Welcome to the first installment of Meet the Team. Friday, I had the chance to sit down with our beloved COO, Mark Cornett, and we discussed everything from his current work here at SpiceCSM to his family life. Below are the interview questions that we discussed.

Besides what’s implied by your prestigious title, what do you do here?

In short, I spend a majority of my time formulating and implementing the organizational strategy for SpiceCSM.  This includes everything from the product roadmap, focused target market research, overseeing the customer care for SpiceCSM, and much more.

Where are you from?

Owego, NY. Not Oswego. It’s a very small town near Binghamton, and everyone always assumes that when you say Owego, you just mis-pronounced Oswego.

Where were you before SpiceCSM

From 2000-2008 I managed Fused Solutions, an outsourced technical support and customer service contact center, the parent company of SpiceCSM. From 1988-2000 I was a faculty and admin for the Clarkson University School of Business. And from 1977-1988 I worked for Hewlett Packard in a few sales and sales management roles.

When you are not diligently working on making SpiceCSM the best CSM platform, what are you doing?

Well as you know, the life of a start-up doesn’t generally leave much time for anything else, but in my spare time I like to tend to my vegetable garden, I am an amateur arborist, and of course I attend and follow all my kids sporting activities. (Mark is the proud father of 6 children)

What excites you most about the current customer service market and the position of SpiceCSM?

There is a very interesting opportunity to transform the customer service function, and I think Spice can improve it and enhance it in two major ways. The first area is in the user and agent experience.  SpiceCSM’s goal and mission is to make the overall process not only more intuitive, but more efficient as well.  This is mainly done through our ability to integrate our unique guided process workflows with our ticketing system and with our self-service module. The second big transformation in customer service will come with our introduction of the Open Knowledge Community. The SpiceCSM open knowledge community will transform high level subject matter expertise onto our intuitive guided process workflow platform. It will be a true fundamental change in how organizations access and create knowledgebases.

Where do you see the customer service market in 10 years?

1. Convenient access to knowledge: any place, device, medium
2. Highly intuitive tools for resolving problems
3. Seamless process of engaging  a variety associated resources to resolve problems: self-service, mobile devices, video, chat, etc.
4. Geographic independence of resources: i.e. at home agents
5. Customer service apps actually embedded right in products and services.

What is your vision for the SpiceCSM community?

My vision is to have the open knowledge community really expand to cover all customer service and support areas, free up domain expertise to focus on the next new and exciting products and services, and to have all our customers plan out and act upon a customer service management strategy.

Thanks to Mark for being the guinea pig for our weekly team interviews. Next up on the chopping block is Pete Blackmer, lead software developer and creator of Spice HelpDesk.