About Mark

I'm Mark Sherwood. I work on customer experience, mostly the part after the sale where support, success, and operations run into each other.

I spent more than five years at Shopify, first in front-line support, and then in Incident Response, which meant coordinating engineering, comms, and leadership on the days something broke badly enough that merchants noticed. After that, I led multiple escalated support teams of around twenty people. At Hospitable, I launched Live Chat for the company and also scaled the Escalated Support team. This also included coordinating with and leading our BPO partners in Honduras and the Philippines. At Fishtank, I set up the support department from scratch.

The part I'm actually good at is fairly unglamorous. Working out why customers keep asking the same question, then removing the reason they have to. Spotting the tickets that should never have existed. Getting a team to answer consistently on the days nobody is checking. I spot the patterns and systems that are missing, incomplete or broken and build you systems that last.

Before any of that, I spent nine years on wildfire crews in British Columbia, the last few as a crew second-in-command. It's a strange line on a CX resume, but it's where I learned to act on incomplete information without freezing, which turns out to be most of the job. I like to say I went from fighting literal fires to the figurative fires of CX.

I now run SherwoodCX, writing, and doing audits and build work for teams whose support has outgrown the way they first set it up (or haven't set it up at all properly).

If you're not sure what support should look like, or what's going on with it, or if you feel like customers are getting a worse experience than your product deserves, those are the conversations I like having. Get in touch.