Introducing Tina Bhatnagar — walking the talk on Customer Service

Improving customer service continues to be our #1 priority at Coinbase. I’ve been providing regular updates over the past couple of quarters on our progress, but I realize that updates are no solace when you can’t get prompt response from customer support. Actions speak louder than words.

Today, I’d like to share a new action we’ve taken to improve the customer support experience at Coinbase. But first, here is a quick overview of our actions to date:

1. In December 2017 I recruited Asiff Hirji as President & COO to join Coinbase. Asiff has operated at much larger scale companies, including being COO at TD Ameritrade, and running the enterprise services division of HP with nearly 200,000 employees. He has already done wonders to help us scale operations to the next level.
2. In January 2018, I promoted Dan Romero to Coinbase GM to ensure we had a single owner of the Coinbase retail product (we are now operating in an environment of multiple business units, and the original Coinbase product is just one of our efforts, albeit the largest by headcount and revenue).
3. Today, I’m taking another step. Tina Bhatnagar will be joining us as VP of Operations and Technology. Tina will lead all operational teams related to Coinbase and GDAX customers. She will ensure we meet our commitments to double the size of our support team over the next three months and expand 24/7 phone support to all customers by Q2 2018.

The biggest challenge in Silicon Valley these days is recruiting great people. But this is often the only way to solve big challenges in a rapidly growing company. We needed a veteran of challenging hyper-growth situations who could hit the deck running and that is what we found in Tina.

Prior to Coinbase, Tina was VP of Operations and User Services at Twitter. She started at Twitter, working with 20 people in a basement managing just thousands of customer support tickets a month. In five and a half years, she grew her team to thousands of employees operating out of six locations handling millions of support tickets a month. Her team helped tackle spam, account access, identity, and localization issues. Prior to Twitter, Tina spent eight years at IBM helping companies build and scale their operations. She understands not only how to rapidly scale operations and customer support teams to meet the demands of unprecedented growth, but also how to manage sensitive account and customer information.

At Twitter, Tina helped grow the customer support team from twenty people to thousands. Her team ultimately spanned six locations around the world, answering millions of customer support inquiries every month.

Tina’s experience and focus will produce the action that we aspire to. Still we have no illusions about the task that lies ahead. Please join me in welcoming Tina!

“When deciding to join Coinbase, I was not blind to the challenges ahead of me. But when I met Brian and the team, I knew it would be a truly joint effort to run our customer operations how we envisioned it. It’s an exciting time, with Coinbase and crypto in the public eye more than ever before, but that also means it’s an even more critical moment to stake our position. And this can only happen if we do right by our customers every single day.”
— Tina Bhatnagar, VP of Operations and Technology at Coinbase.

One final note: With the price movements last week, we saw record volumes and traffic to our products (again). The engineering and ops teams at Coinbase have been working around the clock to ensure we provide a high level of uptime during these periods. I’m pleased to report that we were able to meet demand with only minor hiccups during all times highs last week.

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Introducing Tina Bhatnagar — walking the talk on Customer Service was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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