Lauren E.

Content Manager, Customer Education

Since I was a little girl, I was set on being a TV news reporter/anchor. I loved performing and capturing an audience and I was also obsessed with news and pop culture. I studied broadcast journalism in college and got my first job at an ABC station as a “multimedia journalist,” which is basically a glorified title for a local news one-person band. I was responsible for doing my own story pitching, videography (yes, carrying a 50 pound tripod around), scripting, editing, and then turning around a package and going live for the evening newscast, while also working as a weekend weather anchor and sports reporter. 

This job was tough but taught me how to be really agile in an environment where anything can happen in the moment. Eventually, I moved back to the Philadelphia area and worked for about 10 years as an on-air guest/spokesperson at QVC, representing tons of different consumer brands across many categories. Throughout these years, my career trajectory has been very “zig-zag” — working as a management consultant in the life sciences space, then as an education manager in the beauty industry. This is where I was really able to combine my passion in content creation, storytelling, and enabling customers to get the most out of their products while incorporating my business acumen in finding digital solutions for internal and external education. 

Now I get to bring that ability to Toast by helping our customers through content. Allowing my creative juices to flow while strategizing how to best get our customers optimized on Toast. I always think to myself when creating content, ‘what would I want to know? What would I care about as a Toast customer?’ It is so important to finesse the practice of hitting that fine line between, what is going to enable them versus what is going to overwhelm them when it comes to education. Our team, Toast Education, works cross-functionally with our product, enablement, and marketing teams to best understand launches, features, changes or knowledge gaps to make sure our messaging for our customers for key initiatives is consistent. We also work with our program managers who are oriented by go-to-customer strategy (activation, adoption, and troubleshooting) to help us scope and prioritize our educational requests from stakeholders, in conjunction with direct customer feedback. 

Customer feedback is one of our core inputs for our team's roadmap. We solicit feedback in a variety of different ways, then synthesize trends and take action. Customer insights inform what content we maintain, update, and amplify. Some examples of how we solicit insight/feedback from our customers are through engagement with our written and video content, voice of the customer (VOC) readouts on a quarterly basis, ongoing conversations with our customer-facing departments, Customer Advisory Board interviews, and more.

Our team is such a melting pot of folks with different backgrounds – spanning from teachers, to content creators, to restaurant managers, to internal transfers at Toast – and everyone brings something different to the table. We each have our speciality where we serve as the subject matter expert for that area, and we leverage each other's skills all the time to come to comprehensive solutions and design impactful, engaging learning experiences. We all bring different perspectives,  but we all have one thing in common– the goal of serving our customers and helping them thrive. 

Hear from more of my teammates about what excites us about our role in customer education:

• “Helping customers at scale! One piece of content could fix a pain point for hundreds of customers - that’s pretty rad.” (Dylan B., Content Specialist)

• “Helping customers take in higher-level content in digestible bites!” (Bre J., Content Specialist)

• “This team fully understands our customer base, allowing us to get creative on how to best serve them and meet them where they're at. Our niche audience empowers this team to think outside the box, and stay on the cutting edge of customer education in the SaaS space.” (Brooke L., Manager, Customer Education)