Kat Gaines
Senior Manager, Developer Advocacy and Community at PagerDuty
San Francisco, California, United States
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Kat leads the Developer Advocacy and Community team at PagerDuty. She enjoys talking and thinking about incident response, customer support, and automating the creation of a delightful end-user and employee experience. She previously ran Global Customer Support at PagerDuty, and as a result, it’s hard to get her to stop talking about the potential career paths for tech support professionals. In her spare time, Kat is a mediocre plant parent and a slightly less mediocre pet parent to her two rabbits, Lupin and Ginny.
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Mastering incident communications
When launching new products or dealing with an outage, customer-facing teams see terms thrown around internally that customers might not identify with immediately. Good communication practices, including good translation of engineering terminology to customer-friendly communication, can save time and increase customer satisfaction when moments matter. Customer Support's unique ability to understand both what is happening internally as well as what customers need to hear positions this team as the experts to steer communications during major incidents.
Come to this talk to learn how to partner with your customer-facing teams during major incidents and build both internal and external trust along the way.
Staying in your lane: Incident Response for Leaders
When something breaks, your company may kick off an incident response process and your team may need to play a role. As a leader, your sense of responsibility and maybe a little bit of panic will naturally kick in when you know something is wrong: you're the one many will look to for answers, and you want to have the details handled when that moment comes.
Your natural instinct to handle all of the things can also be your downfall, one easily avoided by leveraging and empowering your team to own their role in incident response. Whether implementing process for the first time or a seasoned pro, we'll go over all of the do's and don't's of maintaining your composure while letting your people lead when s*** hits the fan.
Happy Agents = Happy Customers: Empower your Customer Service Team to Lead the Way
Keeping on top of your organization’s technical platforms as well as customer experience is a daunting task, and it can't be done by siloed teams. Your Customer Service team and the insight they gain from users is critical to the incident identification and response process, and your development teams can use this insight as data to speed up their ability to resolve the problem. As the team closest to the customer, incorporating your customer service team into the DevOps lifecycle will reduce silos, shorten feedback loops, empower agents, grow careers and delight your customers.
Come to this session to learn about bringing customer service teams in line with development teams, organizational goals, and improving agent experience to improve the customer experience. In this talk, you will learn the importance of aligned customer service ops, and how to help your customer service and dev teams establish strong practices of collaboration as one team in service of your customers.
ElevateCX London
You might have ended up in a CX career intentionally or by happenstance. Maybe you took the first good job that came along upon entering the workforce, or maybe you had skills that seemed like a match, such as problem solving, communication, or empathy. However it happened, you’re here now and career mapping can be a little weird in CX roles. Upward movement can be hard, lateral movement can be confusing, and you have to find the right people in your corner no matter which part of the maze you end up in. In this talk Kat will go over her own career trajectory, how she made things happen, and lessons learned through moving ~20+ team members into new roles within and outside of support.
ElevateCX Denver 2024
CX Careers Don't Have to Suck
You might have ended up in a CX career intentionally or by happenstance. Maybe you took the first good job that came along upon entering the workforce, or maybe you had skills that seemed like a match, such as problem solving, communication, or empathy. However it happened, you’re here now and career mapping can be a little weird in CX roles. Upward movement can be hard, lateral movement can be confusing, and you have to find the right people in your corner no matter which part of the maze you end up in.
In this talk Kat will go over her own career trajectory, how she made things happen, and lessons learned through moving ~20+ team members into new roles within and outside of support."
Lesbians Who Tech NYC Summit
Leading Through Crisis :: Empowering Teams in Incident Response
Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit
Documenting Failure: How to Get Incident Communication Right
DevOpsDays Montréal 2024 Sessionize Event
Salesforce World Tour: New York 2024
Transforming Customer Experience: Leveraging SLA Management with Salesforce and PagerDuty
Devops Barcelona
Mastering Incident Communications
DevOpsDays Montréal 2023 Sessionize Event
Support Driven Expo
Mastering Incident Comms for Customer Liaisons
DevOpsDays Taipei
Mastering Incident Communications
https://devopsdays.tw/2023/session-page/2290
When launching new products or dealing with an outage, customer-facing teams see terms thrown around internally that customers might not identify with immediately. Good communication practices, including good translation of engineering terminology to customer-friendly communication can save time and increase customer satisfaction when moments matter. Customer Support's unique ability to understand both what is happening internally as well as what customers need to hear positions your team as the experts to steer communications during major incidents.
SREDay
Mastering Incident Communications
Salesforce World Tour: New York 2023
Aligning Customer Service & Engineering Teams to Improve CX
In this session, learn the importance of aligned customer service ops, & how to help your customer service & dev teams establish strong collaboration practices as 1 team in service of your customers.
ElevateCX San Diego 2023
Best Practices For Customer Communications During Incident Response
When launching new products or dealing with an outage, your Support team will see terms thrown around internally that would sound a little alien if a customer were to encounter them. If sci-fi has taught us anything, it’s that communication including good translation will go a long way to brokering peace between worlds. If you put your Support team in charge of the ship when it comes to comms, they’ll advocate for your users and help others remember that they’re speaking to humans at the end of the day.
Support Driven Leadership Summit Philadelphia
Panel: Creating Feedback Loops: Support to Product to Engineering and beyond!
Salesforce World Tour Sydney
PagerDuty - Breaking Silos: Aligning Customer Service and Engineering to Improve Customer Experience
API World 2022 Sessionize Event
APIWorld
Happy Agents, Happy Customers
Support Driven Expo
Happy Agents, Happy Customers
Lesbians Who Tech
Happy Agents, Happy Customers
DeveloperWeek Cloud 2022 Sessionize Event
Kat Gaines
Senior Manager, Developer Advocacy and Community at PagerDuty
San Francisco, California, United States
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