INFO
Out of Office
According to its proponents,
remote working offers greater access to talent, removes growth limitations and is environmentally sound. But is it good for the organisation?
We speak to three companies in Ireland who are doing business beyond the cubicle....
Shopify Shopify looked to Ireland to launch its first all remote working operation. John Riordan, European Director of Customer Support for the Canadian company, reveals how its Galway hub is going from strength to strength.
Shopify is an all inclusive e-commerce platform that enables people to open up the world as their market and affords them the opportunity to have a portal where they can handle everything from payments to shipping to marketing. The entrepreneurs that operate on our platform can go onto their own internet dashboard – the Shopify admin portal – to see how their business is doing, traffic on the website, what’s been shipped, what needs to be fulfilled, what payments have come in. It’s essentially a virtual shop. Amongst the larger brands that we handle worldwide are Tesla, Red Bull, Kylie Cosmetics by Kylie Jenner, and some of GE’s consumer business. When Shopify started to grow exponentially, about five years ago,
there was a realisation that building a support network based just on a bricks and mortar call centre model would essentially have sunk the company, so we decided to trial remote work in Canada. It was hugely
successful and very quickly the conversation became, ‘let’s go find somewhere else.’ We considered a couple of countries in Europe and IDA Ireland
put together a great pitch, so Ireland was chosen. Within Ireland, Shopify looked at a couple of different sites and settled on Galway for many reasons, key amongst them being the access to great talent. And since then we’ve gone from strength to strength: we’re currently over 200 employees and growing very fast. Most of those employees are Customer Success Gurus and they
answer questions from merchants all around the world across topics including site design, payments, shipping rates, and social media. We started with 50 Gurus and squad leads – team managers – in July 2015. Along with the Gurus, we now have representatives from many of our escalated teams – such as an escalated team that handles payments and financial risk; a team that looks after our point of sale product; a team that handles our website theme support and groups that handle tier two and tier three escalated calls. Over the course of the next year, we’ll be looking to bring in more technical roles such as app development, engineering and user experience. We were absolutely confident that the talent was in Galway to fill
36 INNOVATION IRELAN REVIEW
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
