Living, breathing, and bringing authenticity | Employee story

Hello 👋 I’m Patrick Wijntjes, Technical Support Engineer at Zivver. You (perhaps) don’t know me yet, but today I would like to make a change in that and  would like to tell you more about myself and my journey within Zivver.

My journey at Zivver started 5 years ago. I lost my previous job and was looking for a new one. Via an agency that focuses on helping students and starters, I found Zivver. My first interview left both Zivver and myself very enthusiastic! My manager to-be, back then, asked me if I could start the next day, though the procedure required two more interviews 😂.

During my 5 years at Zivver my job has changed to different roles. I started as a Solution Expert,  moved to the role of Technical Consultant and currently my official title is Technical Support Engineer.

As a Technical Support Engineer, I help our bigger customers with (technical) problems they experience in our products. Next to that, I support our Technical Support Specialists with more technical questions they receive from our users.

Besides that, I’m a natural at breaking software 🤓. The only team that seems to appreciate my efforts in doing so, is our QA team (who, by the way, asked me multiple times to join their team). Although I like my current role and like to alternate between supporting our customers, and testing our product, I don’t see myself doing testing for 40 hours a week. I like the personal and client-facing aspects too much.

I know in today’s society it’s less common to stay at a company for a longer period of time. But I really love working for Zivver, mainly because everyday at Zivver is different. One day I help answering a lot of customers on the phone because we have a (little) crisis, the other day I’m asked to help QA testing our latest Outlook plugin build. And not to forget mentioning, I love working with the great Support team. No day passes by without having fun, making jokes or going outside for a small walk & talk. Together we take care of each other, make sure the whole team is doing well, and everyone is willing to help each other out when possible.

Although the team is very important, when it comes to my work happiness, I also value the atmosphere within Zivver. Literally everyone within Zivver is willing to listen and share ideas, from management team to junior employees. We find that  feedback is a present, and everyone at Zivver treats it accordingly. No matter someone's role, everyone can give feedback to everyone.

I’m still figuring out what a good description of a Zivvy (employee at Zivver) could be. I think we are a big group of interesting and smart people, each with their own peculiarities. And those people and their peculiarities make working at Zivver so interesting and fun!

At Zivver, we have 4 core values that we try to live up to:

• Be all in
• Breathe simplicity
• Build together
• Bring authenticity

Be all in:

A recent example of how I am all in, if I have to say it about myself, would be the migration to a new support tool. As part of this migration all our quick/default responses (called snippets) had to be migrated as well. The old tool didn’t support a nice export that could be imported in the new tool, so someone had to manually copy-paste them. And because I had early access to the new system (as part of the test group), that someone was me. I planned some blocks and moved all the snippets, at least, that is what I thought… I found out that some snippets were only visible to a specific department in the old system, so I missed those and had to continue moving those. For a second time I thought I was done and all were moved to the new system, but one day before shutting down the old system some more hidden snippets were found. It took me a few hours after business hours, but finally all the snippets were migrated.

Breathe simplicity:

As a Technical Support Engineer I believe breath simplicity should be part of your nature. The customer is best helped if you keep it simple. Explain what the customer needs to know, but keep the distracting and unnecessary details out of the story so it’s understandable and easy to digest for maybe less technical clients

Build together:

As one of the early Zivvies, I get a lot of colleagues at my (virtual) desk (I am saying virtual here, but most of my colleagues know I am a die-hard go to the office kinda guy). Most come with questions, ranging from just a simple “how was that working again?” question, to more complex scenarios a very important customer experience. Building together means for me always helping out when possible, and that is what we all carry out towards each other. Sometimes my schedule is too tight to help colleagues out immediately, but I always make sure to schedule something to help out later.

And finally bring authenticity… 

Some at Zivver would say I’m the embodiment of that value. I take it as a compliment, but it feels strange to say that about myself. I’m open about being gay, and everyone is very supportive of that. Ofcourse, being gay is a part of who I am, but I’m also a big fan of Disney. And I don’t feel ashamed at Zivver to tell my favorite music is Disney songs, I sang a few at our karaoke night even 😉. I even got a Disney themed birthday card a few times. At Zivver I can really be myself. Do I feel like wearing a funny thing on my head? I can just do that without judgment (I always take my chance with special days like Halloween or King’s day). Do I want to sing my favorite Disney song? Big chance a colleague will join.

Of course, all values at Zivver are equally important, and Zivver is promoting all of them. But bring authenticity is the one that I feel reflects the most what I value. Bringing my full self to work. Every now and then, a food market is organized where all our different nationalities can bring their favorite home food, and taste the food of other countries, we can bring our authentic cultures to work.

June is for me an important month, as it is pride month and I got the opportunity to share a part of my story and values with you in this month so close to my heart.

I really liked sharing my story, and I hope you liked reading it.