Stephen Wood Email & Phone Number

Wokingham, Gb

Reading, England, Gb

London, Gb

Sofia, Bulgaria, Bg

New York, Ny, Us

Key Accomplishments in this role:Customer-Centric Technical Support Strategy:Crafted and executed a customer success-focused vision for technical support, aligning it strategically with company goals and OKRs. Employed exceptional stakeholder management, requirements analysis, and a commercial mindset to drive success in meeting customer needs.Cross-Functional Collaboration and Escalation Process:Led cross-team strategy sessions with development, success, and product teams to establish a unified ITSM-based escalation process. This collaborative effort resulted in reduced escalations, enhanced communication, and improved customer outcomes. Implemented system incident management processes to maintain a single source of truth during unplanned downtimes, ensuring transparent and efficient customer support.Workflow Optimisation and Integration Enhancements:Enhanced workflows and integrations between Zendesk and JIRA, elevating visibility and effectiveness in technical support ticket communications. Proactive Customer Experience through Automation:Deployed Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technologies to proactively manage error messages, reducing the cost to serve (cost per ticket), minimising customer impact, and improving the overall customer experience through process automation.Knowledge Management and Standardisation:Implemented Confluence as a knowledge management platform, enabling standardised documentation of processes, capturing RCA workflows, and fostering cross-team collaboration. This initiative improved process consistency, promoted knowledge sharing, and facilitated streamlined customer support across the organisation.Agile Transformation and Customer-Centricity:Restructured the technical support team to align with agile methodologies, emphasising customer-centricity. This reorganisation enhanced collaboration, responsiveness, and the ability to address customer needs promptly and effectively.

Chicago, Il, Us

Hired to lead the Customer Care organisation at Mediafly, during their crucial growth phase. This role involved defining and leading the customer care strategy. Key successes in this role were the full migration of a legacy support platform onto Zendesk whilst at the same time ensuring continuity of service for our customer base; Implementing and documenting a suite of procedures to ensure the smooth operation of the customer care organisation, working with other teams such as Customer Success, Product Management, Engineering, Finance and Marketing; migration of an acquired companies customer care ticketing system into Zendesk which required full scoping of the acquired companies support processes and mapping this into our existing one. This was completed with no downtime to the customer and improvements in the efficiencies of the acquired customer care team.Key indicators of my success in this role from a metrics perspective were, first response improved by 92%, Backlog has reduced by 44%, Resolution time improved by 25%, CSAT reporting and SLA management were introduced and were both steady in the 95%-100% range. These improvements were archived by a combination of improved structure and processes, focused metric measures, improved knowledge transfer and a switch to collaborative support.Worked on creating strategic recommendations for implementation of Artificial Intelligence driven support, Knowledge Centred Service, Shift Left Support, the importance of a Customer academy strategy, Metrics driven customer care. I was also responsible for the migration of a legacy Zendesk platform into the Mediafly Zendesk platform which was completed on time and with no impact to the end users or internal users

Herndon, Va, Us

Promoted to lead the strategy for a global support team (UK, Denmark, USA, Philippines, Australia and, New Zealand), setting clear direction and goals for a team of senior managers each responsible for key functions within the customer care organisation. A key part of this role is working to drive improvement initiatives and identify strategic opportunities for change and growth. I have presented at customer forums and user conferences globally and I was highlighted as a top talent and as such selected for the executive mentor program and, I am now working as a mentor to others within the organisation. A major element of this role is the development of team members and indirect reports to drive the rising talent within the organisation.

Herndon, Va, Us

Initially hired to manage the technical support for Delteks flagship ERP product Maconomy. Within my first year I revamped the customer care approach within the team to focus on technical and application knowledge to ensure a 360 view of the product. I was also responsible for rolling out collaborative support which ensured that all there was a support network for all analysts so we had no bottle necks within customer care. Over 3 years this improved the % of cases closed within 30 days from 75% to 93%. Following on from these successes I was promoted to Director Customer Care and took on a global support role along with responsibility for multiple products

Austin, Texas, Us

Responsible for on site and remote management and direction of 4 teams of technical support engineers across multiple countries including UK, Japan and Australia across multiple products and functions including tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 and paid support services.Key achievements have been leading the team through acquisition and substantial systems changes; responsible for re-building the team and giving them a clear direction and developing multi product, multi tier teams including rolling out premium paid services. This has involved scoping, developing, piloting and cross selling premium support services to customers, defining the benefits of the service.I have developed and implemented strategies to streamline the process of the transition of customers from implementation into support to ensure a smoother transition including better internal transition of knowledge and ensuring customers work in the best way with support to maximize customer satisfaction.Other areas of focus in this role are managing multiple customer escalations to ensure the required outcome from both the customer perspective and the company perspective. This role also involves working very closely with VP level executives, country leaders, account managers, the sales organisation and operations to keep them all up to speed on emerging issues, new sales opportunities, meetings with prospects and site visits.

Us

I was hired to develop the EMEA support strategy and re-develop an EMEA support team. This involved re-positioning how the EMEA support organisation was managed, driving to the next level in support, focusing on developing a CSAT driven support organisation and re-aligning the EMEA Support org from an end of sales / implementation phase team into a centrally focused organisation. This was achieved by working with regional leadership, customers and staff to identify areas of strength and weakness internally and balancing that with the demands of a CSAT driven B2C customer.Responsible for running the European support organisation, ensuring that the direction of the organisation was in line with the broader global support organisation and working very closely with the EMEA leadership team on direction and scope of the support organisation. Responsible for hiring and headcount budgeting; escalations, interfacing with technical solutions, sales and account management. Key elements of this role included meeting customers and attending user forums and conferences to represent the EMEA customer support organisation.

North Sydney, Nsw, Au

Responsible for day to day management and leadership of the European support team across multiple products within the Objective portfolio of software.

Redwood Shores, Ca, Us

Day to day Management of a team of application support consultants.Key achievements:# Driving the support team to one which is end of the line of the customer experience, transnational process to a proactive one, focused on understanding customer implementation as well as product knowledge.# Ensuring improvement in knowledge of the support organisation by closer alignment of technical implementation teams and, implementation of Document of Understandings with customers to improve partnerships and working practices.# Improvement in CSAT via focusing on improvements in process and compliance.# Requirements gathering, Identification and implementation of new support platform.

Gb

Investigation, Resolution and communication of defects raised by customers on their in house implementations of the Practique incentive compensation management software.Outside of day to day role, key achievements including:Designing and implementing a real time SR tracker to show number of SR's raised and closed in realtimeStreamlining the security side of the support team to securely store passwords and connection details to customers on site premises.

Gb

Managed and ran the Network inventory GIS Application which maintained details of a high availability fibre optic network. Responsible for maintaining relationships with suppliers including the Ordnance Survey and improving the usage of the solution.

Leeds, Gb

Msc, Geographical Information Systems

Bsc(Hons), Applied Geography