A main priority here at SendGrid is to impress our customers with top-notch support. So we have a global team of support engineers who are dedicated to making sure that all of our customers experience success with our service.
Support interacts with customers via phone, chat, and email every hour of every day. They serve our customers 24/7 without a night shift! This is accomplished by hosting support teams both domestically and in Europe. This “follow the sun” support method means customers are always working with alert and knowledgeable experts regardless of time of day.
The Support team is also directly involved in the onboarding process for new customers and is an integral part of developing new initiatives for our clients. One of these initiatives is VidGrid—a new library of step-by-step “how-to” videos for our Email Marketing Service. Tech tips from the experts might not be perfectly polished in presentation but they are spot on with the content and expert tips.
With the release of this new initiative, we thought that it would be fun to get the inside scoop on what it’s like to be on SendGrid’s front lines. We recently sat down with two members of our support team, Keanon and Kyle to find out what makes the support team tick.
Q: How would you describe the Support Team’s role at SendGrid in 50 words or less?
Keanon: We’re the front line of communication for our existing customers. We’re their first point of contact, so if there’s a problem, we’re the ones who hear about it and pursue the fix.
Kyle: And it’s not just about maintenance, it’s also about education. We help coach developers in how to use our service—we want them to have an email solution that works for their company. We’re available 24/7: through live chat, phones, and email tickets.
Q: What does it take to be on SendGrid’s Support Team?
Keanon: Being a member of the Support Team is not just a support role, it’s a success role. We’re customer success engineers. We look for people who are both proactive and re-active. It’s important to have a technical background and to be dedicated and forward thinking.
Kyle: We look for people who are hungry to help customers. Everyone on our team is skilled to be able to look at any type of code to help our customers fix things.
Q: SendGrid offers a unique opportunity for its Support Team called Development Days. What are those?
Keanon: We have Dev days once a week that allow us to work on a new skill or new project—they’re days set aside for us to proactively work on personal and professional development.
Kyle: We work on learning different coding languages and how various customers integrate with our APIs, so when we’re asked questions, we have the answers. We also use this time to write up additional documentation for our docs page.
Q: What is your biggest challenge on a daily basis?
Keanon: It’s important to remember that every customer is different than the one who came before. You need to constantly assess each situation to make sure that you’re tailoring your response to the person, not the problem. Marketers ask different questions than developers, so you need to speak differently to a marketer than you would to a developer.
Kyle: Exactly, we have such a wide user base—from developers with 20+ years of experience to customers who don’t know what an API is. So we need to make sure that we’re communicating with our customers in a way that makes the most sense to them. We also have extensive documentation to help with this support. We like to promote knowledge sharing.
Q: What’s one of the best things about being on the Support Team?
Keanon: I really like how open and close knit the Support Team is even though we’re all not in the same city. I’m never worried about asking a question—someone will always answer any question I have. Our team is very team oriented. We all look out for each other and help each other out. And we’re on board with helping each other grow.
Kyle: The interaction and open communication between our engineers and support is really valuable. It’s great to know that our team is supported by the whole company.
Both: Last year, to celebrate a bunch of our one year anniversaries, we went to a climbing gym, dinner, and a play. It was a great way to support and celebrate each other. We also grab lunches together a lot, especially on Dev Days. Working at SendGrid is like being at a company with all of your friends.
Q: Can you explain VidGrid a bit? What was the genesis of the idea and who is it for?
Keanon: Our fingers are always on the pulse of what’s happening with our customers. In our daily support meetings, we talk about what trends we’re seeing in the questions that our customers are asking and we try to be proactive in answering them. VidGrid was a result of one of these trends.
Kyle: We want to anticipate our customers’ needs and be proactive, so we created these videos from what we’ve learned from our current Email Marketing Service customers. We wanted to break down the service into step by step videos, so customers know how to take advantage of its options, how to customize, how to manage unsubscribes, etc.
A big thanks to Keanon and Kyle for giving us an insider’s look at what it’s like to work for SendGrid Support. For more on VidGrid and our Support Team’s initiatives, please visit our Documentation Page. And if you think you have what it takes to be a part of our Support Team, check out our Careers Page for open positions.