Empowering Customer Support: Hiring Outside the Box with Erin Ozolins

Meet Erin Ozolins Customer Support Insights Manager at Zapier, who combines over four years of SaaS experience, leveraging data-driven insights in both frontline and managerial support roles. She excels in implementing tools like Qualtrics surveying, streamlining processes, and developing stakeholder-focused dashboards in Looker, while also adept at project management and team leadership for delivering comprehensive monthly analyses.

Check out this video featuring Erin Ozolins our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where she discusses the importance of hiring outside the box for customer experience leaders, emphasizing how diverse backgrounds, such as music, teaching, and retail, can bring valuable skills and perspectives to support teams, enriching the overall customer service experience and team dynamics. Get a sneak peek of her compelling ideas before she takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.

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Charles: Hello everybody. My name is Charles. I'm the director of a customer support team at a company called Coastline Academy, and I've been a Support Driven member since 2015.

I have the wonderful pleasure of talking with Erin Ozolins. Erin found her niche at Zapier as a Customer Support Insights Manager after navigating the dynamic landscape of customer support. Her story began at Zapier as a customer support team member, moving from the core team to enterprise customers in Premiere and evolved into her current role where insights meet strategy. When she's not analyzing the customer experience at Zapier, Erin swaps spreadsheets for sheet music as a French horn player in Calliope Brass.

Erin: Facts. And I'll share with the listeners what I shared with you. ChatGPT loves a music pun, so kudos to her for helping me write this bio.

Charles: Swaps spreadsheets for sheet music. It's like a wittiness that's unmatched. So Erin, you are speaking at the Sport Driven Expo, and the topic of the talk is, "Hire outside of the box."

I would love to learn a little bit more about why it's important for customer experience leaders to hire outside the box.

Erin: My story, of course, biases me to say that it is important. I think you can look at it from a few different ways. Everybody starts somewhere, right?

Support can often be an entry point into the tech industry. It can often be an entry point into an organization for folks who want to grow their careers long term and folks who are coming to support from other industries and other fields can often bring in unique perspective, fresh perspective.

They can bring in skills that have been honed in different environments, but that can still apply in the support environment and help to create a successful team dynamic. So even something basic like patience, someone who has worked in a different field that required patience, and maybe a different setting, is still going to be able to bring that skill of having understood how to work with people, understood how to be patient with people when people are people and those types of skills can really find their way across different fields and different industries. And so taking advantage of those transferable skills is great for customer support leaders because not only are we bringing more people into the fold, but you're also broadening your candidate pool. You're not limiting yourself just to people who have two years of X experience with X tool. By thinking a little bit more broadly and thinking about those other skills that you'll find and say, non traditional candidates, you're opening up your team to have that broader perspective and that broader set of people to draw from.

Charles: That broader perspective is so important because if you are a customer support professional in a customer support organization, and you're only hiring for people who have worked in customer support organizations, it's possible that you all think alike, to some extent.

And can share the same perspectives and the same ideals and the same way you approach customer situations, whether that's from a technical aspect or a personable aspect. Like you said, there are a lot of other industries where people are problem solvers and what some of those industries?

Erin: The first one that comes to mind for me from my personal experience is my background as a classical musician. Being a trained musician, I have seven years of post high school schooling. I have a double degree as an undergraduate in music history and music performance from the Hart School at the University of Hartford.

Say that five times fast. And I also, fun fact, got my master of music in French horn performance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. So when we're at the Expo, I will be in the old student union that I remember from my graduate school days. And I will also be making several stops at the In N Out Burger that's on the edge of campus.

So I have an extensive background and training in being a classical musician. And a lot of times people say wow, that's quite a leap. Like, how did you go from music into software support and into the tech field. How does that even overlap? And some of it does have to do with these skills that transfer. And so as a classical musician I'm problem solving a lot in real time. I'm collaborating with people in order to be able to create the music that we're playing together.

I really don't often perform as a soloist and I really prefer not to. I really much prefer to be part of a larger ensemble. A lot of the training that you'll go through in school, you'll be playing in an orchestra of 60 people. You have to learn how to get along with a lot of different types of people, a lot of different types of personalities, or you won't reach the goal that you're working towards together.

And you won't be able to create the output and the product of the highest quality that you're looking to create. So some of these skills that I've honed as a musician, problem solving, communication, working with others getting along with just about anybody, and even things like grit and tenacity.

Anybody who's been trained in the performing arts can tell you that you have to be bad for a long time before you're good. And so you get good at taking feedback; examining your own performance finding ways for yourself to improve. And so all of those types of skills can bring themselves over into support world.

So for me, for example, it was a little bit of a culture shock coming into a corporate environment and realizing that when people gave me feedback, it was a lot different than getting feedback when I was being trained as a musician. Because say I was going to a master class and I was going to play, I play in front of an audience, and then I get told exactly what I'm doing wrong in front of that audience, and then I have to try to do it better in front of that audience.

And that's just a normal part. You're used to going every week. You go to your teacher and you play for your teacher what you've prepared, and your teacher tells you exactly what you're doing wrong, or asks you to think about different ways to interpret, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm very used to a continuous feedback loop.

So when I got into support and I was new, I didn't totally know what was going on. That process of learning a lot quickly and getting that feedback loop of, this is what you can do to improve was totally normal to me. It didn't occur to me that's not the case for everyone. Some people are not used to a high level of feedback.

And so that skill really served me in that transfer. Other fields that I'm thinking of in particular that come to mind when you ask me that question, someone who's a teacher. A teacher is very used to solving problems and probably not with very much funding behind them. A teacher also is constantly breaking down complex topics into bite sized steps.

And that translates into support as well. If you're thinking about something like a zap, the process of several API calls being made can be difficult to explain to someone, especially someone who's new to the product.

So being able to take that broader concept, break it down into easily understandable, concise explanations, and then break down the next steps to take in order to solve whatever the problem is the customer's having. Somebody who's coming from a teaching background will already have that skill. They just need to take that skill and apply it to a new topic.

Another field that comes to mind is perhaps someone who's worked in retail. Someone who's worked at maybe Starbucks, or they've worked in a grocery store, or they've worked in some kind of direct, customer facing environment. They understand the spectrum of people that you'll have walk in through the door of any given business.

They probably have a honed understanding of how to work with an upset customer, how to make a customer feel heard, even if they aren't able to offer any different solution. Making sure that the customer knows that their feedback is received. We take it seriously. We're not blowing you off. We really want to take what you're saying and help improve our own processes. So some of these different fields have these facets that can be helpful in support. And really can bring value to a support team.

Charles: That's such an interesting perspective. On that first point that you made, which is the feedback, taking that feedback, that is support.

And as an organization, we thrive on metrics. We thrive on quality and it's something we seek a lot of. So you've got that CSAT survey that goes out, you've got a customer effort score. Potentially, you have somebody who's listening to your phone call and reviewing your tickets and getting feedback on all of that and sharing that with you and being able to be coachable and that's something I look when I'm trying to hire outside the box - is this person coachable? We can teach this part. We can teach that part.

Erin: Thinking about that coachability piece, anyone who's been involved in music, in art, in Broadway performance, singing, dancing, whatever sort of performing art form, they're probably used to getting feedback and getting it in front of an audience and having feedback from the audience.

So even feedback from the customer directly, thinking of the customer as your audience. And being used to having that feedback coming back at you and having the the skill set and the resilience already built in to handle that and being able to separate it from your value as a person and the value of the work that you're doing.

That's preparation. It's really hard to get very far, especially in classical music, if you haven't learned how to take that.[00:10:00] And even when you have learned how to take it, it remains challenging. But that skill set can be really helpful in that coachability piece that you're mentioning.

Charles: And being a teacher. Taking something that's potentially complex and not only translating it into something that's more relatable, but also providing a self teaching opportunity for that. It's, here's how you can think about this, or let me educate you on this piece of our software, the product, and you can solve that in the future.

Then the retail part of that, it's high volume, potentially high transaction. It's transactional. Okay. I can provide a good customer experience here and move on to the next one. And the next one, doing that with composure and finding a great customer service.

Erin: experience. Yeah. Being able to handle providing that high level of service at that rapid pace can really translate well depending on the needs of your support team and the environment that you're working in.

Charles: You chose this topic for a specific reason. Hiring outside the box. Why are you passionate about this and sharing it with others?

Erin: Part of it has to do with my personal experience, I was an outside of the box hire myself. And the specific process that I went through at Zapier was that I did not have to submit a resume. And so there was several questions in the application, some that had to do with the product, some that had to do with, tell me about a time when, type of question.

And the opening that gave me has obviously really changed the course of my career. I've been at Zapier for almost five years and I've been able to get into an industry and get into a product and an organization that I'm really excited about. And I really love being part of Zapier. That experience for me personally inspires me to want to bring this message to more support teams to say listen, there's people out there who can and will thrive in your support team environment and bring value to your team that might not be the obvious choice or maybe are coming at it from a different angle. So opening up our collective minds to take a little bit more of a broader perspective to not use, the easy criteria, maybe not lean into that quite as much and have a little bit more of a broad perspective on what am I really looking for? What do I really need out of a team member? And could I find it somewhere without some of those two years of experience with x tool type of requirements. From a personal perspective, I know a lot of musicians, I know a lot of creative people. I know a lot of people who are working in the performing arts. And I have a few friends who have made the transition. My husband has actually made the same transition I did. He's a French horn player, he worked on Broadway as a sub for 15 years. He was a freelancer.

And during COVID, he decided to move into software support and has had a lot of success with that as a career path. And the experience of also participating in his transition and seeing how that process looked for him. Knowing how many people are out there and knowing that those skills exist there and those could really serve support teams made me want to bring this topic and open up the idea in the minds of people who are hiring for their teams.

How can I search outside the box? How can I broaden or change or tweak the criteria that I'm using, especially in the initial screening stages, to find people in more unexpected places that will be a great addition to my team.

Charles: That's wonderful. And this is something that a lot of organizations should lean into.

Erin: Maybe I spend too much time on LinkedIn, but based on some things that I've seen, around LinkedIn, it does seem like that's in the ether of people, recognizing that careers are not a straight line from point A to point B and that people will take different paths, different routes and will have skills that make sense in the next thing that they're looking to do that maybe came from somewhere that was less of an obvious connection.

I think for a lot of people who are in support quite a few folks that I've known, have come from different backgrounds. I've worked with people who were social workers.

I have a colleague who has an MFA in graphic arts and worked for a video game company and then moved to support. I have a colleague who has a PhD in astrophysics, and if you Google her name, has written academic papers about black holes that are in the academic canon.

So folks come from all these different backgrounds, and those backgrounds can inform the way that they approach their work, like my colleague with the PhD is a very technically minded and very methodical person who has now moved into the escalations team and is a great fit for that team because that's how she was trained in her previous work.

Finding those pathways, and making those pathways perhaps more accessible for people who want to make that move and want to make that shift, is something that I'm really excited about because I think it benefits all of us, the more perspectives that you can have on a team. Most companies are paying attention to the diversity of their teams. And thinking of this is another facet of diversity is just career background or life experience, that we can think about might be different from the folks that we're going to find from this broader candidate pool.

It benefits our teams to have those different perspectives.

Charles: I love talking about this. And I say that personally because it's something that's close to me as well. I did my undergrad in geography and have a degree in geography, which has very little to do with what I do now, but I had somebody who met with me and who gave me a chance.

And said, I think you would be great at this. Would you like to give it a shot? And that is the thing that I do now because I'm so passionate about it as well. We both have that shared story, and I love that we can give that to other people as well.

Erin: Those who are going to be coming to the talk, who may be in positions where they're hiring for their teams, how do we help those people give more of those chances with confidence. How can we help those folks find those openings and have an understanding of how you can identify the people, with some reliability, that are a good idea to take a chance on. Because of course, you don't want to have every single person that you hire is a person that you took a chance on. There are concrete skills that are involved in support. You don't want to just wander down the street and say, Hey, what did you do for a living before, do you want to come be on the support team? So being able to help folks in those positions where they're hiring for their team make those decisions with confidence and make those offers with confidence to open up the career path to more people, I think is a wonderful thing.

Charles: I know a lot of people are going to be really interested to hear more on this in Las Vegas, so if you haven't registered for the Support Driven Expo that is in Las Vegas, on October 9th, October 10th. Erin, how can people get in touch with you?

Erin: You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Erin Paul Ozolins on LinkedIn. . And if you want to follow my brass quintet you can find my brass quintet on Instagram at Caliope Brass. I am also on Instagram in my music life. Under Erin plays horn. And if you're interested in hearing me talk from the other side of this, where I've talked to people who are musicians who have moved into other various career fields, I hosted a podcast during COVID called Doubler's podcast, and you can find that on Apple podcasts and at double podcast. com, and I believe it's still on Spotify. I don't hold it to that. And that was about 10 episodes of interviews with folks who are from a musical background moving into different career fields.

And outside of the scope of support, but it's still interesting to see how people take these different skills that they hone and translate them elsewhere. So it could be of interest to those who are interested in this.

Charles: That's wonderful. I'm always excited to catch up with you. And I will see you at the Expo.

Erin: Looking forward to it. See you there.

Check out this video now featuring Erin Ozolins our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!