Meet Nick Clark, a Technical Support Engineer in our Wollongong office. Coming up on his third Accelo-versary, Nick is the bridge between the Product and Customer Success teams in Australia serving as the internal go-to person for complex technical solutions.
Learn more about his journey to tech support, the micro-culture of the Support Team and the professional development opportunities available to him at Accelo!
In the early stages of my career, I earned an entry-level certification in IT support called CompTIA A+. With this, I was offered a support position at a local startup that provided eCommerce software to help customers manage their inventory across multiple online retailers.
Not long after that, I packed my bags and moved to Australia from my hometown in the UK, where I rejoined the IT sector as a Software Support Associate for an online ticketing platform. While I enjoyed the experience, the lack of career opportunities and small client base meant I couldn’t grow out of entry-level customer support. I set out to return to my startup roots… enter Accelo!
Accelo presented an opportunity for me to work on more challenging escalated support issues and grow into a senior technical support role. After meeting with the team and getting a taste of the company culture, I was more than excited to join the team!
Not only am I fortunate enough to be a part of an amazing global company, but I’m very lucky to have my colleagues on the Support Team, too. Even before the pandemic, I was the sole Australian team member so not much changed in terms of comradery - we’ve always managed to have plenty of fun, virtually! Our team lead and Director of Support will often organize a team lunch before meetings and are never afraid to get the team together for a Zoom team photo!
Our team is always on the same page. For example, our quarterly goals are team-based ensuring that we’re always aligned to achieve great results. One of our team goals is to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction as a team and our team culture enables us to easily get together for a daily stand-up to help each other with tough issues. Because of this, we can get back to our customers quicker and with the answers they need, ensuring we maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
Zooming in locally to the Australian office, I am in a unique position where I get to work (and sit) closely with members of each team in Customer Success including Account Management, Professional Services and Support. This means I get an exclusive look into what’s involved in those roles on a day-to-day basis and see a comprehensive picture of Customer Success.
The Wollongong office is home to the majority of our engineering team, so I often get a peek behind the curtain of what’s in the pipeline for our platform. I also get to celebrate with the team when we have a major milestone release - For example, an afternoon in a ‘Breakout Room’ after the release of the Custom Lists project.
This is the first role in my career where I truly believe that professional development is taken seriously and supported. Both my team and department leads have helped me to establish my career goals and planned how I can achieve those goals within the organization.
Furthermore, I’m encouraged to take time each week to work on my professional development. Before Accelo I’d never worked through or started a Udemy course, but I’m proud to say I’ve now completed a handful, and have plans to start an advanced course later this year.
Since starting at Accelo I had a personal goal to write a guest blog post. And I did! In doing this I had to rethink my writing style and present my blog in a different way than writing a response to a customer's support inquiry.
I was also a part of a cross-team collaboration to deliver an initial implementation for one of our larger clients. This meant attending dozens of live sessions as a support resource and answering tough setup questions in a professional and knowledgeable way.
The Support Team is also responsible for monitoring the developer forum, a place Accelo users go for assistance with the Accelo RESTful API. Since the team took on this responsibility, I’ve learned a lot about the Accelo Public API and APIs in general. I can now answer questions about the Accelo RESTful API’s endpoints and also provide suggestions for different endpoints and requests our users want to explore.
So many examples. Support is who customers go to when they have a problem, big or small. My tickets vary from tasks as simple as granting user access to the platform, to helping a user repair an automation, to solving an error from an important invoice that’s syncing over to a customer's accounting software.
My job is to give clients peace of mind through the utilization of our experience, to test systems and ultimately to be there when they’re stuck. By having these systems in place, our customers feel at ease when enabling a new integration knowing that their carefully curated CRM can continue to be operational and trustworthy. In a way, I guess you could say my work indirectly gives small-business owners confidence!
Nick is looking for a teammate to join him in our Wollongong office! If communication is your superpower, you persevere through complex problems and you’re a driven team player, you could be our next Technical Support Specialist. Apply today!
