Developing new products at scale that engage customers through an exceptional and simple user experience requires a passionate talent. Our new chief engineering officer, Pat Copeland, brings that in spades.
Pat is an experienced technology leader who understands the importance of building and scaling reliable products, and a supporter of customer-centric business. As chief engineering officer, he is responsible for building and scaling reliable products and developer platforms to meet the needs of our current and future customers of all sizes.
“To continue on our mission of making it easy for companies to create connections with their customers and take the complexity out of doing business, we are excited to bring in a talented leader and innovator like Pat who is integral to delivering continued innovation for our customers,” said Jeff Titterton, Zendesk’s chief operating officer. “He is passionate about the customer experience and shares our vision for building products that change the way businesses deliver better experiences to their customers, and brings highly valuable experience and insight to our global engineering team.”
Why Zendesk?
Building beautiful and simple technology has excited me my entire career. The types of products I like working on are those that change the way people interact with software – products that improve the way we live or work – and Zendesk checks all of those boxes.
We are focused on helping industries change and modernize the way they work and do business. In doing this, we gather a tremendous amount of data about customers, how they are feeling, and their interests. We are leveraging these insights to automate workflows that are currently very manual and taxing to our customer base. Zendesk’s easy to use software, simplifies a lot of the complexity companies face, and makes it easy to implement and scale across an entire organization of any size.
When you have that type of focus and customer obsession, what you get is a product that really fits the needs of your support organization. Working here has really reinforced why I do what I do.
When it comes to the latest product and customer experience trends, what are you excited for the most?
The world’s greatest platforms are customer-focused. Trends shift, but the focus on customer obsession remains: how you support customers, create loyalty and trust, establish seamless communication, and manage customer interactions in any channel.
If you look at what leading machine learning companies are working on, it is about bringing near-human interaction to otherwise mundane situations in real time. Being able to make an appointment through an artificial assistant comes to mind. Helping these types of interactions go from manual where agents have to go into a table to read a script, to a customer being able to make informed decisions based on real time data, improves interactions and the customer experience.
It goes without saying product and engineering go hand-in-hand. Explain your vision for how the teams will collaborate to drive innovation and the best experiences for Zendesk customers.
You can’t do one without the other. We act like one team and we make commitments as one team. There are specialized skills that we have in each of those functions, but it is critical to perform together and that is how we have been approaching things.
Find out more about Zendesk’s leadership team.