Ray Allen is a Customer Success Manager at Prodigal, acting as a strategic advisor for his accounts, helping to provide our customers with the most ROI from Prodigal.
He has a business communications degree from Stephen F. Austin State University and started in customer service and then sales before moving into customer success.
Where do you live?
Tyler, Texas.
Why Prodigal?
I was working at a bigger tech company and I enjoyed it, but it felt like I was a small fish in a big pond, whereas starting with Prodigal I felt like I could make more of an impact. At my previous company, my voice was heard, but it wasn't making a lot of changes.
But at a startup, at Prodigal, I have a larger percentage of our customers. So whenever I say that we have a feature request, it's heard immediately and the product team wants to know more about it. My voice for the customer is much louder than it was at the bigger tech companies.
When I’m not working, you can find me…
At this stage in my life, the majority of the time I’m at a park with my family or we’re playing outside.
But if I'm not doing that, I'm a big Dallas sports fan: the Stars, the Mavericks, and the Cowboys. If I can make a game, I'm going to it with my friends and if I can't, then it's probably on my TV.
Being a Cowboys fan is something that was passed down in my family - my grandma is a big Cowboys fan, and my mom became a big Cowboys fan, and it passed down to me. And my dad was big into hockey, so we would go to Stars games. I was a big basketball kid when I was growing up, so I caught on to the Mavericks as the closest team when I was in middle school - I don’t think I ever missed a game.
What would your co-workers be surprised to know about you?
I would say that I'm really big into comedy - I love The Office, just like Alex, I love Friends and a lot of Seinfeld. So all those older shows where stand-up comedians would do sitcoms, I love, but what I’m recently getting into is stand-up comedians. I really like going to stand-up comedy and following that.
I think comedy kind of goes with the stage of life that you're in, so Nate Bargatze is one of my favorites. He's very clean and he's family-oriented and he does a lot of jokes about the dynamic between him and his wife and then him and his daughter.
Another interesting thing is we have a bucket list to hit all the national parks. I think we've seen maybe eight of them so far.
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What’s your favorite Prodigal value?
We’re radically candid with each other. The description on our page is perfect, honestly. We personally care for each other in our challenges to achieve long-term success. That is probably my favorite part of Prodigal. I think if you lean on anybody, they're always going to give you advice on how something could be better or you could be better.
And there's no line from us to leadership. Shantanu [Prodigal’s co-founder and CEO] is probably the one that gives me the most feedback. It’s really awesome. I feel like I've grown my career a lot, because I have direct contact with our CEO, and Sangram [Prodigal’s co-founder and CTO] as well.
That's my favorite part of our values - we do our best to make each other better because it makes Prodigal better.
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