Flywheel & WPEngine
‍Customer Support

My most notable contribution to the company was handling 100% of all performance-related customer tickets for the first two years of my role. Handling such a large volume of tickets all focused on a specific topic helped me to deeply understand website performance in all facets, from browser-level render through server stack complications. Eventually, I was given the capacity to onboard a second performance specialist to help with ticket load and proactive performance research, afterward getting our entire ten-person Tier 2 support team trained on performance to have more sustainable and flexible coverage for the subject.
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One of the secondary responsibilities in the position was assisting our sales and account teams with pre-auditing potential enterprise-level clients after they had migrated a copy of their site onto our servers before making the full move to our hosting services. This would involve ongoing communication with the customer, their account manager, and platform engineers to schedule load testing and in-depth performance metrics, and generally ensure that all of their needs were being met. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of recurring revenue over the years, with an extremely high success rate in getting customers to try our platform out. One of the most notable clients that I can talk about was the lovely CSSTricks.com, as well as many other international clients behind NDAs.
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As an L2 Tech Lead, I was also the "end of the line" for most customer tickets, meaning that the ticket had gone through all avenues and escalations possible before reaching me and it was my duty to do deep dives into problems and root out tough issues. Most tickets required specific technical knowledge of how creating websites worked (structural language debugging), but some ended up being difficult platform-level bugs with our hosting systems themselves. These more difficult tickets would result in ongoing testing in separate sandbox environments to replicate issues, as well as writing down extensive case studies to collect sample data which I'd then present to our project management and engineering teams if no solution could be discerned from our research.

Flywheel's largest selling point was speed since any dynamic site would be faster on our hosting platform than our direct competitors. The high pressure for keeping this promise to customers meant that we needed to train our support team on performance subjects, which was one of my main long-term internal focuses at the company. I am a big advocate for continuous education within the workplace, so I spent most of my efforts creating training and documentation for our Real-Time and Tier 1 support team members so that they were equipped from the very start.

I also created and taught multiple bi-monthly performance classes for our new hires, covering subjects such as how to use browser development tools, how to read various webpage speed audits (Google's PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, WebPageTest, etc), and how to read Linux access logs to audit for stability. Alongside the class-based approach, I also wrote most of the company's internal documentation for performance debugging, including step-by-step guides for properly configuring servers for stability (AmazonS3, DigitalOcean, Linode, and eventually Google Cloud Platform), navigating Linux audit logs, and how to audit the front-end of websites to improve scores across the board.

Education should not just be limited to your team though, which is also why I worked closely with my colleagues over in the Sales and Account Management departments to provide ongoing education around how our hosting offerings functioned, compared to the competition, and would always offer one-on-ones for any member who wanted either clarifications or deeper insights into any topic.