Sparkol behind the scenes: meet Jay Steele

At Sparkol we pride ourselves on providing the best possible service to our customers. It’s our mission to ensure that you love using our products and services, and fast, friendly and knowledgeable support plays a big part.

To share more about the importance of great customer service, we sat down with Jay Steele. Jay is our awesome Customer Support Analyst who helps our community to get the most out of our products including VideoScribe.

If you use any of our products or services, you’ve probably spoken to Jay or heard his voice on one of our tutorials, webinars or videos. We like to say that Jay is the unofficial voice of Sparkol!

But we thought it was about time we shared more about the person behind the voice. So let’s get into the questions...

First things first, can you tell us about your background and how you got started at Sparkol?

I started my career at the Royal Bank of Scotland in the customer support team and that was my first taste of technical support. I then built up more experience working at Orange (now EE) and other organizations until I was ready for a bit of a change.

My friend Joe mentioned that the company he worked for was looking for a support team member and recommended I apply. Of course, this turned out to be Sparkol and I’ve been here ever since, evolving my role to take on new projects and responsibilities!

What does your typical day at work look like?

My day starts by dropping my son off at school, playing some Pokemon on the way (him, not me of course…). Then I’ll cycle into work, make myself a cup of tea and sit down to work on the latest support requests that have come through.

These could be from people wanting to buy our video animation software, VideoScribe, customers looking for support on using a specific feature, or organizations looking for training and extra help.

We get most queries through our support website but we also manage the questions that come through our social media channels and support calls.

Once I’ve responded to these questions, I like to engage with our brilliant community of users in our forums. They’ll often share new feature ideas or images they’d like to see in VideoScribe. I then work with our community and technical team to understand which suggestions are most popular and how we can make them a reality in the software.

What's the best part about working at Sparkol?

I really like the working environment. Being based in a co-working space like Desklodge means you’re surrounded by creative people with lots of different ideas which I find inspiring.

Even if I’m only grabbing a coffee I might have a conversation with someone which sparks a new idea or approach to my work. That combined with all the experience team Sparkol has means I’m constantly learning new things.

What's the biggest lesson you've learnt here so far?

This links to my previous answer but I really think it’s so important to always have an open mind and be ready to learn. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learnt since working here - make the most of the skills and experience of other people in your team.

What do you get up to outside work?

Outside work my life is all about music and my kids! I play hip hop and rap at different venues and I’m also teaching my kids how to play instruments like the keyboard.

If I can get a moment to myself, I’ll be playing video games.

What's something not many people know about you?

I’ve played at Glastonbury Festival a few times, supporting different artists like Macklemore, Coolio and Wu Tang Clan.

A bonus point is that my band is actually called ‘The Scribes’ which I have to say, was started before I joined Sparkol!

Want to join Jay and the team at Sparkol? Check out our latest job vacancies here.