VP of CS and Support at Privy (Attentive)

How big is it?

‍25 FTEs across 5 different functional areas: 

Customer Success (8) / Onboarding (5) / Technical Support (11) / Billing (2) / Compliance (2)

‍Where are your teammates located?‍

All over the United States.‍

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

We own the post-sales relationships and customer outcomes including activation, adoption, retention, expansion, and upsell. The Support team is responsible for technical support for all pre- and post-sales customers.

We are responsible for helping our customers grow their businesses via our solutions, delivering a world-class customer experience, and growing our business through our existing customer base. 

This includes product training and support, onboarding services, strategic guidance, billing support, and compliance guidance for our email and SMS products. 

We also collect and disseminate customer feedback and share those learnings throughout the organization including Productdev and Sales.

The values that make a remote culture strong are the same ones that make any culture strong:

A shared set of meaningful values that the company actually embodies, transparency in everything from decision making to compensation, honesty coupled with kindness as the default communication mode, the normalization of change, and comfort with experimentation and uncertainty.

Being the leader of a customer-facing organization, I truly believe that the customer experience starts with the employee experience. If your customer facing teams are miserable, your customers are going to feel it. 

But a happy and engaged team can not only weather the bumps and bruises that can sometimes come with a customer facing role more resiliently, they are much more likely to want to solve problems for customers and do their best to make them successful. To go that extra mile and to help each other with their shared goals.

So employee happiness for me is not just something that makes work tolerable, but a strategic imperative that allows the company to better achieve its goals. 

How do I do that? I talk to my team. I talk to them often, not just where there are “issues.” I talk to them about their lives and their goals. I’m vulnerable with them. I ask questions explicitly to elicit responses that may be hard to hear. I follow up. I do my best to materialize the things that they want and need. I create the conditions where my team can and wants to be honest with me and believes I can help. 

It’s only then can you actually problem solve--when you know what the problems are. And better yet, intuit them when they are small and not yet systemic.

The biggest challenge has been getting the right constellation and frequency of communication where everyone feels informed, but not overwhelmed. As we all know now, Zoom meetings hit differently than in-person meetings. What can be asynchronous vs real-time. And realizing that what works for one team might not work for another. For example, one of my teams still loves to do a quick daily standup in the morning. Another one of my teams found that draining so they cut back to 2 per week with some Slack related checkins in between.

We’ve done a ton of games, small in-person meetups when appropriate, and virtual offsites. I’ve also launched a small group mentoring and self-development program.

My team LOVES games. Especially trivia which we’ve done with both external and internal hosts. We’ve also done a virtual escape room and some virtual activities like baking with kits that we got delivered to our homes.

Yes! I love to start a meeting that way. It’s a low stakes way of getting everyone warmed up and ready to communicate while sharing something personal that builds relationships. I have a whole list of icebreakers that I refer to. One of my favorite ones is to tell the story of how you met your best friend.

There’s a lot of ways to use Slack for recognition. For example, we have developed a culture of gratitude by thanking our team members throughout the company for excellent work or collaboration. We also have a peer-nominated All Star award. And I’m always sure to celebrate milestones like anniversaries and promotions. We also use the Donut app to make connections with folks on other teams. I even use it to have impromptu, casual skip levels.

I also send my team handwritten notes related to those professional milestones (and some personal ones too).

Anything related to emotional intelligence and effective communication. I recently finished “Set Boundaries, Find Peace” by Nedra Glover Tawwab which is a great resource for any customer facing professional who constantly has to balance the company’s, the customers, and their own needs. Also the “Assertiveness Guide for Women” (which is very applicable to men as well!) has some excellent strategies as well.