AUTHOR NOTE

This was originally posted on my WordPress blog, which I have deleted after migrating the blog's posts to this website in November 2025. Differences from the original are minimal and include: changing Twitter to Xitter every chance I get, adding links to screenshots of referenced Xitter posts because my inactive profile is locked down, adding in paragraphs to reduce the wall of text, and adjusting text formatting.

Recently I posted on Xitter some red flags in communities while job hunting. Some may see this as dangerous to publicly talk about while job hunting, but I really don’t. That ended up spiraling into this blog, a space where I can effectively talk about my experiences as a community manager, product marketing manager, and customer advocate. I’ve been around a few different communities over my career; voluntarily running communities with my friends as a teenager and young adult as an admin for role playing forums to being a Guild Master of a few World of Warcraft Guilds, moving professionally to brands like Xbox and Microsoft Edge. Between those two roles, I championed for a community that used a conversational AI, something I know most people can’t say they’ve done.

I was part of the first-round layoffs at Microsoft in January 2023. While doing research into companies for potential roles I interview for I’ve been digging into a variety of communities to find some glaring issues that they definitely need help with. It’s important information to share: how to understand what you are getting into as a community manager or product marketing manager. I guess you can now see how this rolled into people convincing me to start a blog.

When thinking of the post titles that Dona challenged me to provide, one thing I knew I could talk about ad nauseum was active listening in customer service. Absolutely no disrespect meant towards the actual employees in customer service roles - I worked my way up through call centers and truly understand the hell you go through and what is required of you (sometimes ridiculously). Companies in general do not value customer service, it’s often the first considered in a budget cut and outsourced to reduce those costs further.

Not a lot of customer service agents truly empathize with their customers for a wide variety of reasons, and it frustrates the fuck out of literally everyone. You’ve had that bad customer service experience, I know you have. The empathy aspect in the initial goal of this post wasn’t obvious to me at first. It wasn’t until new Bing suggested a few potential titles I could use that it clicked - you can actively listen but still sound like you are reading from a script, it’s the empathy and understanding the person on the other side that is often missing.

AUTHOR'S NOTE, Nov 2025

el oh el fuck Windows, Bing, and everything that comes with their "AI".

My first lead on Xbox Community Support said, “I can teach you the tech, but I can’t teach you to care.” That’s both true and not true in my experience; there’s some people you can teach but definitely not everyone (think of the planet we would have if we could teach everyone how to care). But I’ll never forget that line and think of it when I train people on talking to customers, working to show the human on the other side of the screen when engaging. Sure, you may not really care about them; I definitely can’t say I’ve loved everyone I’ve ever interacted with as a community lead. But you sure as hell can use active listening to show empathy and relate to them a little. This goes a long way in a heated conversation, which can be the case in customer service situations, and it’s surprisingly easy.

I held a 100% CSAT score over two years of doing phone support for Microsoft, and I distinctly recall one of my coworkers saying, “You have that calm mom voice on the phone.” That was bizarre to me considering I actively hate talking to other people.

No offense to other people, it’s the masking I hate, being an autistic social butterfly in a “neurotypical” tech world will be a post I do in the future. (Edit: Part 1 and Part 2 are both up now!)

It’s true, though, I had a way to calm customers with my voice and the ability to not only recognize their technical level but speak to them at it without being condescending. There’s a really fine line when walking someone through something and not being condescending while doing it, it’s easy to go over that line if you aren’t actively looking for it. Now, typing the same kind of stuff I was performing through speech on the phones wasn’t the same at first; that first lead also told me, “You talk to problems, not people.” Again, autism, but I had no idea at the time so we’ll glaze over that to focus on the fact that I was able to learn how to use active listening and empathy together using text.

Active listening is an underutilized skill, imho. People say they can do it, but rarely do they practice it. The amount of emails I’ve received from colleagues who clearly did not read what I wrote… 🙄 “Per. My. Last. Email.” but ~P R O F E S S I O N A L~. It can be taught. One aspect of having empathy while engaging with users is having a solid understanding of a product. It’s easy when you’re an engineer or PM for a product, you basically built or are actively building the thing! Excellent, one thing down.

Now, look at what that user said in their ticket/social post/email/wtf ever else. Can you tell what they mean? If any part of you says no, you need to focus on asking for clarification instead of assuming anything. “Hey, I want to make sure I fully understand here. When you say x, do you mean y? Or do you mean z? Or maybe I am way off and you mean something else completely. 😅 I’d love to help out further but want to ensure we’re on the same page.” Yes, use emojis if it’s the right tone, that’s just how we all talk these days - be a human first.

Sometimes you already know what they mean, like when they say bookmarks instead of favorites. Other clues are in the experience they describe, sometimes you can see the missing piece that the user doesn’t know is missing and causing their issue. Product knowledge helps active listening so well when engaging with users on any platform, and one thing a lot of companies don’t do is properly train their support agents on the product. Most are still trained to click through a script and there are now virtual agents (read: chat bots) that do half of it before you talk to a human anyway. Support agents are so conditioned to click through a script that they will ask users who send in complaints explaining the steps they have already followed to go through the exact. same. troubleshooting. You’ve probably had that experience, too. This whole process feels incredibly condescending and doesn’t value the individual who just came to you asking for your further help.

I bet product knowledge wasn’t what you thought I would say first before empathy can properly kick in, didja? I’m gonna blow your mind even further.

Empathy in customer service also requires following up with your users. I’m sure you’ve contacted customer service for a company needing to talk to someone new yet again for an escalated issue instead of getting that call or email you were promised. Just look at my account, the reference number should be attached! 😭 Following up with people using active listening and product knowledge has been the biggest delighter customers talked about over my career.

Most call centers work in a way that does not allow employees to follow up, which is just honestly tragic; call center employees are often treated like chickens earning their feed for the eggs they push out. As a networking specialist for Xbox phone support, I was luckily given the flexibility to follow up with users I had active tickets for. Working as one of 4 - 6 Xbox support agents for the forums (depending on the point in our team’s existence), I owned my own follow ups, handing them to my teammates if I went on vacation to ensure my commitment to the user was held.

While working for the Microsoft Edge team, I would set honest expectations with users in not only my one-on-one technical troubleshooting with them but in the Edge Insider communications so the community knew when we would be back. “The team is going dark for the next couple weeks as we observe a summer holiday! Expect only Canary to get updates, and we will be back in a few weeks with what’s new in Dev.” or “I am gonna be out on vacation next week, so I’ll be back the following Monday with an update for you. Please tag me if you don’t hear from me then!” There’s just something about honoring your commitments that builds solid brand loyalty.

The last thing I will say is required while offering customer service or community building is just consciously practicing empathy itself! Put yourself in their shoes. In fact, my entire post should have shown you that you have been in their shoes. When I respond to a frustrated user, I call out that I read their pain points and express them back to them, show that I feel for their situation and that I just want to help instead of attempt to sell the product. I respond like a human, not a PR-bot, and focus on the user themselves.

Like I said, it’s surprisingly easy to show empathy while building a community, whether you are helping them learn something new or troubleshooting something that may be broken. None of this requires you to be friends with the person, but if you understand where they are coming from, respect their technical level (or lack thereof), and have a solid understanding of what you are talking about, you can take your community’s experience with your team and push it a bar above the rest.

-🧜‍♀️🦄