Last week we had someone new join our team in the role of Customer Success. We wanted to have this person start mid-summer to get fully up to speed by the beginning of the school year.

We chose this new title because we wanted the job to be meaningful to an external audience, while also accommodating the internal ambiguity of the role.

Ambiguity, you say? My official description I gave during interviews was basically as follows:

• Support. This person will become the primary point of contact for users who need support. We’re known for awesome support at all hours. So… get ready! But, we don’t get many support tickets, so this is probably only about 5 percent of total time.
• Account Management. This person will be the primary point of contact for our partner organizations. This person will need to ensure our partners successfully deploy Edthena and then make regular contact to ensure they’re happy! Maybe about 40 percent of the total time.
• Other. So…there’s a lot of addtional time left over, so this person will take on other projects to help with the business. Examples are building training campaigns for accounts to share how they’re using Edthena, and sending monthly update emails to all users, managing our social media accounts, and helping with logistics for a conference. Lots of utility-infielder type activities.

First, as a reflection on how our hiring process has changed, we had a lot of people apply for the role. A lot. We advertised through channels including AngelList and EdSurge.

We had to decided among several great candidates from across the country. It was truly humbling to meet so many high-performing individuals.

Ultimately, we ended up selecting someone with classroom experience. We continue to believe that this will be an asset to meeting the needs of our partners and users.

So, if you’re one of our users who emails for support, you’ll start to see replies from Daniel instead of Adam. Now you know where he came from.

photo credit: bamalibrarylady via photopin cc