Sean Drummy, Senior Director of Product Management at Vee24
Vee24 is a SaaS platform for customer engagement that helps leading brands improve customer services and increase e-commerce sales. With the growing demand for their services, they've recognized the need for expanding their engineering division and have engaged Questers to build their new team in Sofia.
To learn more about Vee24, their platform and the plans they have for the Bulgarian office, we invited Sean Drummy, a Senior Director of Product Management. Here’s what he shared:
You are a Senior Director of Product Management at Vee24. How did you come into this position? What was your previous educational and professional background?
My educational background gives me little reason to be where I am today! I majored in political science and Arabic but ended up doing project management in software. I joined Vee24 as a Client Director managing accounts and implementing new clients that joined the Vee24 roster. As I accumulated experience in the live engagement industry I moved more into the product and engineering space because had an increasing interest in bringing my experience into the product.
I can say that the opportunity to learn and grow my career in different directions is one of the biggest advantages I’ve seen working for Vee24. The organization is very flat with few barriers – if you are talented and motivated to learn you can grow your career and skillset in many complimentary directions and have a lot of fun doing it in the process.
Tell us a bit about Vee24. How would you describe the company in a few sentences?
At its core, Vee24 helps its clients meet their customers digitally. Supporting and selling to customers is increasingly conversational, engaging, and personalized. An e-commerce website alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. Vee24 future proofs companies against being left behind by their customers by giving them a wide array of tools to support and sell.
In terms of Vee24 as an organization, we’re based in Boston, Massachusetts and Manchester, UK. While we’ve been in the live engagement space for a while and boast a significant client roster, we’ve never lost the “young company” feel. Vee24 is still a flat organization with plenty of room to grow within your own department or cross functionality.
What’s your typical client profile?
We have the privilege of working with some of the most distinguished brands in automotive and retail. Our typical clients are e-commerce focused companies that have a strong presence in Europe, the US, or both. Our clients tend to be data-driven, fiercely proud and protective of their brand, and put the customer experience above all else.
Some examples include Clarins, Estee Lauder, Clinique, DFS, Schuh, Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, and others.
What are the biggest benefits for your clients?
Clients who utilize live engagement on their websites see a massive uptick in revenue from their digital storefronts. This happens for several reasons. First, customers who engage with a live customer representative are more likely to purchase products. Second, the amount of products purchased (average order value) tends to be higher as well. Finally, our product is able to offer help to customers “just in time” so we can also reduce cart abandonment at drop-off points in the customer journey.
From a technical perspective what are the most challenging projects the company is working on?
Blending all the various collaboration tools within the Vee24 platform is a difficult but satisfying challenge. We offer text chat, video, audio, sharing, scheduling, chatbots, live translation, business analytics, and more. These capabilities all have their own separate infrastructural and engineering demands that require us to learn quickly and adapt even quicker. Engineers at Vee24 benefit from learning very hot technologies like WebRTC and video streaming, chatbots and NLP, business intelligence and data analytics, real time high availability strategies to keep the whole thing running smoothly, and more.
What’s the tech stack currently used in Vee24?
Vee24 offers a diverse array of capabilities so it utilizes a diverse set of technologies to power its platform. The core piece of the platform is powered by the Microsoft stack. We are highly experienced in Microsoft’s cloud technologies and have a close partnership with them after years of utilizing their products. The customer-facing side of our product uses a combination of pure JavaScript and some JavaScript frameworks (Angular).
On top of these technologies, we utilize cutting edge libraries like WebRTC for video/audio streaming and screensharing, Redis for high-speed caching, a proprietary framework for chatbots and other AI-powered capabilities, and a variety of other tools.
What are your plans for the Bulgarian team?
Vee24 both the product and the company are growing quickly, helped along by the increased dependence on virtual interaction brought on by the pandemic. The newly-created Bulgarian engineering team is a strategic piece of our plans to scale the company. We are very keen to establish and grow a solid team of engineers and supporting staff that takes advantage of Bulgaria’s reputation for solid technical talent in an emerging market.
We don’t have any intention of creating a small satellite office for some extra hands on the product, the Bulgaria team is a key part of the puzzle to continue our quest to dominate the live engagement market.
Find out more about the vacancies in the new team of Vee24 here.