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Nice to meet you!
A Buffalo, New York native, Laura relocated to New York City in 2006 and started her career working in professional sports. She holds a degree from the State University of New York at Fredonia in Communications and received her MBA at Pace University in May of 2019.
Laura just moved to Maryland with her husband and son, and due to Covid-19, have been spending a lot of time driving around the area and playing DoorDash roulette. In normal times, you can find her traveling, taking photos of landscapes and obsessing over the weather - sometimes combining all three together!
Home: Welcome
My Story
I have always been one who can't sit still.
Since I was young I found myself trying new things and keeping busy with as many different activities as possible, and find I am constantly reminding myself of my past to bring experience to my future.
My joy for singing and performing in high school drama club and choir helped to prepare my public speaking skills.
My first retail jobs at New York and Company and at Anderson's, a small Ice Cream shop in Buffalo, New York, helped to set the bar for my customer experience expectations.
Being a cheerleader and eventually coaching a group of 40 ten-year-olds helped me to understand the environment while working in sports.
A love for travel encouraged me to spend entire hockey seasons (more than 30 months) on the road and ultimately, 90 days in India reestablishing and rebuilding a team.
My amazing family of education professionals (5 tenured teachers!) inspired me and encouraged me to go earn my Executive MBA.
I've worked with large organizations and small start-ups of different industries. With every opportunity, I take what I learned from my past and apply it to create future success.
Home: Bio
Proficiencies
Knowledge & Expertise
Home: Skills
A Focus on Customer Experience
I have a passion for working with clients and partners to bring a focus on operational execution to help grow businesses.
The role of Customer Experience an any organization is to keep the customer top of mind during all major decisions that span products and services. Customers are willing to pay more for a better experience and happy customers are more likely to remain loyal.
I have a proven track record of growing a culture of customer empathy at several organizations. Supporting both hardware and SaaS, I have experience implementing and scaling new processes and ideas to enhance product experience, strategy and delivery.
I have a knack for identifying and influencing product designs and experiences based on customer insights. I am able to drive Customer Experience Programs that are rooted in agile business practices, with cross-functional collaboration and a “build-measure-learn” approach.
Creating and Maintaining Community Omni-Channel Management
Much of my customer service career has been spent in operations - designing and implementing workflows to keeps teams efficient and on task.
I have experience creating multiple Zendesk Brand instances for email, phone, chat, and social support. Including automation, triggers, SLA priorities, branded help centers and workflows for multiple points of contact.
Other Products and Software I have experience as an Administrator creating workflows for include:
GSuite Admin
Shoretel/Mitel
Twilio
StatusPage
Desk.com
Intercom
Help Scout
Kustomer
Zapier
Slack
Microsoft Office
Snap Engage
Olark
LivePerson
Shopify
Shipstation
Shippo
Acuity Scheduling
Atlassian/JIRA/Confluence
GitHub
Clubhouse
Asana
Monday
SalesForce
Online E-Commerce/Store Management
Creating and managing an online store has been one of my favorite projects to date. I have experience managing the operations for five (5) simultaneous separate instances of Shopify for multiple brands and countries. This experience also includes generating notification workflows, creating email marketing designs, implementing promos and discount codes, providing internal reporting, creating product SKU's and product bundles and generating UPCs for multiple products.
In addition, I have extensive experience creating procedures for inventory management partners. That includes simultaneous shipping coordination with multiple 3PL's both domestic and international while processing returns and RMA management internally and externally with 3PL partners. I have also maintained relationships and am familiar with reseller and third party vendor management operations at companies such as Amazon, Best Buy and B&H, and have experience worked with large organizations such as Ingram Micro.
Automation
I believe in being as efficient as possible and automation can be a secret weapon. That's why most workflows that I've created have included integrations with Zapier to Slack, Google Drive, Shopify, SalesForce, Zendesk, Intercom, JIRA and so much more. Why have the team look in multiple places when the basic tasks can be done for you? Some examples of what I've automated:
- Reminders of customer interactions needing attention in Zendesk to Slack
- Updates to open or new issues to Zendesk and Slack, triggered by JIRA
- Live feature requests forms populating a Slack group and Google Doc monitored by the impacted product teams
- Google Calendar invitations for onboarding appointments generated by Acuity Scheduler, then notified by Slack and added to Salesforce.
I have so many more examples of exciting ways to keep your team productive on the operations side! Feel free to ask me about them!
Community Management on Socials
When launching new products, our team decided to create closed Facebook groups for moderation and real-time feedback about the experience. These groups are still prominent today, and I have gained a great deal of experience in curating, managing and engaging the groups to provide feature requests, beta testing participants and a level of customer engagement that is impossible to do just over support tickets.
Project Management & Beta Group Administration
My favorite projects involve customers that are passionate about products that want to share their opinion. I have a lot of experience interviewing customers, and providing direct feedback to product teams. This can be done via video interviews, calls, chats and also through beta groups.
Running beta groups has been exciting. Many may think it is tedious but I just love to collect data, get opinions and present them to others. The fact that we can take the voice of the customer and influence a product for the better is truly rewarding in my book.
Past Experience
What I’ve Done
Home: Experience
August 2020 - Present
Vice President Operations, DrFirst
DrFirst regularly creates unconventional solutions that solve care collaboration, medication management, price transparency and adherence challenges faced in healthcare. As VP of Operations, I am responsible for the Integration, Implementation, Support, NOC and Project Management teams, encompassing the entire cycle of the customer once a sale has been completed. Our customers are mainly Electronic Health Record Companies, doctors and their practices, working to provide their patients with the best care possible.
January 2020 - August 2020
Vice President Customer Service, Sweet
Sweet brings affordable phone service to everyone. As the VP of CS, my responsibilities include working closely with the COO and CTO to build and execute an automation first customer support strategy, that makes it easy for anyone to save money on phone service.
June 2019 - January 2020
Head of Customer Experience, The DB Method
The DB Method is the Dream Booty machine. Coupled with accessories like the Dream Band and Dream Weights, The DB Method was my first experience working in the fitness, consumer goods industry. I was able to bring all operations in house and switch 3PLs from Moulton Logistics to Ingram Micro in the span of 2 months, in addition to creating and launching a new customer support team and help center.
October 2017 - Present
Head of Customer Experience, Vimeo
In October of 2017, Vimeo acquired Livestream.
December 2010 - October 2017
Starting out as a customer service agent in the technical support department, I moved my way through the Livestream organization in many capacities, ending as a VP.
Vice President, Customer Experience, Livestream
October 2008 - December 2010
Live Event Producer, NeuLion
My time at NeuLion was mainly spent managing and creating digital workflow delivery of video for companies like the NHL, NFL and NBA to deliver their content to fans online both internationally and domestically.
August 2006 - October 2008
Producer, New York Islanders (NHL)
At the Islanders, I was shooting, editing and producing video on the fly for fans while the team was on the road. Pre-game, post game and everything in between including in-game entertainment videos, nothing was off limits. Eventually this lead to producing a television show aired on MSG+ called Islanders Illustrated.
Academic Experience
Learning and Living
Home: Education
September 2017 - May 2019
Executive MBA Program - Pace University
Pace University's Executive MBA is an experiential, project-based MBA degree intended for individuals with at least 5 years of managerial or professional experience. The program uses a combination of classroom and online learning and provides experience working with real companies. Students build skills in leadership, critical thinking, and communication, and gain understanding of the challenges of the current business environment.
August 2002 - May 2006
Bachelors - SUNY Fredonia
Major - Communications, TV & Digital Film
Minor- Film Studies, Psychology
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