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VIPKid Honor Roll: Teacher Support Team

By VIPKid  |  March 31, 2020

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It can be said that students are the heart of VIPKid with teachers as the soul. The award-winning VIPKid Teacher Support Team is what connects the two together, and is made up of passionate employees stationed from all corners of the world, working directly to support teachers around the clock. 

It may be easy to group this department as a typical customer support team for an international education platform, but members from our Teacher Support Team go beyond that. How many can say companies truly value their sentiment? Or allow collaboration? Or have an Advocacy Team to speak on their behalf? It is one of many reasons we’ve been able to carve out a niche.

The team was recognized earlier this year for their accomplishment when winning the People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Customer Service. They were also awarded the Bronze Stevie Award for the Customer Service Department of the Year among all other industries. 

It takes a village of hard-working people to make sure teachers are happy as a clam, but we’re going to introduce you to some of those faces.


Teacher Support Team: Allen

Name: Allen

Title: Director of Teacher Service

VIPKid since: 2017

What path led you to VIPKid?

It was a coincidence in 2017 when I was considering changing my job to the emerging market of online education and  I still wanted to focus on a global service team. Luckily, I was contacted by a headhunter who told me about VIPKid.

It’s been quite an exciting year for the Teacher Support team with the win of the People’s Choice Stevie’s Award! What does this award mean for the team?

Winning the Stevie Award is really encouraging to our teams in both the U.S. and China.

Our team was set up along with the company’s establishment in 2013 when the team was really a small one with just about a couple of staff members.  Then the Teacher Service Team gradually grew to about 30 team members in 2017 when I joined this company in June. During this time, although our team was very experienced and passionate, it also lacked standardization.  In order to grow our team, we started to optimize our working flows as well as our team organizations. Over these years, we are proud of our improvements and growth of our team: such as developing service processes into S.O.P (standardized operation procedures), building up a Knowledge Base and Support Center, re-organizing the larger team into smaller specialized teams, and enabling real-time support chat features. We finally grew to the current Teacher Support Team that is distributed in China, the U.S., and the Philippines to support more than 100,000+ teachers across the world with 24-hour support.  

What inspires the team to keep pushing for excellence? 

Being the bridge between teachers and students, we are working every day to try to deliver our best service and support to them. It is our hope that high-quality support allows teachers the ability to teach their students without any concerns or issues they might have with the platform. This is truly the responsibility that drives us to chase service excellence.

What do you think people may not know about the daily operations?

Good service performance is based on our solid daily operations, which means accurate capacity planning, detailed shift management, a robust knowledge base management process, training system, and an independent quality assurance system. We are running this mechanism on a daily basis. This is truly a meaningful job as we collect teacher feedback for each of our interactions. Every day, we learn from the teacher’s feedback and improve our service based on their suggestions, feedback, and concerns.  We also have a space in our office called the “Wall of Love” where we post all the thank you notes that we receive from teachers! This truly helps encourage the team to strive for greatness! 

Now that we’re off to a great start this year, what’s next on the department’s journey?

We will keep driving to improve the support experience for teachers, including working to improve the chat service. Additionally, we plan to add more self-service tools within the Teacher Portal so that teachers could help themselves more easily without sending any ticket.


Teacher Support Team: Zach

Name: Zach

Title: Senior Manager, Teacher Advocacy and Success

VIPKid since: 2017 

Tell us a little about yourself and your role.

I’m a former classroom teacher and taught high school chemistry for two years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Since 2015, I’ve been working in the Education Technology industry, leading Teacher Advocacy, and Support teams. I’ve been with VIPKid for about 2.5 years!

What path led you to VIPKid?

I’ve always been passionate about education and working within the classroom setting! When I was teaching, I was able to use technology in my classroom. I realized the importance of technology in the classroom and that’s what brought me to the Education Technology space! VIPKid’s mission and vision are what led me to VIPKid. I love being able to support teachers and help empower and inspire learners!

What do you think sets VIPKid’s Teacher Support team apart?

Many of us are former classroom and/or online teachers! We’re all passionate about education and work hard to improve education!

Why do you think having a teacher support team is effective for the overall user experience?

It’s helpful so that we can advocate for the teaching experience. We’re not just a support team- we are all teacher advocates and are working hard to create a positive experience for teachers on the platform.

What do you think people may not know about the daily operations?

We have team members in the U.S. and Beijing looking out for teachers 24/7! Many of the Community Team members are former brick and mortar classroom or former online teachers!

Can you explain what a typical day looks like for you on the job? 

  • The Teacher Advocacy team closely monitors the Official Facebook Group and the Hutong to offer support and handle support inquiries
  • The Teacher Advocacy team responds to support inquiries from teachers
  • The Teacher Advocacy team troubleshoots, investigates, and reports issues to tech and product teams
  • The Teacher Advocacy team produces support documentation and resources for the VIPKid Support Center
  • The Teacher Advocacy team collects teacher feedback and shares this internally with the team. Altogether, we are advocating for a positive  teacher experience
  • The Teacher Advocacy team meets with product teams to discuss new projects and communication strategy

Teacher Support Team: Angela

Name: Angela

Title: Senior Manager of Teacher Service

VIPKid since: 2017

What path led you to VIPKid?

Being open-minded and trying different things has always been part of my personality. I joined VIPKid based on my belief that online education is an emerging industry in China and this is truly one of my interests. My 3 years with VIPKid is a tremendous journey in my career path. I work closely with a lovely team and enjoy such a passionate and rewarding journey. I have developed and grew in this role, and my career path has been enriched because of working on this team.

Can you explain what a typical day looks like for you on the job?

Since we have different office locations, our colleagues also work in different time zones.

So my day normally starts with different group messages.

  • 8:00 a.m. Review all group messages, catch up what missed while I was asleep
  • 10:00 a.m. Morning briefing with the Support Team to understand all updates from our knowledge base
  • 10:30 a.m. Morning briefing with the team managers, to monitor all key goals
  • 10:45 a.m. Team meeting with the online chat team
  • After all morning briefings,
    • Review tickets with the Training team
    • Review teacher feedback and suggestions with the Teacher Voice team
    • Product knowledge training
    • Catch up with Knowledge Base team to check in on project updates
    • Review our team’s goal

VIPKid Receives the Stevie Award

The Stevie Award trophy is one of the world’s most coveted prizes. Since 2002, the Gold Stevie Award has been conferred for achievement in business to organizations and individuals in more than 70 nations. The competition itself receives more than 12,000 nominations each year. 

Watch what this award means to the VIPKid Teacher Support Team.

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