Customer Support Specialist
Job description
About the Role
You will be part of the integrated Kuali Customer Success team, working closely with Project Managers, Functional Consultants, Customer Success Managers, Customer Success Engineers, and Product colleagues, who are focused on helping customers get the most value from their investment in our software, and the team-members who design and build our products.At Kuali, a Customer Support Specialist is responsible for assisting our customers in using our products to effectively manage the complex needs of higher education. You’ll do this by being responsive to our customers when they have questions about how best to use our software, run into issues they need help with, and documenting our software and best practices. This includes investigating system questions or issues so you can provide timely responses and/or resolutions back to our customers. Your communication skills and ability to build lasting relationships with these clients will ensure they have everything they need to have a great experience using our software. You take what you learn from working with our customers and share that with the entire team in order to improve our product. This is a fully remote position.
Who are we?
Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted. We are poised for high growth.
Our Culture
As a company, we are guided by our cultural values:
- Iterate to evolve
- Cultivate openness
- Act with accountability
- Assume the best
- Practice humility
- Deliver amazing experiences
- Drive outcomes
We’ve embraced distributed work for years—it’s part of who we are. Many of our employees work remotely across the U.S., from Massachusetts to Seattle, while others collaborate in person at our office locations. We’re intentional about creating a healthy, connected culture no matter where you work.
What you’ll be responsible for- Respond to incoming support tickets within our defined SLA timeframe.
- Manage prioritization of issues by taking into account severity of issue, end user impact, customer relationship, etc.
- Troubleshoot and investigate issues or questions that customers submit in a timely manner.
- Do due diligence in independently investigating issues, but also know when you need to reach out for assistance or when a question requires additional expertise.
- Disseminate information gathered into a clear and consumable way to the customer, ensuring we’re addressing all questions/concerns in our response.
- Continue to deepen your knowledge and understanding of our software so you can respond accurately to customer questions or issues.
- Stay up to date with our continuously delivered products and features so you can provide support to our customers.
- Continually strive to be self-sufficient and able to handle/manage support issues that arise.
- When testing and troubleshooting an issue, think through possible causes, solutions, workarounds, and any short/long term steps that need to be taken to resolve.
- Take ownership of issues and follow up as necessary with the appropriate parties until full resolution is achieved.
- Assist in creating system documentation for our support portal.
- Occasionally help retest code fixes related to customer support issues.
- You align with Kuali’s values: You model curiosity, openness, accountability, and a commitment to delivering amazing experiences.
- You’re a resourceful executor: You take broad vision, collaborate on strategic priorities, and own the steps required to make it real, from planning to hands-on implementation.
- You’re calm under pressure: You can handle shifting priorities, ambiguity, and fast-changing situations with resilience.
- You’re collaborative and influential: You build trust quickly and communicate clearly across all levels of the organization.
- You’re organized and detail-oriented: You can manage multiple projects at once without losing sight of the big picture.
- You thrive in remote environments: You know how to create alignment and connection across distributed teams.
- You roll up your sleeves: You’re comfortable being the ‘doer of last resort’ in a resource-constrained environment.
- You have broad experience: You’ve independently led multi-disciplinary projects in resource-constrained environments where the buck stopped with you.
- Delivering Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
- Have a background providing support for enterprise software; at least 3 years.
- Ability to multi-task effectively in a fast-paced environment and tame support tickets with the best of them.
- Have contributed to a culture of meeting or exceeding product SLAs.
- Know how to thoroughly test software. Push every button and peer into every corner.
- Your communication skills, both spoken and written, are renowned. You listen and ask the right questions to understand a customer’s needs.
- You are proactive and sensitive to customer needs; some even suspect you may be a mind reader.
- Are passionate about your role in helping customers achieve their missions, and are ready to dig in and solve problems.
- You live in a growth mindset with an enthusiasm for learning.
- You are flexible and can work independently, cross-functionally, and on multiple initiatives at the same time.
- You are a motivated self-starter with a determination to get results.
- Your peers and previous colleagues would describe you as a great team player because of your strong interpersonal skills and ability to build relationships.
- Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent work experience.
- Have a background in the Higher Ed Community and/or Technology
- You’ve worked in a Higher Education office in the business domain of our needs for Research, Academic Operations, and Business Continuity
- You’ve used Kuali software
- Have experience working with software engineers to creatively solve problems
- You’ve helped influence product development based on your domain expertise
- Have used one or more of these technologies: Zendesk, Asana, JIRA, ChurnZero, AI language models (e.g., ChatGPT)
- The opportunity to work together with smart, passionate people building a high growth, highly profitable SaaS company
- Flexible remote work with no expectation of returning to an office setting
- A truly exceptional benefits package, including 100% company-paid medical and dental insurance
- 100% 401(k) matching up to 4%
- Paid Maternity/Parental leave
- Flexible PTO — no accrual limits, no ‘use it or lose it.’ Just work with your manager to make sure the team’s covered, and take the time you need to recharge.
- Encouragement and support for ongoing learning and skill development
- Recognition platform to celebrate contributions with meaningful incentives
- Company retreats to connect, recharge, and collaborate.
Skills mentioned
In 2004, a group of universities and colleges, who were frustrated by working with traditional software vendors, got together to build financial software. Supported by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the consortium of universities formed the Kuali Foundation. The Kuali Foundation was incorporated in 2006 as a nonprofit organization with a mission of finding a way to leverage the resources among colleges, universities, and companies to build better software to serve higher education’s unique needs. The goal of keeping more money in the mission of the institutions themselves was always at the forefront of every decision we made. When the model for the financial system within Kuali was successful, the Research Administration departments of member institutions decided to adopt the Kuali method and formed a partnership for Research. The community of schools continued to grow over time and, at Kuali’s 10-year anniversary, reached a crossroads. The Kuali Foundation called two, face-to-face meetings of the entire community and concluded that the biggest impediments to growth were speed of development, a great user experience, evolving cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, and the need for a professional marketing & sales organization to grow adoption. The community determined that the solution was to invest in a for-profit company that would focus on design, speed of delivery, and sales & marketing. A company could scale by recruiting top talent, diversifying the client base, putting things into the cloud for new revenue streams, and securing additional investment in a way that the institutional collaboration model with the foundation wasn’t able to do. Joel Dehlin, a long-time Chief Technology and Product Officer, had reached a point in his career where he wanted to start his own company. He recruited a number of developers to join him at his home where they’d brainstorm ideas on what they could do to improve higher education. A mission-driven man by nature, Joel knew that he wanted the new venture to mean something to higher education, and not just be a way to make a quick buck. Executives of the Foundation contacted Joel about the idea of creating and leading a new company. The Foundation was looking for a partner that really valued and was willing to listen to the community, who was more open to that input than was typical, and who would focus on a great customer experience. And that matched what Joel had set out to accomplish with his crew of developers. They wanted to create a mission-driven company with a culture that valued customer and employee experience above all else. And so in 2014, the Kuali Foundation invested in this young company. Kuali set out to take on the mission of the Foundation as our own: providing value to higher education while enabling institutions to keep more money in their mission of educating and doing great research. Kuali used part of the investment to purchase some of the assets of rSmart, an original for-profit contributor to the Kuali community. The most important part of that deal was joining forces with Chris Coppola, a long-time community member and CEO of rSmart, who became COO of the new company. Kuali immediately started hiring and began to deliver services to the Kuali Foundation member institutions. With the endorsement of the Kuali Foundation Board, as well as the Financials and Research communities, the company took the publicly available open-source Kuali software and re-issued it under the AGPL3 license. We also began hosting it in the cloud. Kuali focuses on five product categories: Financials, Research, Curriculum, and Catalog Management, Build (no-code applications), and Ready (business continuity). Our modular approach allows institutions to extend the life of their current systems without required large, “rip-and-replace” suite implementations. Kuali, the Kuali Foundation, and the active community of institutions of higher learning continue to work together to identify needs, enhance existing software and develop new solutions for the betterment of higher education, and that will continue to be the driving force moving forward. The word Kuali means "wok" in Malaysian. A wok is the humble, yet essential tool for the successful kitchen—just like higher ed software systems and vendors should be.
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