We hope the experience of reading this job description is as exquisite as Verblio’s customer experience will be when you’re through with it. And if reading this is unpleasant, well, we’re open to feedback on improving the CX of our JD’s too, so let’s go. 

We’re looking for a Senior Manager of Customer Experience to join our legitimately fantastic team!

Verblio is a content creation marketplace and platform  based in Denver, CO. We are content marketing enthusiasts who are proud of the amazing brand and platform we’ve built. We’re in full-tilt growth mode with  grandiose plans for world domination (the friendly kind) and show no signs of slowing down. 

Content is vital to modern marketing, and it’s really hard to do well—at scale. (It’s hard to do great things in large quantities. That’s why wedding food is often so bad.)  To help companies do that, Verblio is home to a thriving marketplace of 3,000+ writers combined with an easy-to-use platform to collaborate with them, allowing 1000s of modern digital agencies, businesses, enterprises, and publishers to create great content. 

We’re led by a 15-year marketplace industry veteran and staffed by a team of energetic, eclectic startup junkies, word nerds, D&D nerds, and random liberal arts degree collectors. Together, we brew a powerful SaaS + marketplace potion. We’re intoxicating, but not toxic, and we think you’re going to like it.

Now, we’re looking for the right Senior Manager of Customer Experience to join our team. 

About the role:

A little context:

Platforms are cool, and scale is sexy, but everyone wants services. We give the people what they want. Verblio blends a self-service marketplace business, with managed-service for large accounts, and full-service for customers who prefer to be more hands-off. 

Every customer is a special flower, and customers of all shapes and sizes, across dozens of industries, use Verblio to create engaging content that  powers SEO and content marketing. We know content is deeply personal, and the rules of SEO are ever-changing. We help customers navigate those challenges with blog posts, local landing pages, e-books, and more. We also offer optional services like content optimization, stock photography, and short videos.

That means our platform, user experience, and team do a ton each day to serve our customers well. While we’ve always been a customer-centric company, we’ve never had someone leading the charge on customer experience. Now is the time for that to change.

That’s where you come in:

We’re looking for a customer experience (CX from here on out) enthusiast to figure out how to maximize mutual long-term value between our customers and Verblio. You’ll be our very first CX hire, which means you’ll have a tremendous amount of hands-on influence over CX strategy and execution, as we continue our quest of creating a consistent, and consistently remarkable, experience for all our customers.

You’ll dive in to understand the customer journey deeply, then collaborate across the organization to improve it, making it:

• More customer-centric. Are we communicating with and enabling customers how and when it’s most useful to them?
• More consistent. How can we ensure that a customer feels like an email they get from our billing system, a pop-up they get in our app, and a support ticket they receive in answer to a question come from the same  trusted advisor—one who understands their full journey with us?
• More on brand, fun, and helpful. We’ve worked hard  to build a brand that stands out in our industry. Our unofficial tagline—the friendliest content creation platform in the business—acts as a guiding operating principle that needs to be translated across every touchpoint.

Those touchpoints and the tech that facilitates them are numerous; you (in conjunction with your new friends in Product, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success … is that everyone? Yes, basically the whole org) will  seek to affect, improve, and unify:

• Our marketing
• Our sales process
• The self-serve signup flow
• Our customer onboarding process, which spans our application, email, onboarding Zoom calls with customers, and more
• Knowledge base
• Emails a plenty
• And more

You will consider the entirety of the customer journey, and focus on four facets: find more customers, win more customers, keep more customers, and do more for those customers. (This last line is stolen from a book on CX, bonus points if you know it.)

Here’s kinda* how we think this will go:

*We’re collaborators, not dictators. You’ll help us figure out how it goes, exactly.

Map and understand the customer journey: It’s complex. We need to see it to understand it and understand it to improve it.

Gather data, both qualitative and quantitative, on pain points and opportunities: We’ve made some great inroads into understanding our customers. You’ll collaborate with Product, Product Marketing,  Customer Success, and the rest to grasp our ideal customer and paint an empathic picture of where their pain points are

Start fixing stuff, especially low-hanging-fruit: Because 1) we’ve been on a growth rocket ride and 2) CX hasn’t existed here, you’ll find there’s lots of opportunity to upgrade things. You’ll need to prioritize this, and be on the lookout for low-code/no-code opportunities—Product and Development support will be available, but, like most places, they’re a precious and limited resource, so we’ll need to get creative. You won’t be able to rebuild giant parts of the app right away, but you will have lots of flexibility over things like tooltips & email copy.

Build a CX roadmap, and act as a consultant on new launches, processes, and more, along the way: There are some known larger projects and areas for improvement already waiting for you. We should architect a new signup flow and create a more holistic onboarding process, to name a couple. You’ll build a roadmap for these things and work cross-functionally to implement them. You’ll also be our voice of the customer and consult with various teams as they implement new products, features, and processes.

Look to build remarkable experiences. Sometimes, straightforward and easy to understand is the way to go. Sometimes, delighting customers with the unexpected is. You’ll look for opportunities to do both—we believe surprise and delight can go a long way in building happy customers and a powerful brand.

Experiment and try wild stuff. We believe strongly in the power of a fun, quirky brand. We recognize if we do everything the same way everybody else does and try to act all corporate, our customers will feel we’re just like everyone else. So, let’s not do that all the time. We’ve toyed with the idea of sending a physical instruction manual for Verblio to every new customer. We’re building a virtual zoo of mascot-like creatures who might be fun to build into the customer journey. Those might be terrible ideas; we won’t know until you help us try stuff, test, and have fun.

Help us bake inject CX into our organizational DNA. Though we hear often that Verblio is already a darn friendly place for customers, 1) there’s always room for improvement, and 2) this isn’t going to get easier as we get bigger; it’s going to get harder. You’ll work with teams to create SLAs, talking points, policies, and more to ensure we live up to the aforementioned unofficial motto.

One more thing…we consider our writers to be customers, too. The power of Verblio’s two-sided marketplace comes from the 3,000+ writers on our platform (and hundreds more joining each year). Our writers are our product. Our customer experience can only ever be as good as our writer experience. We see a huge opportunity for this role to collaborate with our writer team to improve writer experience.

What you will need to be successful in this role: 

A disclaimer (because this job description isn’t long enough)

CX is, in the evolution of corporations, a relatively new field. If you have direct CX experience, great. If you don’t, but you have the skills + desire to rock this role, that’s cool too—just tell us how what you’re currently great at translates to CX.

For success in this role, you’ll need most of these:

• 5+ years of experience in CX, customer success, product management, or another discipline you can tie to CX
• A burning passion for improving CX (or a flaming enthusiasm if you hate the word passion)
• A knack for getting others to understand and care about CX as much as you do
• The ability to collaborate cross functionally and the belief that it’s fun to do so
• Strong writing and editing skills. Even though we have a copywriter you’ll collaborate with, and tons of great writers, strong writing skills will still be key.
• Analytical skills. Again, we’ve got some rocket-scientist-level analysts around, but knowing your way around Google Sheets at a V Lookup type level, having interpreted heatmaps, being able to look at Google Analytics and other web analytics tools will serve you well.
• A desire to do all of this in a startup environment where budgets aren’t unlimited, systems can be complex and imperfect, and scrappiness is required

Bonus points for these:

• A basic understanding of content marketing and SEO (and willingness to learn more). 
• Basic UX/UI design / CRO design skills
• Desire to hit the Loom button in your browser and create video how-to content

Cool or unexpected skills that make you great for the role we haven’t mentioned? Let’s hear them in your application.

What makes Verblio a great place to work:

Verblio has a vibrant company culture. We’re smart, welcoming, creative, and engaged in our jobs. We love to share resources and recommendations. We like to make each other laugh. We care about our jobs, but not so much that it kills us. We care about our families, our communities, our hobbies, and our mental health, too. We have a low turnover rate because people love working here. We’re looking for someone that wants to be a part of that. 

Other reasons Verblio is an awesome place to work:

• Stylish sock options
• Competitive equity package built by people who have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to startup equity packages.
• Health, dental and vision insurance with a  generous monthly company contribution.
• Flexible paid time off and holidays.
• Last Fridays of the month off.
• Consistent investment in employee growth. We don’t just talk the talk, we put time and dollars behind helping you grow.
• You’ll have a high degree of ownership and opportunity to inspire your passion and personal fulfillment.
• Did we mention we’ve got a really fun team culture and everyone is delightfully intelligent and that we share a wonderful set of company values? We don’t have needless meetings, don’t tolerate egos, and genuinely like each other. It’s awesome.
• We’re growing, and it’s way more fun to be on a rocketship to the stars than riding in circles on a model train set. (No disrespect to model train enthusiasts.). We made the Inc 5000 list for the third year in a row, won our sixth Mercury 100 award as one of the fastest-growing companies in the Boulder Valley, and just made the Colorado Companies to Watch list.
• Some day when we can safely co-locate again, we’ve got in-person perks like free food & drink, fun events,  a hip centrally-located Denver office, a free RTD Eco-pass, etc… Some day. 
• This position pays $75,000-100,000, commensurate with experience
• Have you read the website? That’ll give you a good idea of our energy.

Excited about this opportunity?

 Please apply with:

• Your resume
• LinkedIn profile link
• A short statement (a few paragraphs) that shows you read this whole thing and that it speaks to you, and that you think you’d be good at it. You might call this a cover letter, but please don’t, because we hate cover letters. We’d much rather read something that breaks the mold and actually tells us something about you.  We really don’t want a bloated essay about how you leveraged impactful opportunities to coordinate improved stock options for monkeys. Leverage your creativity for a more impactful something. We’re excited to get to know you. Thanks for reading this extremely long JD.