Erica Kuschel

About Erica Kuschel

Continued learning, skill attainment, and growth; some of the main focuses of my personal and professional growth over the last ten years. I have a passion for customer support and coaching agents through servant leadership, change management, and finding ways to reach personal goals and realize ambition. My work focuses on Quality Control and high-quality customer interactions. This is driven through establishing peer reviews, emotional validation, as well as psychological and philosophical conversations surrounding word choice, connotations, experience engineering, and high-level support details that make for excellent customer interactions. My prize accomplishment is scaling WooCommerce support from 3 million downloads to 183 million downloads as a Team Lead, original employee #37, and third woman in the company.

Experience

1. Happiness Engineer

   Automattic

   Jul 2015 — Present

   Growth is the theme for my career at Automattic that is reflected in business growth and professional development.*I joined WooThemes on March 24, 2014.* I was employee #37, third woman, and was hired to bring our documentation from WooCommerce 2.0 to 2.1 (Peppy the Penguin) as well as bring my customer support experience to the table.* WooCommerce had 3 million downloads.* Today (April 2021), WooCommerce has 133 MILLION downloads.* Worked through a successful acquisition in 2015.* WooThemes was sold for $30M company and today Automattic is worth $3B.* WooCommerce helped move $20B in sales in 2020!* I established many of our documentation guidelines / customer resources, brought quality control in, helped improve our peer feedback, and lead a successful support team. Team Lead / Happiness Engineer responsibilities include:* Billing, Pre-Sales, Forums, and WooCommerce Support * Customer Service Training * Customer Support Quality Control * Creating Onboarding Educational Materials and Online Lessons * 1 on 1 Coaching Sessions * Content Creation for Internal Team Blog/Announcement P2 * Support Liaison for Product, Marketing and UX * Documentation * Statistics Analyzation * Quarterly Objectives and Key Results * Queue Management * Project Creation and Management * Personal Development Plans * Consistent HR Feedback * Quality reviews for WooCommerce Support * WooCommerce Troubleshooting (Zendesk and live chat) Attended the following conferences:* UserConf * WordCamp US 2019 Assisted with the following:* Accelerate LGBT * WordCamp Austin * WordCamp Nashville * WooConf (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017)* WooConf Store Owner Track - Social Media Team * WordPress.com Representative and Sponsor Speech @ WeAllGrow: Latina

Education

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Radio, TV, and Film

  2001 — 2007

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Bachelor of Science - BS, Radio and Television

  2001 — 2007