Response Time: Vol. 8
You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?
With Sarah Donahoo, Head of Marketing & Customer Success at Fugo.ai.
Please tell us a little bit about your company and what you do there.
I’m the Head of Marketing & Customer Success at Fugo.ai. You can think of Fugo as being like Canva for digital signage screens. That is, it’s a platform that lets you pull together live business intelligence data, social media, feeds from your workplace systems, video streams, and a whole bunch of other content into living digital posters that go on TV screens. Neat, right? 🤓
Which celebrity would be really great at your job, and why?
Matthew McConaughey. Besides just being good at everything, ever … he’s got this intensity and zest for his work that’s really evident both on-screen and off, if you’ve ever encountered his interviews. And he’s one of the most got-dang charming people you’ll ever encounter in conversation – something I hope we’ve got in common!
What’s your greatest productivity hack?
Get some kind of AI assistant tool for your calls/meetings. I’m using one to record my customer calls – it gives me not only a transcript of the call, but a pretty comprehensive TL;DR of the key points, as well as some suggested follow-up items. And it all gets automatically pushed to my CRM. You wouldn’t believe how much time I’ve saved writing up recaps.
What’s the strangest thing a customer has asked you?
This wasn’t a question, but a customer once told me after our video call that my eyebrows were “on fleek – the best I’ve ever seen.” I’ve carried that little treasure around in my pocket ever since!
What do you doodle when you’re on video calls?
Mrs. Sarah McConaughey … kidding! (Kind of.)
What book are you reading at the moment?
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. I’m working my way through all of his novels!
What’s the best thing a customer has ever said to you?
It’s really hard to narrow it down to one singular thing, but something that consistently encourages me is when a customer thanks us for the personal and prompt approach we take to our customer success and support. We’re still a really small team with a fast-growing customer base and volume of support requests, so when we hear that our team has gone above and beyond to solve an issue for our customers that our competitors couldn’t or didn’t fix with their bigger teams and resource pools, well, it really warms my heart. If your resources are limited, know that genuine empathy and initiative cost nothing, but can make such a big impact!
Where do you get your support leadership news?
The most helpful resources I have for encouragement and insights on support leadership come from my Slack channels and startup friends that reside digitally within those. Support people need support, too!
What’s your most used emoji in customer chats?
Oh, the arm flex 💪 for sure.
Do you identify more with the title “customer support,” customer service,” “customer success,” or “customer experience,” and why?
Customer success. The nature of the projects that our customers work on requires wide organizational buy-in and discovery before they really succeed and scale with our product. So we offer both high-touch technical and creative support and consultancy that helps customers evolve into real power users. I think “customer success” envelopes all of these things into a handy title!
What was your “15 minutes of fame” moment?
There is a semi-viral video of me carrying a tortoise to safety in a bikini while it does a projectile-poo on me (am I even allowed to say that here?). Obviously, I will not be dropping the link 😂
What do you wish people knew about working in customer service?
That we are your staunchest advocates! And that we don’t actually wear those awful headsets (at least most of us don’t 😜). Everyone on the Fugo team – and I really do mean everyone – is involved in customer support to some degree and takes customer issues to heart. We work so hard to build our product and get attached to it at potentially unhealthy levels as our “baby” … so we want it to work for you, I promise! Trust that we’ll have your back as best we can and that it makes us genuinely bummed when it didn’t work out for you.
Conversation closed… for now 😏
If you’re interested in being featured in our Response Time series, you can share your insights on customer service – and thoughts on which celebrity would be great at your job – with us here.
