Employee Spotlight: Gil Vigeant

Name: Gil Vigeant

Position: Senior Customer Success Manager

Translation: I keep our customers happy and act as a bridge between our commercial and engineering teams.

Fun Fact: I once owned 5 tanks of tropical fish.

Hometown: Lowell, MA

Current city: Raleigh, NC

Passions: Basketball, Guitar

What brought you to Elemental Machines, and why did you choose EM over all of your other options?

I’ve always loved science. I initially considered becoming a science teacher. Instead, I first channeled my love for science into textiles and color physics where I was consulting with customers. I then wanted to get back into biology and combine that with my customer success skills. Elemental Machines represented a good bridge from my last role back into biology.

How would you describe the team you work with?

We’re all very flexible. You have to be in a growing startup. If we ever need additional hands on deck, there’s always someone to lean on.

What is it like to interface with Elemental Machines customers?

I’m typically helping our customers on a granular level. Visiting customers on their turf is always a highlight. When we’re in a lab installing our sensor network, it’s great to get the scientists’ questions and explain how it all works. They’re often very interested and surprised at how easy it is as well as how sleak our machines look.  It’s great to be the person bringing in the newest and most innovative technology.

What has surprised you about working for EM?

How much easier our implementation process is than our competitors. The difference to our customers is significant.

How have you grown personally or professionally in your current role?

I’ve gained a lot of experience managing a team and working with multiple departments. Though my previous role lasted 11 years, it had a much shorter-term/seasonal operations staff. Here, our customer success pros have years of experience across different fields. It’s a different animal. I’ve had to learn how to balance it all while staying realistic and rational. I’m constantly looking forward and thinking about how we can improve. How do we best optimize our Customer Success team? What can we do today with what we currently have to make our customers’ lives easier? What items on our roadmap will bring the most value to our customers?

What skills would you say contribute most to your success?

Flexibility. Being able to balance a bunch of things – installing a new fleet of sensors, training our customers, interfacing with engineering – means that no day is the same. Next: taking in customer feedback and reacting to it appropriately. Having empathy. Our customers are quite happy, which makes that easier. But if a customer has a need, understanding the why and how to address it is key to allow our engineering team to build it!

What’s a day at Elemental that stands out in your mind?

During the second day of a site visit to a large pharmaceutical company, we visited their automation floor. Their key scientists stopped everything they were doing to open their automation chambers so that we could install our sensors. That was fascinating to see. Normally it's the other way around and we have to ask them for access! They were so eager to get all this data and integrate it into their process and they had lots of insightful questions that we were happy to answer.

What EM tools have been the most well-received by the customers you interact with?

Utilization. I haven’t seen a competitive solution that comes close to what our utilization solution offers.

What is your perspective of the future of Elemental Machines?

We’re definitely going to keep growing. We have the ability to connect to everything, and to give lab managers and scientists a view of everything. Seeing how much our system has grown from last year to today is incredible. I can’t even imagine what it will enable our customers to do in three to five years. The sky really is the limit.

Interested in joining Gil and the rest of the Elemental Machines team? View our open positions at elementalmachines.com/careers.