School of Rock(stars)

Fresh Andrei's Graduation - the final challenge!

Anybody who knows anything about FreshBooks knows that we we strive for extraordinarily awesome support for all our customers. You may have also heard that everyone who starts working at FreshBooks spends their first couple months doing support to get to know both our product and our customers (and if you haven’t heard, now you have!).

In the past few months, there have been a number of new hires at FreshBooks in many different departments. As a Support Rockstar here at FreshBooks, it’s one of my responsibilities to ensure that these newbies are geared up to answer all your questions. In the year I’ve been here, we’ve really evolved this process and it will probably continue to develop as more people come on board.

Here’s a little more insight into our Support Rockstar Training Program:

Everyone who starts is assigned a FreshBuddy from our core Support Team (either Randy, Tim or me). The first thing we do on a newbie’s first day is take them out for coffee for a couple hours, get to know them on a more personal level, explain the culture of FreshBooks and make sure they understand the importance of providing outstanding support.

They spend the next two weeks learning the application, the tools we use in house and having individual shadowing sessions with everyone on the Support Team. On their third week, they are officially added to our support rotation schedule several times per week. They continue to help customers and answer questions until their FreshBuddy and the rest of the Support Team all decide that the new hire is ready to graduate from our Support Training Program and start doing what they were hired to do full time.

Now, we’ve recently started making a big deal out of these graduations. It’s usually a surprise ceremony where everyone in the company stops what they are doing for 15-20 minutes to celebrate. I could say more, but I’ll let these pictures/videos speak for themselves:

And battle begins!

Needless to say, these support graduations have been both amazingly fun and HIL-AIR-EE-US!

Now, I know what you’re thinking and the answer is a resounding “YES! We are still hiring!”. Check out what awesome positions are available on our Careers page.

If you liked this, please vote for my SXSW Interactive panel on How to be a Customer Support Rock Star.