Director Profile: Jason Ferguson

Welcome to the premier installment of our new Director Profile series, in which we speak with some of the movers and shakers here at ModSquad. To kick things off, we’d like to introduce you to Jason Ferguson, our Director of Client Services. Jason’s a familiar face and name to the vast majority of our Mods, having worked his way up through the company, starting off as a Mod himself and transitioning to new roles with greater responsibilities in his time here at ModSquad. During that time, Jason made his way from his Atlanta home to join us at our Sacramento Operations Center. In his downtime, you’ll find Jason at his Folsom, California home with his wife and his young son, the latter of whom he’s trying to get into Star Wars. Says Jason, “I enjoy playing video and board games, sci-fi/fantasy, Star Trek, Star Wars… the typical nerd stuff.”

So you’ve been with ModSquad almost from the beginning.

Maybe a year or so after it started. I was here before any of our VPs. It’s been a long time.

Where were you before that?

I spent a lot of time online and I was a gamer. At the time I really wanted to get into gaming community management, so that’s kind of how I got here in the first place.

Before I came to ModSquad, I worked for a company called Sulake. They’re still around. They make Habbo and they also built and operated Virtual Magic Kingdom for Disney. I was a moderator in that game, which was one of my favorites. It was fun, Disney-themed, and kind of cute. It was a really well-built game with very thorough policies and lots of great moderation tools. I was always really impressed with what they did over there.

When that closed, I got a position as a community manager for a virtual world for kids called Elf Island, but it was a startup and didn’t last. The virtual-world-for-kids boom sort of burst. At that point, I came to ModSquad.

For my first project at ModSquad, I was a moderator for Webosaurs. The company was much smaller than it is now, but it was still growing quite a bit, so I managed to get on other projects as well. And it took off from there, going from working a few hours a week on the side to working as a full-time community manager for about a year. After that, I was a project manager, running some of my own projects. And then I took another job for 15 months, but when I came back, I did so as an account manager. And since June 2014, I’ve been Director of Client Services.

Can you describe what a director does?

I supervise our account managers, help launch new projects, and work to streamline and improve our service offerings. We’ve got nine account managers, each of whom oversees their own accounts with project managers and many Mods. So that’s a lot of people down the list, but I’m directly managing nine account managers.

With new projects, I’m involved from the beginning to ensure that it launches smoothly. I’ll be on kickoff calls and get directly involved with complicated launches, so that things go well. I assist our account managers when they need backup; whether they need help with a launch or they need to quickly fulfill an urgent need for a client, I’ll jump in and help.

Streamlining service offerings — what does that entail?

I ensure that we’re being consistent across the board, in terms of our policies, procedures, or expectations. I’ll establish project-launch checklists or set procedures for how we handle the kickoff or end of a project.

What sets ModSquad apart, in your opinion?

I would say the big thing is flexibility. I hear that both internally, obviously, but also from my own experience with our clients. One client, a food-delivery service, is always telling us that they’re amazed at how flexible we are. They’ll come to us with an urgent need for quite a few more hours, and we’ll get it staffed. Then, once we’ve handled all of their customer-support tickets, we let them know that they might want to scale back a bit. The fact that we’re so flexible going up or down when they need us has been something that has set us apart for them. They really enjoy working with us, and their favorite part is knowing how we can just do whatever they need us to do.

We have a diverse pool of talent, so basically whatever a client might need, we can provide it. We have people with different skill sets, different languages. We might be doing customer support for a client and they’ll realize we do moderation or QA, which they also need. They’re always impressed to hear about all the different things we have to offer.

Any great stories that stand out in your memory?

I remember when we started with Plain Vanilla Games, they were small. Their app, QuizUp, wasn’t even released yet. We started out doing a one-time five-hour QA engagement with them. And that ended up turning into recurring weekly QA, which grew into moderation once they launched their project. That grew into customer support, and as the game became more and more popular, they had even more service needs that we helped them with. At the time, everybody was playing QuizUp. I’d log into social media and everybody was talking about it. It’s great to see your clients be successful, to watch TV and see a commercial for your client come on and know that you played a part in that.