Meet the Apptentive Leadership Team

Over the last year, team Apptentive has made some impactful changes with the leadership team, including some new faces, new positions, and new promotions.

With these exciting changes, today is a great time to introduce our 2019 leadership team and learn about what they are excited about this year, what their daily struggles are, what customer love means to them, and more. For fun, we also had them play a game of snack foods “this or that.”

Keep reading to learn more about Apptentive’s highly talented—and fun!—leadership team.

Ken Clements, VP Marketing

What are you most excited about in 2019?

We are doing more and more every day to help our customers understand their consumers. As a marketer, I crave insights about my customer base and seeing how we can deliver meaningful insights to our customers is incredibly cool. Our customers get excited to see it too and then want to dig in more, so we are working hard to keep answering their questions, peeling back the layers more and more.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

How people here walk the talk about loving the customer. It’s not surprising since one of the things we hire for is how much a person will care about our customer’s best interests. It is evident in strategic conversations and in the small things our people do every day.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

Making sure I’m focused on the most important thing and dropping what’s not important. I’m always looking for ways to optimize and work smarter.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

When a company puts a high priority on giving customers a great experience, while still doing the right thing for their investors. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but getting it right means mutual loyalty and value.

Christy Culp, VP Customer Success

What are you most excited about in 2019?

I am really excited to see the team expand in new ways. We recently added new positions to the Customer Success team and now our scope of work can be bigger and more data-driven. Also, we have moved away from a somewhat reactive and more tactical role, to moving the ball more holistically to help our customers think more strategically and provide insights on their consumer’s journey. We are starting and will continue in 2019 to be more of a strategic partner instead of a point solution.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

Everyone is willing to put in the work. It pushes me to work harder because the whole team is in and fully committed to our customers and company. Everyone goes out of their way to ensure other teams are successful. Last year, I moved from Seattle (headquarters) to Chicago and became a remote employee. People were willing to come along the journey with me. When I come back to Seattle for meetings, the office is always great to come into—such great vibes.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

Over the years, we have grown and adapted the Customer Success team focusing on what is best for our customers (innovative) versus what everyone else is doing in Customer Success (traditional). We have a more hands-on approach with customers, which we get a consultative decision on but at some point, that is not going to scale. We are still figuring out the balance of helping customers to see #customerlove from us while also being able to perform at the scale we need to be in a competitive atmosphere. We are not a Customer Success team that is only around at renewals.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

It means consistently showing customers your heart. Treating them as humans and not as just another vendor. We want to make sure everything we are doing is what is right for our customers. Different teams may have different views on #customerlove, but in the end we are thinking about what is best for our customers.

Gloria DaPra, Director of People

What are you most excited about in 2019?

I am very excited to help our team grow and develop this year. We are so lucky to have such smart, talented colleagues who love to learn and expand their skills. One of our values is we bring our best selves, everyday, which includes our desire to be better. As a company, we invest in our team because we care about giving them opportunities to grow.

I am also excited to move into a new space next quarter. It is a beautiful, bright space where we can all feel comfortable and do our best work.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

We have a team that truly cares about our customers and who enjoy working together. Our team has a lot of fun, supports each other, and shares information broadly. One of our values is that we succeed together, and we are able to live that because we invest in strong communication and collaboration.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

Increasing diversity amongst our team is a challenge. We have worked hard to minimize bias in the interview process by being more conscious of the language we use on our website, job postings, and we’ve reframed interview exercises to be more inclusive. I’m proud to say that over 2018, we increased our female population from 35% to 40%!

What does #customerlove mean to you?

To me, #customerlove means listening to and caring about what your customers want. Companies exist because of their customers and they need feedback from them to get better. Deliver #customerlove is our main value and we not only live it with our customers, we help them to build it with their consumers as well. It really is the secret sauce!

Michael Fountain, Director of Product

What are you most excited about in 2019?

I’m very proud of the product we have built thus far for mobile product managers to truly unlock more brand loyalty and brand love from the “silent majority.” What I’m excited about for 2019 is that you will soon be able to tie your customers’ brand affinity to and from any digital touch point, making it possible to actively listen and engage with them throughout their entire journey experience with your brand!

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

I love that we are all customers of the many brands that we serve. Often, we get to see first-hand when our customers successfully implement Apptentive and truly start to listen to, and understand their consumers’ feedback. We celebrate these wins together knowing that we just improved the experience for millions of their consumers too! That is such an awesome feeling! High-fives all around!

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

2018 was a year of change on many levels for Apptentive. For the Product org, we grew from a team of one to a team of five while iterating on our product strategy throughout the year. Balancing time between individual contributor work, strategic planning, and growing a team was the norm. And by the end of the year, we rallied the company towards a unified product strategy and closed the final quarter strong setting ourselves up to deliver a great 2019!

What does #customerlove mean to you?

#Customerlove is a mindset, not a buzzword. To me, it means you are thinking of your customers as people, not users. You are making it easier for them to talk to you, not harder. You are actively listening to what they say, not just surface listening. And you are taking the time to engage with them or respond thoughtfully, not superficially.

Robi Ganguly, CEO and Co-Founder

What are you most excited about in 2019?

Expanding the ways in which we help companies give every customer a voice, in order to dramatically accelerate the speed with which our customers can make more customer-centric decisions.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

We care about each other, our customers, and the end consumer. To us, customer love is not just an idea—it’s a shared and lived value.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

It means an act—taking action to make sure you are understanding your customers, listening to them, taking action, and constantly striving to get better because you know your customers are the reason for your business in the first place.

Pat Goodwin, VP Finance and Operations

What are you most excited about in 2019?

I am excited to see our team gel and outperform the plan we have put in place. We made really good investments in the second half of 2018. On the engineering team, we made quality improvements to our platform. Sales rebuilt the department and invested in training. Customer Success hired two really awesome new team members, and marketing has incorporated account based marketing (ABM). In leadership, we made a plan that everyone is comfortable with and excited about! All these positive changes are going to set us up for success in 2019 and beyond. As a whole, Apptentive is transforming the customer experiences space.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

It is hard to pick one great thing about the team because there are so many. We have solid talent across the board, and everybody is really good at what they do. The team has a really strong work ethic and people are humble. The teams are fun and enjoyable to be around, and we also do engaging activities for people to rally around. I also feel like we have good diversity in age, gender, sexual orientation, and race.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

We are still a startup and a fast-growing company. It is like a double-edged sword. We are “lean” and because of that, I wear a lot of different hats which makes the day go by faster and it’s fun! I run the yearly audit, taxes, legal, budgets, and much more. It is a good mix of tactical and strategic things. Also, I feel everyone can relate to this one—there is always more work than there is time.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

It works on two levels for me. It means we love our customers, create good tools for them to use, and onboard and train them to be successful at their jobs. And on the other hand, we help create the platform and tools for them to increase customer centricity, and nurture customer relationships, which increases their lifetime value and in return increases shareholder value.

Mel Jones, VP Engineering

What are you most excited about in 2019?

While we’ve been greatly successful for the past seven years, I’m really excited to introduce our unique approach to #customerlove into more channels to provide deeper consumer insights to our customers. The anticipation of accomplishing the lofty goals that we’ve laid out for the year is awesome, but I think the journey will be the best part with such a fantastic group of customers, investors, and teammates!

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

The team “loves” to get shit done while respecting people over processes and to celebrate shared success with our customers. The primary reason I wanted to “Be Apptentive” was for the team and culture that is very prevalent.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

I mentioned our lofty goals? That we love our customers? We favor action? The tough decisions and trade-offs it takes to march to a “north star” is hard when faced with day-to-day distractions and requests from everywhere. As in many startups, making sure that the engineering team is focused on the most important items while opportunistically improving our software/architecture investment is always a big challenge. We made a lot of investments into our development environments and quality in 2018—I’m hoping those really help us be more nimble and innovative in our approaches in solving the challenges of 2019.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

To me, it means I can help to solve customer problems before they even knew there was one. This entails putting myself in their shoes as we make decisions to ensure that we’re continually improving their experience.

Patrick McNulty, VP Sales

What are you most excited about in 2019?

I’m really excited to drive the revenue team this year and exit 2019 with our best results ever. The nascent customer experience market is gaining attention due to large acquisitions in the space. Notably, Qualtrics was acquired by SAP for a 20x multiplier on their revenue. This is a tremendous bellweather for the market realizing true value. If you’ve read “Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen, as a mobile disruptor to traditional CX firms, Apptentive is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this wave. Our proactive approach to customer listening at a 1:1 level, versus a statistical modeled approach, will help to catapult us ahead this year. As brands struggle with retention, adoption, and loyalty KPI’s in the wake of GDPR/AB375 regulations on 3rd party data usage, the rise in personalization, and greater consumer power, we will be here to help radically shift the way brands interact with their customers.

What is the best thing about our Apptentive team?

Team Apptentive has great energy and passion. We really saw all these traits come out in our SKO (Sales Kick Off) in early January.

What has been the biggest challenge in your role?

I enjoy the challenge of transforming a seven year-old sales team, implementing the right mix of technology, psychology, and deal choreography to our buyers’ journey. The progress we made in the later half of 2018 really helped set the stage for 2019 and beyond. We are poised to help deliver more value than ever to our customers.

What does #customerlove mean to you?

To echo a comment from Mike Hilton, previously co-founder of Concur, “Increases in NPS (Net Promoter Score) = increases in EPS (Earning Per Share).” The equation might also be written as ESAT = CSAT = EPS. So, when you treat your employees well and give them a voice, they in turn take care of our customers, and our customers take of Apptentive by rewarding us in becoming a successful company.

If you’re inspired to “Be Apptentive,” we’re hiring! Check out our job openings and learn more about the entire team.