Customer Support for The Events Calendar 4.0

Description

Modern Tribe’s flagship WordPress plugin, The Events Calendar, has grown substantially during 2015. It is currently the most popular calendar plugin on the WordPress.org repo, and just a few weeks ago, hit 2 million downloads. As we move towards launching The Events Calendar 4.0 in November and prepare for the support onslaught that will likely accompany it, we’re looking to build out our support team with 1-2 friendly people who know the plugin and find great joy in helping troubleshoot user problems.

Our support team prioritizes our premium forums above all else. Each day, the team works to clear out the list of new threads and existing follow-ups, collaborating to troubleshoot challenging issues together in our support team Slack channel. Everyone on the team is responsible for clearing out their queue of assigned threads and making as big a dent as possible in the unassigned queue each day. No threads should be left unreplied to at the end of each day, and all threads need a reply within 24 hours (during the business week).

Once the queue is clear, there are plenty of opportunities for support members to help with other tasks that interest them. These include:

• Quality assurance testing on each plugin prior to a new release
• Contributing to development tickets during the plugin dev cycle
• Preparing tutorials, snippets and video walkthroughs that help users do creative/cool things with the plugin
• Helping run regular user testing sessions
• Marketing efforts: blogging, promoting the plugin, working on swag, etc.

Though the support forums are everyone’s priority — and will be the main focus of your work each day — it is not the only opportunity support team members can expect. We want to provide people with chances to learn in the areas that interest them, so long as it doesn’t distract from the main goal of helping our customers solve their problems politely and quickly.

The Team

Modern Tribe is a unique hybrid of independent contractors and traditional employees, with the added distinction of being 100% remote. One of the benefits of working with us is the diversity this brings: you’ll be building cool stuff with people from different cultures bringing a variety of experiences to the table.

A Scottish support guru living off the Western Coast of Canada. An amazing Argentinean developer based in the secluded hills of wine-rich Mendoza. A lead project manager nestled in the heart of New Hampshire while his assistant PM on the same project chills down in Nicaragua. A trio of owners — Shane, Reid and Peter — who don’t even all live in the same state.

With a worldwide crew of the best and brightest, you can be sure you will learn a lot and have a great time working with people you might not cross paths with at a traditional office gig. And when we get together for our yearly team-wide retreat (usually in warm exotic locale where the food is cheap and the wifi is spotty), there’s no telling what types of friendships will emerge once everyone is in the same room.

The Right Candidate

If you possess the following traits, we’d love to speak with you:

• An existing familiarity with The Events Calendar. Bonus if you have used The Events Calendar PRO or our other premium add-ons.
• A fairly strong command of PHP, CSS, HTML and JavaScript. You don’t need to be a full-stack developer, but you need to be able to effectively troubleshoot problems in these 4 areas on your own.
• At least 1 year experience doing web-based customer support. Be prepared to provide some examples.
• 1+ year remote freelancing experience. Full-time freelancers are the only candidates we're looking for at this time; we are not seeking F/T or P/T employees, nor can we work with somebody moonlighting from a full-time gig. And if you haven’t worked remotely before, this probably won’t be a good fit.

Our hourly rate for this gig starts at $30-$40/hr, depending on experience, with opportunities for rate bumps on annual review.

Since this is a freelance position, you control your schedule and work when you want to. But note that we expect team members to have at least 3 hours of overlap each day with the rest of our support team, who generally work between the hours of 7 am and 5 pm PT.

Our Interview Process

Modern Tribe’s interview process involves three distinct steps:

• After our recruiter does initial screening, you’ll have an interview with our hiring manager. They’ll meet with you for 30-60 minutes to ask questions about your experience with the plugin and freelancing, how you manage burnout as a remote worker, etc.
• If the interview works out, we’ll set you up for a paid test project answering 7-10 real world support questions pulled from our forums. (If you haven’t checked out the types of issues that we handle there, now would be a good time). You will be paid for the test project regardless of whether you make it beyond this stage.
• If the test project passes our support team’s collective review, we’ll get you hooked in for a one month trial. You will be a full member of the team at this point and will be doing the same work as everyone else; but the monthlong trial gives both sides an opportunity to “try before they buy.”

When we get to the end of the monthlong trial period, both sides will meet to review how it went and whether it makes sense to continue working together.

Who Are We? 

Modern Tribe is a digital agency with a modern twist. We are a product company. We are educators. We are a great mix of freelancers and full timers. All experts. In today’s world, we get to be many things to many people.We believe in making quality products for other people and ourselves, balanced by living quality lives. We are 100% distributed & our team is spread around North America (and a hint beyond).

We believe that you should be happy, helpful, curious & accountable, on top of being good at what you do. We believe life should be lived intentionally. We believe in a class of artisans and craftsman in control of their work who solve people problems rather than just build more shit. We believe in a sustainable vision of open source, and contribute consistently into the ecosystem.

NOTE: Modern Tribe thrives from having a diverse workplace. We do not discriminate against prospective contractors on the basis of race, religion, color, gender identity, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, physical/mental disability, or other protected classes.

Info for the application
Think you’d be a good fit? We can’t wait to hear from you! Submit your information at the application form on our Work With Us page (make sure to select Community/Support from the radio buttons to let us know which position you’re applying for). Also, please include a note about your favorite color so we know you read this. We’ll be in touch from there.

• Link to original Jobposting