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About the Author
Larry Streeter is the Vice President of Client Success here at BigCommerce. He works with our support ninjas to create not just an amazing support experience, but also a culture which helps our clients become more successful every time they talk to us. Larry is a Massachusetts native, a foodie and a musician who plays a mean guitar. |
Hello everyone! My name is Larry Streeter and I recently joined the team at BigCommerce as the new Vice President of Client Success. I feel very fortunate to be working for such a terrific company and look forward to building on the success our co-founders Eddie and Mitch and the rest of the team have already achieved.
Just a little bit about myself…
I’ve spent many years in various customer support positions, working in industries ranging from timeshare exchange, biometric security, financial services, and my most recent company Constant Contact where I was Vice President of their award-winning customer support organization (my team grew from 25 to 290 people during my tenure). Along the journey, my passion for building awe-inspiring customer experiences has grown as I’ve witnessed how driving customer loyalty can fuel the growth of world-class companies.
Within the contact center community, I guess you could say I’m a bit of a maverick. I don’t follow the more traditional ways of running a contact center; focusing on driving down call volumes, measuring customer support staff by the number of calls they took, or outsourcing support with the intent of lowering costs. I tend to take a different approach to running a support organization – one that has brought recognition and industry awards (finalist in 2010 for Emerging Executive of the Year from the Massachusetts Technology Council, American Business Stevie Award winner in 2008 for Best Customer Support Team).
Here are some of my personal principles:
- Customer support organizations should be seen as an arm of the marketing department, not a cost center. We don’t just represent the company’s product – we represent the company!
. - The quality of a single interaction between the employee and the client is more important than the quantity of interactions overall
. - The single most important role everyone in customer support plays is providing that “voice of the client” back to the entire organization
. - We’re not about call avoidance, in fact we want to talk to our clients! But we also respect our client’s crunch for time, and as such want to help build a product that’s intuitive and easy to use. Success comes when the level of conversation between the employee and client becomes focused more on how to help drive the client’s success, less on “how do I…”
. - We should always be striving to create a relationship with our clients that is defined more as a “partner” as opposed to a “vendor”
. - When our clients succeed, we succeed!
I consider myself very fortunate to have found such a great company to work for. The culture here at BigCommerce can best be described as a fantastic group of people with an unrelenting focus on helping our clients succeed, working in an environment that is “wicked cool” (that’s the New Englander in me coming out!). And being a musician and a big time foodie, I couldn’t have picked a better location than Austin, Texas to start the next great chapter in my career.
I’m looking forward to doing big things here at BigCommerce!
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