I just opened up two new roles on my team: Customer Success Manager, Fulfillment (Dallas, TX) and Customer Success Manager, Fulfillment (Torrance, CA). Both roles are in-person at Saltbox locations. I’ll share more details about those roles at the bottom of this newsletter.
On August 29, I started working from the Saltbox location off of Seaboard Industrial Blvd here in Atlanta. I wasn’t entirely sure how permanent this should be, but I made up my mind by 10 AM when I went back to get my keyboard, monitor, and other accoutrements and bring them to the Saltbox location. This was going to be a pretty significant change in my routine.
Saltbox rents an office off of Peachtree St (P25), which is a good bit closer to my home than the Saltbox location. We’re not required to work from the office—most “central” employees work from home—but there are enough of us in Atlanta that the shared office space makes for a nice hybrid environment.
I really loved working from P25. I had gotten used to commuting there after my morning workout, showering in the building, and putting in a full day’s work at my height-adjustable desk. It was nice. The week before August 29, I even placed a large order of Nespresso pods and organized the cabinet.
But something needed to change.
Getting closer
There was a confluence of events that led to me making the move to work from the Saltbox location, but one particular event stands out. I had been working with our fulfillment managers at various Saltbox locations to learn Zendesk and respond to member emails in a dedicated queue that I had set up just for them. However, despite our best attempts at training and supporting them, they seemed to struggle to stay on top of the queue, and I couldn’t understand why.
Most of a fulfillment manager’s job at Saltbox (in its present form) happens in a physical space. They’re managing workers in the space, receiving inventory, picking & packing orders, and dealing with what seems like a constant stream of interruptions throughout the day. It looks a lot different from “knowledge work” that happens almost exclusively behind a screen. I suspected this might have something to do with the problems I was seeing in Zendesk, but it was still hazy as to what why.
My goal with moving to the Saltbox location was to get close to our micro-fulfillment center (MFC) and “help them get their arms around the support queue in their location”. There weren’t that many tickets, so I figured I would jump in and help and drive these tickets to resolution. Being physically present, I would be in a much better position to get answers and respond quickly. That was my thinking, anyway.
Once I actually got to work, I was amazed by two things: 1) Just how much context you can get by being proximately close to physical operations you’re supporting and 2) how much more ownership I felt for our Atlanta members just by being in the space. Also, a lot of the issues in the tickets were much more complex than I had originally thought.
The context piece is incredibly important. Previously, if I was looking for an answer to a ticket that could only be answered in the MFC, I would leave a note for the fulfillment manager in the ticket and wait for an answer. But when I was there in person, I would just walk over and ask. Usually he would be receiving a purchase order or picking an order, so it wasn’t a major interruption to answer a question as I walked by. Sometimes it helped to get eyes on the situation first hand. This was something we weren’t set up to do very well in a purely remote support situation.
The second piece about ownership is equally important. When I was in the physical space, suddenly member issues were a lot more urgent. That had to be resolved quickly because you had precious little time in the MFC to let problems and issues linger. So when a member from Atlanta wrote into support, I felt a heightened sense of ownership to make that member successful. Not just make the ticket go away, but actually make the member successful. As the director of member experience for all of Saltbox, I shouldn’t have favorites, but when you’re close to the space where value is being delivered for the members you’re supporting, it’s natural that your level of ownership increase1s.
Remote
Remote work has been the theme of many articles and blog posts as of late. I struggle to share a strong opinion without having my own biases and preferences come through. So I’ll just get my biases out of the way.
I’ll readily admit I have a preference for in-person work. I moved my family to New York in 2011 to take a job at Fog Creek Software. Although I went remote around the same time Trello spun off in 2014, I realized after just a couple of years that I missed working together in person, which is part of what prompted me to join FullStory here in Atlanta in 2016. I even moved my family out of the suburbs to get closer to the city and shorten my commute. I have a bias.
I also respect that some people can make a remote setup work for really well for them. I have several colleagues who travel quite a bit and enjoy the nomad life of working from locations around the world. And they can be quite productive without a commute. I suspect if you ask these individuals their thoughts on remote work, you’ll hear a staunch defense.
While we can have a meaningful debate about “remote vs in person” for knowledge work, it’s rather impossible to debate whether you need to be in person to perform actual physical work. If your job is “pick inventory from a physical bin, put it in a box, print a shipping label, and put it on a UPS truck”, that’s not something you can do from your dining room2. You have to go into work.
Getting closer to our members
Which brings me to my most recent job listings for my team:
I’m requiring these roles to be in person at a Saltbox location. Not because I’m “anti-remote”, but because I want our newest teammates to be able to be in the best possible position to learn quickly, take ownership of relationships, and serve our members with a remarkable level of service. Yes, much of this work is true knowledge work, but the knowledge required for this work is won much more quickly in a physical space than it is virtually.
What excites me most about this role is that it’s a real opportunity for growth and leadership for someone who wants to own customer relationships and scale the systems that will serve them. It’s got a strong mix of customer support, success, and experience. Yes, there are emails to answer, so it’s sort of a support job. But those are emails from your customers, so if you make your customers successful, it becomes less of a support job and more of a success job. And if you design a better experience for your customers to achieve success, you have a real customer experience job as well.
While this role requires someone to “attach” themselves to a Saltbox location, right out of the box we’ll need to be thinking about what it means to scale systems so we can serve our customers without having to be in a Saltbox location. That might sound like a contradiction to my this-role-must-be-in-person mandate above, but it’s not. The truth is that Saltbox’s fulfillment customers aren’t physically located in the MFC, so they don’t have a way to get close to their product and know what’s happening. But they want to know. They desperately want to know whats happening with their inventory and their orders, but that’s hard to do when they’re far away.
We totally agree. Which is why we’re hiring customer success managers to get close to the value we’re providing to our members so we can be the eyes and ears on behalf of our members. That will start by having team members located in person in the MFCs and over time we’ll build the systems that make that feeling of “being there” more readily available to our remote customers. The only way we know what’s actually valuable by “being there” is actually being there to learn how the business works.
Does this sound interesting? If you have experience working with customers in the ecommerce logistics space and live in (or are interested in relocating to) either Dallas or Los Angeles, reach out. Let’s build something amazing together.
One of my favorite ways to show increased ownership is taking pictures of what’s happening in the space. My desk is a short walk to the MFC, so if I’m stumped on a question and need to ask the fulfillment manager, I’ll pull up the Zendesk app on my phone, walk over, and take a picture of what I see to send to the member.
Actually, many Saltbox customers do this exact sort of thing before they find Saltbox and either rent one of our workspaces or utilize Saltbox fulfillment.