Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios.
Meet Eryn Carman, Customer Success Manager here at incident.io.
Q: What has been your favorite incident.io memory so far?
The company's social in London, where we did a scavenger hunt across the city. Our team was called “Kenough”, all Barbie-themed, and we had stick horses. I've never worked with more competitive people in my life; it got me really jazzed to be a part of the company and have such a fun night together.
Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?
The value that resonates the most with me is Win together. I've never worked at an organization where Customer Success is more supported by Engineering and Product teams. We all own the customer journey together and I see that in everyday interactions with my customers from everyone across the business.
Q: What is your favorite benefit?
Our health insurance: in the United States, most companies will pay for a portion of your health insurance and subsidize that, but you still pay some out of your own pocket. Whereas at incident.io, they follow their UK approach and cover it all. I don't have any health insurance costs that come out of my paycheck, which is amazing.
Q; What is your favorite Slack channel?
It's either #yelling where all caps are completely required( and you get shamed if you're not using them–whatever emotional state you're in), or #pointless-debates-and-hot-takes. The amount of time we spend debating the most pointless things is possibly one of my favorite things about this company.
Q: What is one piece of advice you would give yourself on your first day?
If I had to go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to lean into the 80-20 rule and focus on what's going to make the most impact and then iterate. I've worked for larger organizations and focused on long-term strategy planning and seeing the big picture throughout time. The pace at which we move at incident.io as a startup of our size is a lot faster. We build and tear down with extremely high frequency. To set us up for the future and make the most impact right now at the same time, this is something I’ve had to learn along the way.
Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing with us?
We highly value individualism and ownership. My advice would be to show us examples of how you've taken initiative on a project and seen it through to completion. We empower folks to own their parts of the business in a high-trust environment, so show that you have done that in the past and you might make a great candidate for us.
Q: How would you describe the culture in three words?
“Always getting better” or “never enough emojis”.
Q: What incident.io employee would you like to be stuck in a lift with?
I would make a strategic choice here. I could focus on who I want to have the most fun with or who I want to have the deepest conversations with, but I think first and foremost, I need a problem solver. I’m choosing Alicia, one of our Engineering Managers. She embodies a “get sh*t done” attitude and would help us Find a way out of the elevator. If we can't find a way out, Alicia can help teach me how to play D&D [Dungeons and Dragons], so we can brainstorm the best D&D characters in our downtime.
Q: What does the last Friday of the month mean to you?
It’s a great way to force myself to take a mental and physical break. I tend to be thinking about work all the time. So this helps me to take a step away, to shut down, re-energize, and go do the things that matter the most to me so that I can be ready and refreshed come the following Monday.
Q: What are you most looking forward to with the future of incident.io?
How fast we're growing our customer base; I’m getting to work with a wide variety of customers. With the launch of Microsoft Teams, we're going to be expanding into a whole new type of customer base across multiple industries. I'm excited to be able to help them with their incident management processes and level that up in a whole new way.
Q: What was something that surprised you when you first joined?
It has to be how often our Engineers are engaging with our customers. This is highly uncommon at larger organizations or even at smaller organizations. Engineers are usually siloed off to build the product, to focus on that. We pride ourselves on everyone owning the customer journey and, with that one-to-one contact, they build empathy for our customers. We can move at a faster pace because Engineers are the ones closing the loop when there's an issue or even a new product feature that we're going to build for someone.
Q: What's been your favorite customer interaction?
One of our customers, who was a champion of our product and was responsible for implementing it, got a promotion to Staff Engineer because of his work on operational excellence. We wanted to celebrate, so we sent a little congratulations package of some incident.io swag and gifts. We knew they loved nail polish, so we sent incident.io-themed nail polish, which they then subsequently wore a couple of weeks later. It was a really fun way to celebrate such a pivotal moment in someone’s career, as well as our partnership.
Q: If you were to work on another team for the day, what team would you want to work in?
I'd choose the Data team because they're some of my favorite humans here. They are the funniest, most solution driven and creative folks here. Also, I just love data, and I'd actually get to dive into some of the things that I know about our customers or about our business and be able to create good stories with that.
Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?
Most companies aren't looking at what the true cost of reactive work to issues is. They aren't looking at the number of people that are involved in issues and incidents, the amount of resources, and tools in the tool stack, the impact on their customers or their brand. All of which is taking their employees away from proactive work on building a product. We don't just surface those things for you to be able to evaluate, we help you get faster and better at them. It's an area of your business that most companies are ignoring or have left to do with minimal processes or minimal products, and it is costing them more money than they're aware of.
Q: How would you describe the day-to-day of working in Customer Success?
It's never a dull day in Customer Success for incident.io because we have shared Slack channels with all of our customers. This means we can work in an extremely fast-paced type of relationship, rather than waiting for emails; we're constantly in contact with our customers. This could be anything from them putting in a feature request and us getting it delivered 24 hours later, to having an issue reported and being fixed within 5 to 10 minutes, to moments of delight, where we share pictures from when we’ve had the opportunity to meet each other in person or magical moments that we're able to deliver.
