Crafting Your Troubleshooting Brand: Insights from Elec Boothe
Meet Elec Boothe an e-commerce enthusiast with a decade of experience, currently leads the support and tech writing teams at Bolt Checkout, leveraging his expertise gained from roles at industry giants like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salsify. With a natural inclination for helping others, Elec's passion aligns seamlessly with his career, making him a valuable asset in the e-commerce and support domain.
Check out this video featuring Elec Boothe our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where he discusses his passion for structured troubleshooting and offers valuable advice on framing problem statements for efficient ticket resolution in the support engineering realm, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer issues. Get a sneak peek of his compelling ideas before he takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Sophie: We're talking to Elec Boothe today. Elec will be speaking at our upcoming Support Driven Expo in Las Vegas, leading a workshop about crafting your troubleshooting brand.
Elec, thanks for talking to me today and thanks for volunteering to speak at our upcoming expo.
Elec: Yeah, thanks, Sophie. I'm super excited to join the team and get out there and network and meet some people and share some of the experience that I have.
Sophie: Could you introduce yourself briefly for our attendees?
Elec: For everybody who doesn't know me, my name is Elec Boothe. I've been with Bolt Checkout now for about two and a half years. I lead our support and tech writing teams. I've been in the e commerce and support space now for about 10 years, working at places like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salsify.
I have a pretty big passion in the e commerce world, I feel like I'm pretty knowledgeable about it. I've always kind of been a helper. So having support there has meshed well with my personality as well as my gifted talents.
Sophie: Great. I'm excited to learn from you. I come from a really different world.
I'm Sophie Heller. I've worked in ed tech, most of my career, most recently built small support teams at Outschool and ClassDojo. I'm curious what got you passionate about troubleshooting to the extent that you're going to lead a long workshop for our attendees.
Elec: There's a couple of different facets there. So I suffer from ADHD and, you know, one of the reasons why I'm in this world is that tickets kind of give you an ability to lean into that and not necessarily see it as like a negative or a problem, but more so as like a benefit of being in this world. Part of that is that as you're troubleshooting you need some kind of structure or standard there that you're using as you're going through your day to day.
If you are not structured in your approach to problem solving, you can find yourself, you know, 90 replies deep before you get to actually understanding what the problem is from a merchant or a customer. We all kind of either starting our journey or we're midway through our journey that it's important to keep an eye on how we're solving problems.
And I think as we all know, AI is coming up, changes happen quite frequently. Having a structure lets you lean into these changes and be clear and still use the same approach you did before, while also being efficient and keeping your merchants and customers supported.
Sophie: Absolutely, and I don't want to spoil your workshop for anyone, but what's one big takeaway?
What kind of structure do you recommend people start using.
Elec: The first piece, before you even start working on a ticket, you need to know what problem that merchants experiencing. From my own team, and myself included, people love to pick up things that they don't quite understand, especially in the support engineering world. We're not monotonous workers, and that's not a negative. There are some people who just really thrive on, I'm enabling this 100 times a day.
Personally, for myself, I like to dive into different things. But one of the things is that, I found myself in the past, not really diving in and understanding the problem, but trying to solve for something. And several times, I got myself a little bit of deep water where the merchant was like, that's not what I was looking for or, it's been a week now, and you're still not understanding my problem.
So, I think the take away from this, whether you come to my talk or not, just take a few seconds, every ticket, the 1st question should really be, "if I understand you correctly, this is the issue that you're experiencing and this is what would resolve your issue" and then getting that confirmation back from the customer a lot of times provides clarity when they hear back, they say, Oh, yeah, you're exactly right, that's what I'm looking for. Or, no, that's not quite what I'm looking for. Let me rephrase that for you. And I think it leads to one, the merchant feels like, okay, they've got me, I can step away and I'll go focus on something else while they research or troubleshoot. For yourself, make sure that you understand what's going on and you have a clear kind of mission statement or vision statement for that ticket that you can take to others when you need assistance.
Sophie: Yeah, that's such a great tip because agents are so often incentivized by different [00:04:00] metrics like meeting your SLA or just trying to close tickets out quickly. So it really makes sense that you kind of want to do the opposite, take a step back and make sure that you're providing responses that actually make sense in the long
Elec: term. Yeah, 100%. I see a lot of times too is when you do take that step back, you actually lead to quicker resolutions, and you're better able to identify your weak areas and see if there's somebody else in the organization that you can lean on and get assistance from, as well as in the future when you see that problem again. Your problem statements at a company are probably limited to 10 to 15 common problems you experience, regardless of if the solution is the same. And then narrowing down that problem statement gives you the ability to reference back to past tickets or past experiences you've had to utilize that information.
Absolutely.
Sophie: I'm really excited to learn more from you and our attendees can really come away with some concrete tips for troubleshooting. Elec is going to be doing a workshop at our Support Driven Expo in Vegas in October, come through if you're able to. In the meantime, Elec, where can people find you if they have questions, want to nerd out about support engineering or just otherwise connect?
Elec: Everybody can find me on Support Driven. It's Elec Boothe. And I'm also on LinkedIn as well under the same. I'm always happy to answer any questions or network or talk to people.
I especially love hearing from different vendors or different people doing unique and interesting things in the community, so definitely reach out.
Check out this video now featuring Elec Boothe our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
