The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Taylor Kirchwehm/Zype Inc:
Taylor Kirchwehm is Zype's vice president of customer success. In her role she leads a 20+ person team as they help customers meet business goals by leveraging Zype's infrastructure. Kirchwehm began her career in media technology in an administrative capacity with Zype in 2015. Over the course of six years her dedication to learning about Zype products and her passion for client management has led her to take on more challenging roles with greater responsibility. She is a graduate of Marshall University where she majored in broadcast journalism and competed in track and field as a heptathlete. Away from work, Taylor has a passion for running and keen interest in sports including football, baseball and soccer.
What her colleagues are saying:
"Taylor is a thoughtful and savvy leader who has been instrumental in delivering value to our customers. She has created an awesome work culture for both her team and her peers and is someone our leadership team relies on to help steer our company." - Ed Laczynski, CEO at Zype
"Taylor is an awesome CS leader who leads our team by example day in and day out. She approaches every day with hard work and passion for our customers and their success using our products, and that mentality trickles down throughout the entire team. I know our team's needs are well represented at Zype with Taylor as our leader." - Michael Smith, director of customer support at Zype
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
Streaming services are my primary television viewing experience. I subscribe to many services, including: Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Xponential Fitness, ESPN+, Disney+, Paramount+, AppleTV+ and MLB.TV. Right now I am making my way through the second season of The Flight Attendant and gearing up for the return of MLB Baseball.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
Being unafraid of taking risks and courageous enough to trust my passion led me to my biggest career accomplishment: joining the Zype leadership team as the vice president of customer success. Several years ago, I was working for a recruiting agency when I was poached by another recruiter about an administrative role at a startup in the video space called Zype. I was fortunate that I was able to learn new skills and take on several responsibilities throughout my tenure in that role, including accounts receivable, general office manager, marketing communications and social media management. It became clear to me that I love interacting with customers and gaining a unique understanding of their business challenges, because it helps me to convey to my teammates how our products are used to achieve successful outcomes. After 18 months at Zype, I sat down with our CEO and asked if I could have an opportunity to pivot into customer success. He eagerly agreed, and from there I busied myself with learning until I could successfully onboard and support a customer end-to-end. I excelled at identifying usage growth and upsell opportunities, which is what led me to implement an account management function that is separate from customer support and reactive customer communication. Account management became a successful function, generating revenue for the company as our customers succeed and grow and maintain high net revenue retention. After 24 months of scaling the account management function, I chartered a customer success team by uniting three functions: onboarding, account management and customer support.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
It may seem obvious, but it is not easy coming to terms with the limits of one's knowledge. I've been blessed to be surrounded by incredibly intelligent peers and supervisors who all possess qualities that I admire, and although reluctantly initially, have tried to learn from and absorb. I've come to peace with the fact that some things are beyond my domain and expertise. I had limited experience in account management. When I wanted to prove that I could build this function from the ground up, I went down the path of investing hours researching and studying other SaaS company models and best practices. There were still limitations with this path that ultimately required me to ask for help from higher ups and collaborate with industry experts. This core group made me better and also raised the bar on the quality of the account management team and its operating procedures. Sharing ideas and asking for help sooner would have saved me time and energy while also still achieving the same outcome. I've learned to not keep to myself and surface ideas early and often to keep up with the fast-paced nature of a startup and the quickly evolving video space. I'm looking forward to my next challenge of globally scaling the team and all of the growth and guidance that will come with it!
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
I see the next big challenge in streaming TV emerging from the democratization of the creator workflow. With Zype's acquisition of MAZ Systems and our own acquisition by Backlight, we are well positioned to serve media, entertainment and video-forward customers to improve every step of the media content lifecycle. Our focus will be providing expertise and solutions to manage, distribute and monetize video for both business users and technical buyers. We already have a wide ecosystem of connectors and technology partners that make it really easy to integrate into their existing workflows, but we'll need to be able to accelerate this momentum and provide even more value to our customers by focusing on deeper product functionality and more innovative solutions on an even faster timeline for the creator workflow.