Welcome...

Hi, I'm Julie. Welcome to my personal website.

Community Management...

I've spent decades of my life interacting with others online, in a variety of mediums. I started out calling local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) in the 1980s on a 1200 baud modem and moderated my fair share of BBS-based forums back in the day. On the Internet, I've done everything from run mailing lists (with and without mailing list software, thank you kindly) to starting up my very own IRC server. (GoodChatting.com, established in February of 2001, is still up and running!) I've spent a lot of time chatting, due to my time as the Chatting Online Guide at About.com, running GoodChatting.com and just generally enjoying the medium. I'm also extremely familiar with online community forums, due to my own hobbies and interests, followed by more than two years of working at Vanilla Forums, as a customer success manager and then the Head of Customer Success.

Customer Success & Support...

I've always been That Person that my friends and my family call with any kind of technology-related issue. I've heard it all, from "my computer is broken" to "my phone has a virus", from "my computer is very slow" to "of course it's plugged in, I-- oops! Sorry!" So working with customers and clients while working at a tech company is kind of second-nature to me. I did a brief stint in technical support for a local ISP in the 1990s, I wrote guides for my Chatting Online chatters and I've done training calls with VIP clients to demonstrate software usage. These days, I regularly take specific screenshots of various pieces of software which, when paired with a detailed explanation, help my customers to not only solve their current issue, but to help them learn.

I'm a firm believer in being kind, patient and friendly in all of my customer interactions, with my primary goal being to resolve their main issue, but a secondary goal of making them feel as though someone (that someone being me!) actually cares about whatever problem they're having. My tertiary goal is, as alluded to above, teach them why something is happening and show them how to fix it for the next time.