“Upwork makes it so easy to find the right people. Whenever anyone in the company comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I need to hire someone to help my team,’ I connect them directly to our account manager,” Arnold said. “Being able to give this over to people who are excited to do it for us has just been great.”

Arnold can communicate with Automattic’s account manager directly in Slack, which makes it simple to connect her colleagues with talent on Upwork.

“I can ping her for anything and she’s there to help me out with it. That’s really meaningful to me,” Arnold said. “And Automattic has always been a very independent company. We think we need to do everything for ourselves. I have to remind people that they don’t have to develop the job post, search criteria, or any of it. They can talk to our account manager and—boom! Suddenly you have a shortlist of talent to look at and potentially choose from.”

The future: How Automattic sees talent on Upwork helping their team in new ways

Arnold expects Automattic will continue to use talent on Upwork to support new and additional areas of their business.

“We’re integrating AI into every single team at Automattic in some way—whether we’re using it for taking notes, creating better meeting summaries, and making our products better,” she said. “And as more AI professionals show up in Upwork’s talent pool, I see us saying yes to that help as well.”

Regardless of the type of talent that Automattic sources through Upwork, one thing remains consistent: independent professionals are a big part of the company’s ongoing success.

“We can keep scaling up and down our customer support team, which is going to keep being one of the most important areas of focus as we grow,” Arnold said. “We can keep our recruiting team really lean, and add people quickly through Upwork. We don’t have to figure things out ourselves—and it really makes my life easier.”

‍

Upwork enables clients to engage with talent as independent contractors or through the Upwork Payroll solution, where a third-party employer of record employs the talent for purposes of the client's project.

‍