Margot Pollard

What were you doing before you joined Creative Force? 

I was working in email marketing for a marketing software company. I enjoyed the job but I was looking to move into a customer-facing role. Email marketing in a way is customer-facing since you are "talking" to customers but you aren't having those direct person-to-person interactions. I always hoped to find a role that was a little more strategic and involved relationship-building with customers.

And you took a few gap months between jobs to travel before joining Creative Force, right? 

Yes, I traveled to Norway for nine days! I actually took one of my Creative Force interviews from a small Airbnb in a tiny mountain town in Norway. We traveled to Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø, via several trains, boats, and buses, saw the Northern lights, and just had a wonderful adventure!

When you started looking for a role, what stood out about Creative Force?

I was really interested at first in the product. I hadn't ever worked for a creative company like this one and when I was researching Creative Force I couldn't find another product as a comparison. I also knew some people familiar with Creative Force and they had shared how sticky the product was with users and customers. 

Then, as I started interviewing with people in the company, I was really struck by how nice everyone treated me and each other and also how much fun they seemed to have interacting with one another. Despite not knowing much about the product or the industry at that point, I knew those were definitely the types of people I wanted to work with every day. 

A lot of your job is about having a deep understanding of our product and the logic that drives it.
Have you always had an interest in understanding how things work? 

Honestly, I wouldn't have described myself as having that mindset before this job. This role has really brought it out of me in a way I wasn’t expecting. In my past roles, I was doing more content creation and strategy and by the end had moved more into the technical side of figuring out how to optimize nurture campaigns, so I had shown an interest in it, but not to the extent that I am in this role.

What's interesting about this role is that it blends customer-facing, relationship-building with the technical, troubleshooting aspect. That’s a pretty rare combination; you usually have to choose one or the other.

I feel fortunate to have found one that allows me to develop both my soft and technical skills simultaneously. 

Was there anything that made you nervous about making a career and industry switch? 

Oh, so many things! I had never worked in support before and I was nervous about what that meant. What would the tickets be like? How many would I have to handle in an hour? How would the customers treat us? What would their expectations be? It didn’t help that I have had friends who work in Business to Consumer (B2C) support at other companies and they had told me their horror stories of customers losing their minds at them so I was pretty prepared for anything. 

I've been pleasantly surprised by the experience with our customers—it's been nothing like what I expected. Our customers are amazing; they're incredibly nice, patient, and great to collaborate with. Providing Business to Business (B2B) support, like we do, means we often talk to the same people, which allows us to build genuine relationships with them. I've even had the opportunity to meet many of them in person, which is something you'd rarely get in a B2C environment.

I also joined Creative Force not knowing much about the industry so I had both an industry to learn in addition to learning a feature-rich tool. Thankfully, our onboarding at Creative Force is super structured and thorough and my teammates offered me a ton of support to help me get up and running. 

What stands out about working at Creative Force?

I have been working here for a little over a year and the one thing I love most is how close our team is. Not surprisingly, given what we do for work, they have been incredibly supportive in helping me get integrated with the team and company and learn everything I need to do my job. I remember in my early days Bri Horwath and Viviana Malva (Head of Customer Support) sitting with me on video calls as I answered tickets just to support me through my first customer interactions and assure me I was saying the right things. They’ve both offered me a ton of support and reassurance as I've gotten my legs out from under me. 

Another thing that has been so fun to see and be a part of is how much the product has grown and improved in just the short time I've been here. I really appreciate how much customer feedback is taken into account when creating new features. It makes my job that much more fulfilling to know that all of our teams at every level are as committed to being customer-first as I am in my role.

And then, despite us being so spread out, I still feel close with all our colleagues in Europe and have gotten to meet nearly all of them. When we get together, it feels much more like I am spending time with a group of my friends than with work colleagues. 

What are your career aspirations?

I'd love to continue to grow within the Customer Experience team at Creative Force. I’m still exploring exactly what that will look like, but I’ve been so impressed with the team and the customers and have really enjoyed getting to know the ins and outs of the product. No matter which path I take, I’m looking forward to helping more studios implement and grow with Creative Force!