Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios. We're kicking things off with Customer Success Manager Georgie Dorling.
Q: What is your favorite incident.io memory?
My favorite memory has to be our Barcelona offsite. I feel like it’s an easy answer, but it’s a core memory when I think back at my time here at incident.io. We work really, really hard and I think the offsite is a chance for us all to come together, have a bit of fun, and get to know each other a lot more which helps form strong relationships at work.
Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?
The value that most resonates with me is Win Together. I think this probably comes a bit inherently in my role as a Customer Success Manager, as working with customers to make them successful involves interacting and working with a lot of different teams. It’s a collaborative approach. For example, reaching out to Product and them jumping on calls when needed, and collaborating with Sales for the handover. It takes a village, which is a phrase that is used a lot at incident.io, but I think everyone really embodies that.
Q: What is your favorite benefit?
My favorite benefit is the one I think everyone will say…last Friday of the month. So I'm gonna go a bit outside the box here and say the ClassPass subsidization. I was a user anyway, but to get extra credits that I can use to do things that I love—like a workout class, going to get a massage, a haircut or something like that—that’s a really nice way of looking after employees and I really, really value it.
Q: What is your favorite Slack channel?
My favorite Slack channel has to be #compliments. This is where we filter in nice things that our customers, prospects, or anyone externally has said about us. Usually that’s them saying how easy the product to use is or how much they value our support and the partnership. Things are sent in there daily and it's a little motivation boost every day, which is just really nice to see. I think everyone in the company loves looking at it, so yeah, that's up there for me.
Q: What is one piece of advice you'd give yourself on your first day?
I think just leaning into the really good feedback loop that we have between our Product Development, Customer Success and Sales teams. The strength of the internal partnerships that we have here is something very unique to incident.io. It's something I haven't experienced before, how good it is.
I also think I’d tell myself to use the product, dogfood the product, be opinionated and provide opinions on how we can improve things, and do that as much as possible. This feedback is really, really well received and helps you build up trust not only internally, but also externally with customers.
Q: What advice would you give to any candidates interviewing with us?
I would say read our content. We are so good at putting content out there. We've got the podcast, we've got webinars, we've got blog posts. There's so much out there, which gives you a really, really good view of what we're like as a company and what it's like to work here. Digest as much of that as possible and get a feel for if you want to work here, which you probably will. I listened to a load of the podcasts and then spoke to [incident.io Co-founder] Chris. I was like, “I feel like I know you already!” I think I knew his favorite meal or something that had been asked!
Q: How would you describe the culture in three words?
Tenacious: we do whatever it takes to reach the goals that we need to achieve. Also collaborative. All the teams are just very willing to help each other out and it goes hand in hand with us being very transparent. Everything is viewable in Slack team communications, which means everyone is willing to jump in and lend a hand sometimes when you least expect it, which is really nice. Finally, rewarding.
Q: Which employee would you want to be stuck in an elevator with?
I think one of the founding engineers, I'd probably bore them to death with all my questions and they would be doing all the talking, not me, but I would ask them to give me a detailed run-through of their incident.io journey from zero to a hundred and tell me all the good, the bad, the ugly bits.
Q: What does last Friday of the month mean to you?
So many things. I think the last Friday of the month is “me time”. I really like my own company. Having one day a month where I can go for a run and go get a coffee, do some life admin, as boring as that sounds, just knowing that you have that day every month to do it. When we all work so hard, it makes a huge, huge difference. I come back with a fresher mind and ready to attack my working day.
Q: What are you most looking forward to with the future of incident.io?
Honestly, there are so many things. Maturing as a company, as we start to increase the sort of products that we deliver in terms of moving into supporting Microsoft Teams, building up the kind of maturity of the organizations that we're working with. There are so many opportunities for us to grow as an organization, for me personally and my career growth as well, and helping mature the team and looking at how we scale in that next part of the journey.
Q: What is it like being part of Customer Success as a team?
It's really nice to get firsthand experience of how much our customers love the product, and being able to influence how we grow the product. Thinking about what [our customers] might be missing at the moment, what are our key priorities moving forward, and being able to influence that is very rewarding. Additionally, reporting back internally on what really makes us successful for our customers and how we can keep doing it.
Q: How does Customer Success partner with Sales?
I'd say the Sales and CS partnership is a very important one. Once we sign a new customer, the handover from Sales to Customer Success involves making sure that we don't lose any knowledge, nothing falls between the gaps and that we give our customers as smooth of an onboarding journey as possible. Everyone in Sales is just so willing to help out, nothing's too big of a job. There are certain customers where CS might get involved really early but otherwise there's a really good culture of trust where I can rely on the Sales team to give me all the information I need in order to give our customers the best onboarding experience possible.
Q: What was something that surprised you when you joined?
What surprised me? The transparency, everything is on Slack. Every customer pretty much has a Slack channel. All of our founders, engineers, support team and customer success are in those channels, which at first is quite daunting. You're thinking, “I need to send some comms out to a customer, but everyone in the organization can see this and I'm one week in." After a while, you get used to it and actually, it's a huge benefit. If a customer has a tricky question, I can lean on an engineer to just jump right into that thread and give them an answer within minutes.
Q: What has been your favorite customer interaction?
I think there have been so many, I work with so many amazing customers. But I think one of the highlights for me was earlier this year when we had our sales kickoff in New York and all of the commercial teams came together. I held a fireside chat with one of our largest customers who has challenged us to drive our product to do more. In the fireside chat we talked about what went well with their onboarding, the key pain points they were looking to remediate, and what successes they have seen with incident.io. It was a really honest and nice conversation that the whole commercial team got to see in person. So yeah, it was really nice to showcase all of the hard work that was done in onboarding that customer.
Q: If you were to join another team for a day, what team would you join and why?
I think I would join Sales. I get to work with so many great customers, but I would love to try doing a bit of outreach to a company that thinks they could see value in incident.io and see if I can get a meeting booked with them. I think it would be quite a fun activity to do for the day.
Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?
I think any company that takes their business seriously needs to have a reliable product if they care about their end users, whether that be other businesses or customers. Incidents will always happen, there is no perfect world where someone would have no incidents. By taking it seriously and having a tool that makes having incidents a nice experience, it just makes everything better; it allows you to have a more reliable product, happier engineers, and hopefully your incidents are remediated quicker as well so it benefits everyone.
Q: What is something unusual about being part of the Customer Success team?
I think something unusual about the customer success team is the fact that we have Slack channels with all of our customers. Historically, I've always had it where my inbox is the first thing I look at and that's your main method of communicating with customers. However, it's a slow way of communicating and having Slack channels with your customers means you can just reach out to people and say, I need a favor; it's just such a quick back and forth. It has benefits for the customers as well in terms of when they need support. I was concerned about how I was going to keep on top of it but now it just allows you to do your job so much quicker.
Q: How does incident.io recognize employee achievements and milestones?
We do awards for who champions our different values, which I think is a really nice way of getting recognition. We also have our #gratitude Slack channel, which is similar to the #compliments channel, but whereas external compliments are posted in #compliments, #gratitude is for internal purposes, shouting out people that have helped you or done something really well. People are always willing to give feedback and then shout out people's achievements.
Stay tuned: There's more Behind the Flame content coming soon.
