Chris Pachuta

Technical Support Manager

Why did you choose to work in education? 

The K-12 space was new to me and I wanted to apply my system engineering skill set to a new technical support position at a company with room for growth. The position not only called for directly resolving escalated problems but also required the ability to design new processes to allow our support team to be more knowledgeable, responsive and effective for our customers.

Describe the eChalk culture. 

The eChalk culture is quite open and allows anyone to express themselves and contribute to the company’s goals. This lets everyone feel like a part of the bigger picture.

What do you find most satisfying about working at eChalk?

For me, I take personal pride in being able to resolve complex problems that are above and beyond the typical scope of support work that most other service providers and vendors can offer. This helps make our support team quite a valuable asset to our customers.

Describe your fellow eChalkers.

I have never met a bunch of people more talented, passionate or dedicated to their work. They force you to be a better person by just attempting to keep up!

Is there one event that stands out during the time you’ve worked at eChalk? 

I’m surprised how much our support team is appreciated. For example, a customer reported they had accidentally deleted some very sensitive data from their site after hours on a Friday night, which caused their eChalk site to be completely inaccessible. Long story short, I was able to recover the data and get the school’s website back up before the impact was felt by anyone accessing their eChalk site. I came in the following Monday morning and was surprised to find a beautiful bouquet of flowers sitting on my desk as a thank you. Once I was in the clear with my wife after explaining the story, I then realized how profound a difference we make in the K-12 space when supporting our customers beyond business hours. Where other companies would defer your after-hours request or charge you for that simple mistake, we always go the extra distance to support our customers.

What surprised you most about working at eChalk?

What surprised me the most about eChalk is the ability for everyone to express their thoughts and ideas and be heard amongst the executive team. The atmosphere is not typical of other companies I worked at before.

What excites you about the future of eChalk?

Beyond growth, I am excited to be part of the team that will deploy and support our enterprise customers. This is an exciting time for us where we have the opportunity to provide our customers with direct access to our application. It’s the engineer in me but this would overcome a lot of the challenges our users face in connecting to a web-based application over the Internet. But not to leave our SaaS customers behind, I look forward to learning how we can take advantage of new technologies to allow our customers to stay ahead of the technology curve as well.