Boldr

As Senior Director of Customer Experience Strategy & Solutions at Boldr, I work with mission-driven companies to design and scale impactful customer experience programs. I partner with clients to improve loyalty, streamline support operations, and unlock growth opportunities through a blend of strategic consulting, data-driven insights, and AI-enabled solutions. I focus on refining service offerings to meet evolving customer needs, ensuring every engagement delivers measurable, long-term value.

Senior Director, CX Strategy & Solutions

PartnerHero

As VP of Community + Education, I’m all about connecting the dots between technology and empathy in customer experience. I lead our efforts to build practical, engaging content that doesn't just teach but empowers. From ebooks and webinars to hands-on masterclasses, my goal is to provide CX leaders with actionable insights into AI and augmented CX solutions.

Working across teams, I bring together marketing, design, and content to create resources that meet professionals where they are—whether they're just getting started with AI or looking to fine-tune their CX strategy. My focus is on making sure our community feels supported, informed, and ready to make meaningful changes in how they approach customer experience.

Whether I’m diving into a thought leadership piece, hosting a webinar, or developing our next big campaign, I’m committed to blending innovation with empathy. It’s not just about pushing out content; it’s about building a space where CX pros can learn, share, and feel confident in their approach to a changing landscape.

VP, Community + Education

Working with our amazing internal teams to leverage our propriety tech, third-party partnerships, and services to bring increased efficiency and lowered cost for stellar CX delivery to all of our Partners.

VP, Managed Operations

As the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, I work alongside our Ops, Marketing and Product teams to educate and elevate our Partners and Associates. 

As the person responsible for defining what "Insights" means for our business, I strive to create educational content, collect data-driven insights, and work alongside our amazing team members to bottle up and deliver all of the CX goodness that we are doing internally.

VP, CX Insights and Community

Venafi

Creating the customer success strategy from scratch for a category-changing new SaaS product. Responsible for hiring, global strategy, forecasting, and developing/launching key initiatives. Current project: implementing automation within our CS org to improve on expansion, overall health, and time to value.

VP of Customer Success

Appcues

Helping people create in-app experiences that people love. I started as a consultant in 2017 helping to build out and scale the support function from scratch. Now, I lead the customer experience functionality at Appcues. That includes customer support, customer success (enterprise and commercial), support engineering, and our implementation team.

Beyond that, I am responsible for structuring reporting and measurement standards as well as KPIs that keep our team aligned with the rest of the company—specifically product as it grows. I've shifted CS compensation, restrategized our onboarding initiatives, and made massive impacts in both adoption and retention. 

The key component of my leadership strategy are experimental, scalable initiatives that put ownership on the individual teams to succeed. I find that ownership is the key to engagement, and love working with individuals on projects from conception to execution and maintenance. There's no such thing as a failure—we can learn from everything as long as we are brave enough to try it.

I also own some of the people-driven leadership aspects at Appcues, including leading initiatives for company-wide career pathing, DEI, remote culture inclusion, and reassessing and designing our company values.

VP of Customer Experience

Consultant

Atlassian

As Head of Customer Support for Trello at Atlassian, I guided our team through acquisition, ensuring timely adoption of all new processes and tools with no customer support down-time. I developed our team to 24/5 support coverage with international hiring and maintained a remote-first team culture. I continue to experiment with and implement new methodologies in document management, support tools, and team productivity initiatives.

Some of the lasting impacts that we have made via out-of-the-queue projects are: self-service support functionality that successfully deflects 25% of incoming tickets per month, proactive support onboarding campaigns improving MAU and customer retention, and internal tools to maintain high eNPS across the support team.

Head of Customer Support, Trello

Campaign Monitor

My responsibilities as the sole member of the integrations team at Campaign Monitor touch on most of the different facets of the business. On any given day you can find me having discovery calls with interested integration partners, helping develop and support new or upcoming integrations, maintaining Campaign Monitor's compliance and customer experience guidelines with our integrations partners, creating training documentation about integrations or development, and focusing on co-marketing strategies for webinars, blog posts and social media. I've also helped to create foundational guidelines for our partnership and integrations strategies: conducting customer research to spec out new integrations, determining which promotional methods will be most effective, and partnering with product and development to execute on them. Equal parts communication, relationship building and technical savvy have helped me towards success in this role and have facilitated my ability to handle all aspects of integrations with confidence—I am just as comfortable working with APIs as I am talking to an executive team about strategy.

If you're building or have built an integration with Campaign Monitor, I'm your lady! My experiences in support and customer success have allowed me to generate a solid understanding of the needs and wants of our customers, thus affording me the opportunity to best guide you in the integrations process and beyond. If you're looking to build, let's get in touch about how we can get the ball rolling, get your integration listed on our pages and potentially do some great things together!

Integrations Manager

Wistia

The Customer Champion role at Wistia is a unique zebra of a support position. While much of my day-to-day involves handling support inquiries, bug reports, and troubleshooting issues with customers, I am also the wearer of many hats. In my time at Wistia I have learned several coding languages, learned how to use programs that I never thought I would get my hands on, and learned how truly important a smooth and frictionless customer experience can be. This has led me to be more involved in the product development process, prioritization of issues on the product roadmap, and enabled me to have a more hands-on understanding of what goes into being on a product team.

Outside of my role as Customer Champion, I built out and moderated our Community with my colleague Elise. I was integral in our weekly video series the Mod Minute as well as managing and bringing in influencers for our AMA series. I was also responsible for implementing and maintaining a process called All Hands Support (AHS), which gets all members of the Wistia team in the inbox for a day once a month. Along with AHS, I put Dev on Point into practice, a version of AHS which creates a bridge between the gaps of Customer Happiness, Product and Development. I was also responsible for the conception and implementation of a number of support practices  and training centered around better efficiency for both inner and external customers as well as conducting weekly 1:1 meetings with the rest of the team. I love focusing on where the big issues are, both with customers and within our individual teams, and trying to figure out the best way to solve them.

Customer Champion & Community Moderator

Apple Retail

-Launch new team building initiatives and practices in support of sales team
-Manage recruiting of new team members to the team
-Communicate feedback about individual sales and customer interaction styles
-Assume responsibility of monthly recognition and implement strategies to better the feedback process
-Facilitate developmental conversations with sales representatives and keep individual progress notes
-Drive store results by exceeding daily goals.

Expert

Northfield Mount Hermon School

-Increased the head count of the team by triple.
-Improved the original training procedures for incoming RCCs to include Mac and PC based programs.
-Maintained system operations for a one-thousand-five-hundred computer network.
-Promoted continuity in training programs for incoming RCCs.
-Functioned as a sound piece between the student body, and the technical development team.

Head Residential Computer Consultant

VP, CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero | Talking about creating your customer experience from scratch. I build and scale customer-facing teams that give a shit and can help you do the same.

I transitioned from being a barista to working in customer experience 20 years ago, and life hasn't been the same since.

I've been fortunate enough to work at companies like Wistia, Atlassian, Trello and Appcues. I've worked with amazing customer-facing folks to create scalable strategies and delight customers. 

Now, I spend my time helping to elevate leaders of teams and empower them to create the best customer experience. Employee-centered teams with simple, beautiful processes are where I find my joy.

Outside of my work with PartnerHero, I also consult and write for businesses such as Help Scout, HubSpot, and others. Let's work together!

I usually keep it pretty unhinged on here, but after speaking at ElevateCX on Friday and seeing a bunch of people take pictures of my slides, I wonder if it's not worth it to try and take one of the topics from my talk and turn it into a series. Enough folks came up to me after the fact to talk about it that it might even be worth the effort. Plus maybe you're tired of my shenanigans, and let's be honest: I'm a people pleaser.

So here we go! Something a little more structured than usual:

CSAT is a liar.

We built entire support orgs around pretending it tells the truth, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t measure loyalty. It doesn’t measure product fit. It DEFO doesn’t measure team performance. CSAT measures how someone felt in a single moment, AND NOT EVEN SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THE PERSON ANSWERING THEIR QUESTIONS. So many negative CSATs I've gotten were after I gave someone bad news about a product policy that I didn't even create. That’s not a metric! It's emotional shrapnel.

We’ve been running CX on vanity metrics, and we’re lying to ourselves about what they actually mean. It’s time to measure outcomes, not vibes. So this is the start of The Metric Makeover Series.

I’m breaking down the metrics that gaslight teams—THAT'S RIGHT I SAID IT—and the ones that actually matter if you care about real CX.

Next up: why “total resolutions” is just as garbage as your watch telling you you need to take 10k steps a day to be healthy. (You only need 3k, tbh, and it's actually about the speed at which you take them rather than the volume). 

Let’s try this out.

Mercer Smith

CX Strategy & Solutions at Boldr; Author of CXOXO | Talking about creating your customer experience from scratch. I build and scale customer-facing teams that care and can help you do the same.

Some of you have never spent 3 hours wrestling with a Zapier webhook payload, crying, googling “why won’t this JSON work,” and then discovering you missed ONE curly brace…and it shows.

I just thought I'd give Zapier's copilot a little spin to create a custom Slack bot and it just...works? What?

Send help, I'm about to automate everything.

Imagine a hospital bragging “we treated 80,000 burn injuries this month!” Sure that number is impressive but also why are there so many fires? Shouldn’t we work on fire safety?

Same deal with tracking the number of tickets you resolve. High resolution volume doesn’t mean good support. It means your product is confusing or your policies suck or you have tons of bug/process debt that you aren’t resolving.

Stop celebrating ticket volume, and start celebrating when you fix friction. Report on how often support tickets result in changes to your product, how much of your lifecycle is improved by insights, or even just how many ideas get passed to product from support. 

Another entry into the metrics makeover series. 👀

Hiiii. Saying “everyone in my company actually works in support” is DEFO not the flex you think it is. It diminishes the very real work that your support team does as connectors and influencers, and implies that “anyone” could do support. You wouldn’t say “everyone at my company works in sales” if you were a product-led growth company, why say it here if the implication is that you are a customer-led growth company?

Here are some things to try instead that give me way less ick: “everyone at my company works in service of the customer.” Or “everyone at our company knows and values the things that our support team brings to the table” or “everyone in our company knows that if someone in support is bringing them an insight, they should listen because it’s probably important.”

Or better yet “we have integrated support and their insights into our product, marketing and development lifecycles so the perspective of the customer is never far from our business decisions.”

Kk baiiii. thnx for coming to my ted talk.

Closing out an amazing week in Mérida with all my RLT and SLT friends from Boldr and finishing it eating airport breakfast and wishing the happiest birthday to Chrissy Sebald! Happy birthday Chrissy, may your birthday hold no canceled flights. 

I’m so excited for the future of this company and all the amazing things we are going to do in 2026, and I am especially excited that I get to do it with people that I cherish and trust deeply. 

Thank you to David and Mari for building a team that works and plays together, my RLT buddies Peter, Ray, and Shanon for putting the fun in FUNDS, and my fellow SLT folks (only Chad Inna and Greg haven’t been mentioned yet I think) for leaning into hard but meaningful conversations. 

Enjoy the random photo dump, LinkedIn. See you on the other side of my hellish trip home which had a real Planes, Trains and Automobiles vibe while navigating airline staff shortages and my second flight home getting cancelled. 🤙

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One time I accidentally reopened 40k closed tickets, and when I reached out to Desk support to try to get help they said that I was SOL. So instead, I had to operationalize a dream team of my colleagues to help tackle the backlog and get back to a good place with the queue.

Nightmares like these can be learned from. Let my (and our other speakers') mistakes be your advantage.

Come hang out on the 20th to get more! and bring your own stories!!

Open article: Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: “When SaaS teams learn the hard way”. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. by zoom.us

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: “When SaaS teams learn the hard way”. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Some of you are out here using AI for PrOdUcTiViTy while I am creating a GPT to DM and manage 4 other AI-generated player characters through Curse of Strahd because I can’t maintain a regular game night and I miss tabletop. 

We are not the same.

Average Handle Time is the MLM of CX metrics. It really is out here “Hey Girl”-ing your entire org.

It's all fun and games until you realize the whole thing is propped up by bad incentives, magical thinking, and a promise that “if you just do MORE, you’ll be successful.”

It rewards hustle over outcomes (“Just answer faster! Grind harder! Crank those numbers!”). It turns your team into performers instead of problem-solvers. It punishes anyone dealing with real complexity, and the only people who benefit are the ones SELLING THE NARRATIVE (hi, CFO dashboards).

Fast doesn’t equal good. Short conversations don’t equal resolution. And also, spoiler alert, if your human AHT isn’t going up, it means your bot isn’t doing nearly enough/the right things.

not to open a can of worms, but don't even get me started on accent translation software and the prejudice that people with accents experience (which I feel like is totally related to this, tbh, and I feel rullll spicy about as a first-gen USer.)!!!

Everyone in CX has a horror story, the kind where you think it can’t get worse… until it does.

We are 3 days away from our Masterclass for SaaS leaders who’ve lived through the burn-it-all-down kind of CX chaos: angry customers, team burnout, and “we’ll fix it later” moments that came too late.

In 45 minutes, we’ll show you where to actually invest in CX to improve retention, which tools are worth your time (👀 CSAT, we’re looking at you), and how to turn CX from a cost center into a growth advantage.

📅 November 20th
🕛 12:00 PM CT
Come for the lessons. Stay for the laughs. 

🔗 Register now: https://hubs.ly/Q03TB00g0

Content & Comms Strategist | Knowledge Manager | Experience Architect

Hi, friends! As my temporary contract as a Senior Support Content Strategist at Coinbase comes to a close, I’m looking for my next step.

I don’t just write communications and content - I build the systems behind them. Mature operations, smoother reviews, and faster launches. That’s the impact that I bring.

Over the last few years, I’ve focused on:

 🔨 Building scalable knowledge base & help center content
 🔁 Designing and maturing the systems that power content intake, production, and review
 🤖 Structuring content for both AI-forward and human-first support experiences
 📣 Strengthening change management and team culture through thoughtful internal and executive communications

I’m open to opportunities in:

 🧠 Knowledge management
 📖 Content operations & marketing operations
 💬 Internal communications
 🌐 Web content production & maintenance
 🎯 Program and project management
 ❓ More? My skills flex into all sorts of roles!

And while I’m flexible on industry, I have deep experience in:

 💰 Fintech & financial education
 🎨 Artist tools & the creator economy
 📺 Entertainment, media, & events

I’m largely looking for a full-time role, but I’m also open to contract and freelance opportunities. If something crosses your feed that feels “very Alex,” please send it my way!

I’m lucky to have built meaningful relationships with so many talented teammates and collaborators, and I’m grateful for the support as I figure out what’s next. ✨

Everyone is yelling (yapping? did I get that right?) about BFCM right now and our SaaS baddies are getting zero love. Newsflash: PEAK SEASON IS NOT JUST AN ECOM PROBLEM.

Feature launches, outages, price changes, renewals: SaaS teams get rekt by volume spikes too. So, funny story, all those BFCM events are actually good for everyone?

Anyway, on that note: I’m running a live session TODAY AT 12PM ET with Ethan Walfish and Neal Travis 🌱 for ElevateCX on how to get your team peak-ready THIS WEEK. No corporate pep talk. No “remember to breathe” nonsense (though maybe on another day, because that's important too). Just actual stuff that you could do today, whether in ecom or elsewhere.

We’re covering:
1. 3 moves you can ship THIS WEEK to prevent chaos
2. How to do a macro detox (aka deleting the ones that should have died 6 months ago)
3. One policy tweak that slashes repeat contacts instantly
4. AI you can safely turn on this week (and the AI that will 100p bork you)
5. How to add capacity without destroying quality
6. triage rules that protect VIP and high-risk tickets

Peak season and backlogs are NOT about answering faster, it's about protecting and actioning the right tickets first. If you don't control your triage rules, your volume controls you.

TLDR, get in here. Bring a notebook.

Open article: Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Oops, you forgot BFCM was a thing: Your last-minute survival plan. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. by zoom.us

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Oops, you forgot BFCM was a thing: Your last-minute survival plan. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

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