Customer Experience · AI Systems
Gerard Urbano
Director of Customer Experience & Operations
AI Deployment & Productivity — CX
A leadership role in CX, Technical/Product Support, Customer Success, Enablement, or L&D — building the AI systems and workflows that make teams faster and more capable.
As a Customer Experience leader with 13+ years of end-to-end expertise across support, content, education, and enablement, I served as a trusted CX partner collaborating with enterprise brands like Ulta, Sephora, and Nordstrom on their customer strategies. My defining achievement was unifying Support, Education, and Enablement into a single 15-person operating model, leveraging structured Academy paths to cut customer time-to-value by 50%, protect enterprise ARR through higher product adoption, and deploy AI tools that boosted agent productivity by 50%. At scale, I was responsible for roughly 40,000 annual tickets while consistently delivering a 4.7+ CSAT and 95% SLA attainment.
Highlights
Field-deployed AI systems
AI Projects
Nine systems I designed and built myself, in production — using AI to turn a pile of disconnected tools and processes into something a team could actually run on.
Here's how I think about AI: it complements us, it doesn't replace us. We steer it, correct it, teach it — and it works for us. Done right, it's not taking away our ability to think or get creative. It's more like a superpower: it just helps us think bigger and do more.
The company had too many sources of truth — three help-site subspaces, a dev site, plus Slack, Drive, Docs, GitHub, and Notion internally. Nobody agreed on where to look first.
A single interface, powered by Gemini, connecting every one of those resources into one central hub. Slack, the help site, and the rest became targeted lookup tools instead of competing sources of truth.
CSMs are supposed to focus on business value, but kept getting pulled into product questions they weren't equipped to answer fast. Technical Support needed the same speed on inbound tickets.
A custom MCP — later converted into a shared Claude Project for the whole CS org — pulling from JIRA, every help doc, GitHub product code, and Slack. It didn't just search for answers; it read the code when needed and drafted the reply.
Three tools, one queue, built off the same underlying data — one view for the manager, one for the agent, one for the exec.
Queue-wide health check
Reads every open request end to end — not just the metadata — to score three real signals: customer sentiment from their actual language, days since the team's last reply, and how long a request has sat open. Segments the queue by type (AI/product escalations, platform issues, engineering-owned bugs, active implementations), flags which accounts and owners are carrying the load, and closes with a short, ranked list of the calls to make that week.
Agents' primary workspace
Replaced the platform's native queue as agents' main way of working — prioritized by sentiment, priority, last response, days open, CSAT. Caught duplicate tickets, flagged incident-level themes, linked open engineering tickets, added team broadcasts and PagerDuty scheduling.
5× efficiencyCommand center for the queue
An operations dashboard built to run the day, not just report on it: live SLA, CSAT, and first-response time with date-range comparisons from today out to last year, tickets auto-grouped by theme so managers can see where the volume actually sits, and an incident detector that clusters related tickets into one flagged event — confidence score, affected accounts, likely symptom — before it turns into an escalation. One click deep into team performance, capacity, schedule, QA, and a rollup built for execs.
Auto-detects incidentsI inherited an Enablement team with a reputation — disorganized, missed dates. Managers said yes to every ask with no real way to prioritize the work.
Started with an Enablement Charter — what the function does, what it doesn't, how it operates — to anchor everything after it. Then an AI-scored intake form that checks every request against the charter and current company priorities, and generates the task list, due dates, and materials needed. Added retention analysis and automated weekly/monthly reports for Sales leaders.
The company shipped fast, which meant running open and closed beta programs — but customers felt out of the loop as features changed mid-beta. Feedback flow was inconsistent between product teams and participants, and product information lived in disparate, disorganized places.
Built a microsite template that only needs a PM or PMM to fill in the essentials per beta feature — description, feature value and why to adopt, how it improves workflows or CX, screenshots, and the owning product team — to generate a single point of truth customers could be pointed to. Routed inbound feedback straight to Slack instead of Support, so engineers and product leaders heard from customers directly, with no support bottleneck in between.
A large share of inbound chat and email was non-technical — order status, account basics, policy questions — burning agent time before a ticket ever needed a human.
Deployed an agentic AI directly inside the main support contact channel, across chat and email, as the first layer of support. It connected to backend customer databases to verify account and order information in real time, so it could confirm identity and resolve the issue on real data — not a guess — before it ever reached a human. It handled the interaction end-to-end, and only handed off to a human agent when it couldn't verify the answer or wasn't confident in it.
A sudden job loss dumps a flood of urgent financial and administrative tasks on someone already under stress — with no clear order of operations for what to handle first.
Built independently with Claude: a web-based tool that turns that chaos into a structured, step-by-step action plan, so people can organize their essential responsibilities without feeling overwhelmed by all of it at once.
Career log
Experience
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05/2025 – 09/2026
Director, Customer Support, Education & Enablement
GLADLY
Took on Technical Support and Enablement, unifying it with Customer Education under one function.
- Led a 24/7 global support organization across L1/L2/DSE tiers, scaling from 3 to 11 via BPO agreements (~$55K annual savings) — ~40,000 tickets/year, CSAT 3.5 → 4.7, SLA to 95%.
- Unified Customer Education under the operating model — Academy onboarding cut customer time-to-value 50% (6 → 3 weeks) and aligned certifications with renewal milestones to protect enterprise ARR.
- Revamped internal enablement across six functions — 80% skill retention, 100% on-time delivery, 50% lift in content hub engagement via automated capacity workflows and a centralized repository.
- Architected and deployed AI tooling, agentic AI, and federated search across channels — 50% agent productivity lift, 20% search efficiency gain, 25% of non-technical inbound deflected.
- Transformed Support from a cost center into a growth engine — created an AI Optimization Specialist role generating ~$60,000 in revenue, and built career pathways into CS Engineering and Implementation with zero voluntary attrition.
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09/2022 – 05/2025
Director, Customer Education
GLADLY
- Defined and executed Gladly's global Customer Education strategy — built the academy infrastructure that became the foundation for company expansion.
- Expanded Academy footprint via an elearning partner: usage up 300%, from 5,000 to 20,000 learning hours, at a 75% completion rate.
- Cut implementation time-to-value 50% (6 weeks → 3) through structured onboarding paths and role-based enablement — doubling monthly go-live capacity to 20 with just 2 headcount.
- Architected train-the-trainer frameworks adopted 100% by enterprise clients (Nordstrom, Ulta, Sephora) — embedded Academy infrastructure directly into client operations centers to power hiring and scale operations without growing training headcount.
- Partnered with CS and Sales to align Academy certifications with customer renewal milestones — mitigating churn risk and supporting net revenue retention across high-ARR accounts.
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06/2021 – 09/2022
Senior Manager, Customer Education
GLADLY
- Launched DITA-structured, enterprise-grade help documentation — the primary source of truth across CX, Product, and Sales; cited by customers (Manscaped, Movado) as a differentiator over Zendesk and Salesforce.
- Structured product documentation as the foundational knowledge base that set the stage for agentic AI and self-service — ensuring high-accuracy AI retrieval and accelerating time-to-resolution.
- Architected Gladly Academy end to end — ADDIE-based learning paths, certifications, video tutorials, live sessions, release-aligned education — delivering 43,000+ training hours at a 74% completion rate.
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01/2020 – 06/2021
Manager, Technical Writing
GLADLY
- Architected enterprise-grade documentation cited as a key competitive differentiator over Zendesk and Salesforce — a core component in RFPs and deal-closing for accounts like Manscaped and Movado.
- Owned product documentation and customer training through hyper-growth. Led the redesign of help.gladly.com (~500,000 visits/year) to cut support overhead.
- Led an LMS rollout for SMB and Enterprise growth; automated customer training saved CSMs 300+ hours/year.
- Established the company's release-note process and knowledge management program.
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05/2014 – 06/2019
Sr. Content Manager / Content Manager
TAULIA INC. (SAP)
Content strategy for a supplier/buyer base of 1.5M+ companies and $1T+ in invoice volume.
- Redesigned self-service workflows across 1.5M+ users — lifted CSAT engagement 300% while cutting administrative escalations 56% and how-to ticket volume under 15%.
- Architected a tailored knowledge management framework for enterprise supplier workflows — standardized highly customized client processes and cut process-related inquiries 80%.
- Implemented KCS v6 and a real-time live-chat translation service across a 4-language help center.
- Led the company's LMS launch and Salesforce Knowledge development — a 60% reduction in support requests.
- Maintained single-digit website bounce rates with a 3+ minute average session — led live customer training webinars.
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2009 – 2014
Information Analyst / Service Desk (Level I → II)
TACO BELL CORPORATE
- SME and trainer for a service desk handling 600K–1M annual escalations across hardware, back-of-house apps, and Linux/Windows systems.
- Revamped Remedy knowledge management with decision trees and a keyword system — the format was later adopted by KFC and Pizza Hut.
- Built interactive LMS training and led rollouts including the e*Restaurant cloud application.
Owned end to end
Websites I've Built
Platforms and tools I designed, built, and owned end to end — enterprise documentation and education systems, plus independent projects: information architecture, content and platform.
Gladly Academy
Company-wide LMS built on Workramp with custom courses and certification tracks. Partnered with OpenSesame to layer in curated skill-up and personal-development courses alongside the core curriculum.
+300% usage growth (5K → 20K hrs)Gladly Help Center
Built on Document360. Owned and wrote documentation across three pillars — core product, implementation, and developer tutorials — the company's primary source of truth for customers and internal teams alike.
~500K visits/yearTaulia Support Center
Built on Salesforce Knowledge. Owned help content for Taulia's (SAP) supplier network — self-service articles supporting 3+ million supplier users on a $1T+ invoice-processing base.
3M+ supplier usersSteadyBallast
Built independently with Claude. A web-based tool that turns the immediate financial and administrative aftermath of a job loss into a structured, step-by-step action plan — so people can organize what has to get done without feeling overwhelmed by it.
Independent build · live in productionCapabilities
Skills & Platforms
CIO "Breakthrough Result" Award
Taco Bell Corporate — for the e*Restaurant pilot training implementation.
Jurupa Valley HS — GED
Riverside Community College — Psychology & Science coursework.