CTM Team Spotlight: Sheri Thomas
One of our favorite traditions here at CallTrackingMetrics is nominating our colleagues for our internal culture awards. The culture awards recognize outstanding employees who embody our core values as a company: Impact, Innovation, Customer Driven, and Community. As we embarked on a new year, we were excited to highlight one of our most talented employees—who also happened to receive the most nominations from other team members—our Senior Customer Support Engineer, Sheri Thomas.
Now, I’ve only been here a few months, but after sitting down with Sheri, I totally understand why she earned so many nominations. She’s smart—as one of our senior support agents, she’s helping her team with advanced questions all day. She’s caring—whether it’s making our customers happy, making her team members happy, or making her two boys happy at home. And she’s passionate about our product—I watched her face light up when chatting about smart routers in a way I never thought possible. So to kick off our new series highlighting the incredible CTM team, let’s get to know Sheri!
Name: Sheri Thomas
Title: Senior Customer Support Engineer
Favorite food: I’m a foodie!
Favorite show right now: The Witcher
Drink of choice: Coffee
Favorite singer: Beyonce
What’s your sign? Virgo
Early bird or night owl? Early bird
If you were a Spice Girl, what would your name be? Funny Spice
What would your DJ name be? DJ Lose Control
I just heard that yesterday was your 3-year anniversary at CTM—congrats! Does it feel like it’s been three years?
Sheri: No! It kind of flew by, just because it’s so fun here. How many people can say they go to work and it’s fun? Being in a startup environment, things are always changing and we grow and move quickly. I think I was employee number 16? And now we’re close to 50.
Do you have a memory that sticks out from the past three years?
Sheri: Personally, I was pregnant my whole first year, so I unfortunately missed out on a lot of the team activities in my early days. After I had my kid, though, I started joining in on all the events our team organizes—and realized that we are all certified crazy! I love all the different activities we do, whether we’re sharing potluck dishes for our annual Thanksgiving feast, competing for best Halloween costume, or dressing up to celebrate Spirit Week. Our work environment is filled with smart, creative, fun people who always keep it interesting. If I had to pick a favorite memory, it would be a team bowling outing we did my first year. We should bring that back!
Shifting gears to our software and what you live and breathe each day… Do you have a favorite CTM feature? Or one that you think is underrated?
Sheri: The smart router is totally underrated. I think it’s an intimidation thing, because the tool can do so much, so fast. If you have a lot of conditions in terms of how you want your calls to be routed, the smart router can control and catch everything for you. For example, if you only take calls in one country, but something slipped in marketing and calls are coming from a different country, you can catch that with a smart router. I definitely think more people should use it, and we should put it out there more.
Read More: How CTM Uses CTM: The Smart Router
What are you working on today?
Sheri: What am I not working on today? Helping my team with their questions. (It’s always questions, right?) I’m helping my premium support client get set up with our new internal chat feature so their agents can interact with each other within CTM. We’re running a couple more tests on that and then launching it for them today so they can start using it ASAP. I know they’ll be excited about it and it will be a total time-saver for their support team.
What’s the hardest part about working in tech support?
Sheri: Software can go wrong, and go wrong fast. If you mess one thing up, it can break so many other things––it’s a domino effect. And with a complex and highly customizable software like CTM, it’s not always intuitive how to set something up in the best way to meet your goals. The most challenging aspect is when you’re helping a customer who may not be as tech savvy and you have to adjust quickly on the phone to meet them at their level. I’m not on the phone as much these days, but I can tell I’ve gotten better with that over the years.
What’s something you wish more people understood about tech support agents?
Sheri: I wish more people understood what technical support is supposed to be used for, and at what point you’re moving into a more consultative relationship and should be engaging paid support or professional services. Our technical support team is focused on providing help for any technical issues you experience with our software, but not necessarily instructing you on how to set up or best configure your account. We have an incredible professional services and premium support team who can help with that and dedicate time in their day to working with you 1:1 on those questions. Often times, there is someone waiting in the queue who needs us right away to help with an urgent issue, and we want to provide that support to them as quickly as possible. To be honest, I really enjoy the troubleshooting aspect of working in technical support, because it’s like doing puzzles every day. I would never want to take that away.
What feature do you get asked about the most?
Sheri: Triggers. What are they and how do I use them?
Read More: How to Use Triggers with the CallTrackingMetrics Softphone
We have a complex product. Do you think it should be more simple?
Sheri: No, because that’s what makes our product so great. Pretty much every time a customer calls in with a request, I’m able to say, “Absolutely, yes we can do that.” It’s rare to have so much flexibility and opportunity within a software to customize to your customers’ needs. We have simple things, too, though, which are outlined in our presets. We try to make the system as approachable as possible, while giving people the leeway to make it what they want.
I enjoy the troubleshooting—it’s like doing puzzles every day.
What do you like to do outside of making our customers happy?
Sheri: I like to make our team members happy. I’m a “behind-the-scenes” person. I really enjoy helping my team out with the questions they don’t understand. Outside of that—loving my kids! I have two boys, and they always think it’s playtime when I get home.
What’s the hardest part about being a working mom and what do you wish people knew about being a working mom?
Sheri: I’m pretty sure everybody knows how hard it can be—that’s no secret. But maybe people don’t understand that it really is as hard as you hear. When I get home from work, I go home to a different type of work. There have been nights when I didn’t sleep, but I still somehow made it into the office the next morning. At least you know that it’s temporary, and in the meantime we have our favorite thing in the world, which is coffee! And Red Bull. So I drink a lot of water in between those two things to stay healthy.
Do you have any advice for someone interested in working in a job like yours?
Sheri: Come in with a fresh mind—seriously, I mean that. Do memory and brain exercises, because you’re learning software, and you can’t troubleshoot software that you don’t know. Most of all, be humble and patient.
About the CTM Customer Support Team
Every day, our customer support team answers hundreds of questions and solves problems for our customers, all while laughing and smiling throughout the day. They’re superheroes and heroines, and they make our product better by paying close attention to what our customers are saying. No matter what plan you’re on, you can always dial the phone and talk to one of our support agents or click to live chat—rather than being stuck waiting for an email response. In this series, we celebrate the employees who make our product great and act as champions for our customers!