At AlertMedia, a Caring Culture Drives Critical Connections

To Elizabeth Loucheur, AlertMedia’s ability to keep companies safe during emergencies and other critical events doesn’t simply come down to its powerful product suite. The company’s ability to help customers navigate crises has even more to do with its greatest asset: its people.

The fact that her teammates are overwhelmingly positive, calm and supportive plays a key role in keeping organizations informed and connected during serious — often life-threatening — events. “We partner with people who are experiencing perhaps some of the hardest days of their lives, which is why we need individuals who possess these attributes,” the company’s chief operating officer said. 

According to Loucheur, this level of support applies to more than just the company’s customers. The organization’s people leverage their shared love of discovery to continually rethink processes and solve big problems. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean team members always have the answers. Rather, she noted that they own the determination to find them alongside their peers. “People will join you on your search for knowledge,” she said. “You’ll have an entire group of teammates helping you.” 

Chief Revenue Officer Berkley Simmons said this focus on continuous teamwork is essential to AlertMedia’s daily operations. He believes that maintaining companywide cohesion is an ever-evolving process, especially given the fact that the organization has grown significantly over the past two years. 

“Cross-departmental collaboration looks different when you have four hundred people as compared to forty several years ago, so we’re constantly reconsidering how we approach it,” he said. 

While the company may be continually scaling alongside its focus on internal alignment, that doesn’t mean its culture is sacrificed for the sake of expansion. Rather, Loucheur hopes that the organization’s evolution will enable even more individuals to bolster its enthusiastic work environment. 

“I’m excited to have new people come in and foster the passion that already defines our culture,” she said. 

For Loucheur, Simmons and Senior Vice President of Safety Solutions Peter Steinfeld, the ways in which their teams take a customer-centric approach may be different, yet their appreciation for the company’s collaborative, supportive culture is the same. Below, the three leaders describe how their teams bolster AlertMedia’s mission, the importance of having caring employees and their excitement for the future. 

Describe your team’s customer-centric approach and how it connects to the wider organization. 

Loucheur: When I led customer success organizations at previous employers, CS team members were generally the sole ones responsible for making customers happy. At AlertMedia, putting the customer first is a part of the fabric of the entire business, and we often discuss it internally. My teammates and I come together to talk about customers who haven’t deployed after a certain number of days, and the entire executive team will discuss ways to offer help and support them. We offer a lot of value, and we want organizations to take advantage of that. 

There’s one core value that we live out in a very authentic way, which is, “We’re humans, not robots.” We treat our customers, and each other, like people. When interacting with customers, we’re unafraid to show empathy while trying to gauge what’s happening in their business. We don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, we act as consultants, informed by the understanding that businesses are potentially coming to us after experiencing a traumatic event or are in fear of encountering one. We aim to address that with a solution that feels tailored to the client and truly helps them. 

Steinfeld: Our solutions engineering team members possess both solid technical knowledge and a strong sales demeanor, which is very hard to find. They have to listen to prospective customers, understand their concerns and then explain how our company will help them succeed. They perform various tasks each day, from joining calls with sales reps to answering technical questions and demoing advanced product functionality. They manage technical trials, in which a prospective customer performs testing before making a final decision. They help complete requests for proposal documents while also maintaining our robust demo environment, which enables our reps to easily showcase our product. The team is focused on how we can best support prospective customers in order to offer a smooth onboarding experience.

Simmons: The sales team has the first connection with a new customer. We begin that connection by deeply understanding who they are and what their needs are both from a business and personal perspective. We are taking that knowledge and systematically connecting it to the wider organization. This aligns the CS, implementation, support and sales teams. And most importantly, the customer is better served throughout their relationship with us.

How do your teams collaborate, and how does this teamwork positively impact both employees and customers?

Loucheur: When I interview candidates, I often tell them that it feels like you never reach the end of the sidewalk at AlertMedia. If you reach out to someone for help and they can’t assist you, they will point you in the right direction and then join you on your search for an answer. Along the way, you’ll meet people who have been at the company for a few years but are just as curious and engaged to add to their knowledge. I’ve seen this happening with our Global Threat Intelligence team, which is a growing group that’s working more cross-functionally than ever before. It feels incredible to have many people with diverse expertise who are supporting you along the way, and that’s one of the special aspects of our approach to collaboration. Everyone has a genuine interest in driving success and finding ways to perform more efficiently both individually and as a team. 

Simmons: We now have more than 400 employees, and we’ve grown especially quickly over the past couple of years. There’s no perfect process or playbook to use to get collaboration right, which means we have to continually check in with both employees and customers to ensure we are successful. Our executive team is very focused on cross-departmental collaboration and ensuring that the communication happening internally is visible to customers. When teamwork works well internally, the customer can feel it. 

What excites you the most about AlertMedia’s current growth phase?

Steinfeld: I’ve been at the company for more than five years, and I’ve watched us get through that first phase of getting our rocket off of the launchpad and into the air successfully. Now we’re in the scaling phase, and we’re focused on finding more people to do an ever-growing amount of work. It’s a fantastic place for those who are experienced or new in their careers, because the volume of activity results in an accelerated learning curve that’s difficult to find in most organizations. 

Simmons: Considering how quickly we’re growing, we don’t have a choice but to change. Change is exciting when it’s done right. Naturally, with growth, things become more complex. More process is needed and more communication is required. Executing change methodically and constantly asking ourselves can we simplify are the ways we are thinking about change in this current growth phase.

Loucheur: We want to keep our culture at the forefront as we continue to grow. What excites me the most is when we ask ourselves, “How do we scale, and how do we figure out what the right process is? What are we going to wish we’d started working on six months from now?” We have both a strategic long-term vision and tactical execution plan, which means we need to hire people who are eager to handle both of these elements. 

The environment we’ve created feels immensely immersive and exciting in many different ways. We know what our North Star looks like, and we want to protect our culture, so we need to consider how to do this in the smartest possible way without disrupting our customers. Right now, it feels like anything is possible. It’s a magical place, and I’m unbelievably lucky to be a part of it.