Mike Kuchera joins FanDuel as our Customer Support Manager

We’d like to introduce you to Mike Kuchera  (username: MikeKuchera) who joins FanDuel as our Customer Support Manager. Mike has been involved with the fantasy sports industry since 2006 when he started a fantasy baseball podcast called The Fantasy Man Show. The podcast turned into a website at TheFantasyMan.com and a blog at FantasyBaseballExpress.com and then “The Fantasy Man” brand was born. The Fantasy Man has spent almost 6 years helping beginner and expert fantasy players win their leagues. Mike has a Bachelor’s in Sport Management from Flagler College in Florida and a Master’s in Education from Mercy College in NY and has worked for such organizations as the WWE, Under Armour, LPGA, USTA and the New York Knicks with experience in customer service, sales, online marketing and live event marketing. Now, he takes his extreme passion for fantasy sports to improve the user experience here at FanDuel as the Customer Support Manager.

Excellent customer service here at FanDuel is crucial to our success. We want to keep our users happy and provide the best experience in the daily fantasy sports realm. FanDuel has added a tab at the top of the website labeled “Support”. Have a problem, a question or a funding issue? It’s as easy as clicking on the tab and submitting a support ticket. The fastest way to get help is to read and search our FAQ page, which is easily accessible. However, if you can’t find an answer, this is when you would submit a support ticket. The Customer Support Manager will be involved with monitoring the chat box on the home page and assuring that every ticket that comes through is handled quickly and appropriately. Remember, FanDuel is still young and as our user base grows, the FanDuel experience grows. Currently, we have two people dedicated to customer support, Mike and Mark Williams, and we’re working to make this department a success. It takes time and we’re human too, but we’re taking every question, every issue, and every situation to heart to make the experience on FanDuel better for you, the user.

August 9, 2011 at 6:46 am Leave a comment

Fanduel is looking for a Marketing Manager

Job Description

Marketing Manager – Media Campaigns

Hubdub (Fanduel.com) is a well-funded premium games start-up looking for an exceptional individual to join our marketing team as Marketing Manager for Media Campaigns.

Your job will be to drive thousands of users to play our games. You will be instrumental in the success of the games and a key member of a small and elite marketing team.

You will be a proven media campaign specialist, adept at running paid media marketing campaigns direct and via ad networks, print and broadcast. You will be metrics-focused, using analysis to optimize campaigns to achieve the best ROI and cost of user acquisition.

This is an exciting opportunity to have real impact and project ownership in a fast growing and fun organisation.

• Media campaign management
• Buying media either direct or via ad networks
• Buying print and broadcast media
• Manage the production of collateral for all channels
• Detailed analysis of campaign results to optimize the ROI
• Detailed analysis of user cost of acquisition via paid media channels
• Inform the overall marketing strategy – messaging, positioning, promotions/offers, referral bonuses, etc.
• Develop relationships with and manage third party agencies including; ad networks, media agencies, PPC/social networks (Google, Facebook, etc.), print publications, etc.

The following are essential:

• 3-5 years experience running paid media marketing campaigns in B2C environment
• Experience buying online media both direct with media properties and across ad networks
• Experience running multiple integrated ad campaigns with a focus on acquisition and maximizing campaign ROI
• Experience optimizing campaign assets and conversion funnels
• Strong quantitative and Excel skills

The following are major pluses:

• Experience buying print and broadcast advertising
• Knowledge of mobile advertising
• Start-up experience

Other skills required:

• Creativity
• People and agency management skills
• Great attention to detail, highly organized, with a focus on quality of work
• Superior interpersonal skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Passion for fantasy sports, games and consumer web business models

You must have excellent professional references

Please submit resume and cover letter to Lesley Eccles at careers@fanduel.com.

July 1, 2011 at 1:47 pm 1 comment

Do you have what it takes? FanDuel is looking for a customer support manager.

Looking for a chance to get involved in the emerging daily fantasy sports market? Then FanDuel wants to hear from you. We’re looking for a Customer Support Manager who has what it takes to help us push FanDuel to the next level.

FanDuel is recognized as the world’s leading daily fantasy sports game, and we are growing at a phenomenal rate. We have given away over $5 million in prizes, launched tournaments that attract thousands of players and are scaling our team and operations to do more, faster!

Despite our growth we pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service and support and that is something we want to build on and improve…with your help.

Our passionate and dedicated Customer Support team is at the forefront of ensuring we maintain our reputation and critical to our continued success by helping users have a superior customer experience.

The Customer Support team is responsible for providing support to our users; interacting daily to help them enjoy and play our games, assist with account opening and funding issues, provide constant communication in the event of game problems, identify issues and problems as soon as possible so the engineering team can jump on them right away, and be a constant supporter and advocate of the users and FanDuel.

You will need to be passionate about fantasy sports (and US pro-sports in general), love interacting with users to help them get the best experience possible from our games and excel at dealing with the challenge of solving issues in real time.

What you will be doing:

The Customer Support Manager will be responsible for building and leading support team; hiring to our high standards other team members that are passionate about sports, helping users and maintaining our high quality experience. Once team members have been hired, you will help them get trained to ensure they are familiar with all the tools and the issues they are likely to encounter on daily basis. You’ll also help the product team ways we can improve our site and the ways we provide support so users can get instant answers to questions.

This is an incredible opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing start-up. FanDuel is the market leader in the fastest growing segment of the fantasy sports industry, and the decisions that you make will help shape the future of the industry. Compensation is competitive, and will include the possibility of stock options or equity.

Location: New York, NY

Job Type: Full time

• First and foremost you need to be passionate about fantasy sports
• Ability to work hours that include 5pm-9pm Eastern
• Willingness to work weekends and off hours shifts as needed to accommodate the US sports schedule
• Extremely strong communication skills – especially written, but also on the phone
• Ability to quickly understand complex topics related to the contests and other issues on the site and exhibit good judgment with regard to handling those issues
• Willingness to be on call 24-7 at times
• Experience at providing high touch customer support
• Experience of managing a small team working to flexible schedules

• Oversee all areas of customer support, including building and managing the team (e.g. hiring, training, supervising, development)
• Resolve all user issues, questions, incidents, compaints, etc. in a timely and professional manner and to the complete satisfaction of the user
• Process withdrawal requests, while monitoring for fraudulent activity
• Understand the nature of user issues, interpret the complexities and escalate as appropriate to product and engineering team members
• Communicate user requests, needs and trends internally
• Provide an internal monthly report, with summaries of major issues, user needs and recommendations
• Identify ways in which we can improve how we provide support (tools, etc.)
• Develop resourcing plans for scaling the customer support team as the user base grows 

• Proven and demonstrable experience of customer support in a consumer centric web product company.
• Creativity
• Passion for helping people
• People management skills
• Great attention to detail, highly organized, with a focus on quality of work
• Superior interpersonal skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• 3+ years of experience
• Excellent professional references

To apply for this position send your resume and cover letter to alex@fanduel.com. Due to the amount of great applications we have already received, applicants must include a cover letter addressing the questions below or they will not be considered for the position.

Your cover letter needs to:

1. Explain why you are the right person for this role – refer to the job description for details of the specific skills and experience we are seeking
2. Detail your experience with fantasy sports in general, and daily fantasy sports in particular
3. Demonstrate your strong written communication skills, your understanding of complex support issues and your good judgment by providing a response to both of the following hypothetical support scenarios…

#1 – Ten minutes after games start, you receive a support ticket from a user that says the following: “Help! I just entered a 10 person, $100 entry fee contest. After submitting my lineup, I noticed that I’m the 11th person in the contest. Please cancel my entry from this contest.” Please write a brief response to this user (note that we are not so much interested in the right answer as we are in how you respond) and detail why you gave that response by including an explanation of the thought process behind it. For purposes of this discussion, assume that you will not be able to get guidance from another member of the Fanduel team for the next two hours.

#2 – Five minutes before game time, you get the following support ticket: “Help! I accidentally entered a $100 contest. It’s contest number S123456. Please cancel it for me.” The ticket comes from a player who you know has never entered a contest above $25 before. Assume that you haven’t been given any guidelines for this scenario, that you do have the technical capability to cancel player entries, and that you’re expected to handle issues of this magnitude without any assistance. What do you think the correct resolution would be and why? What is your reasoning and what factors do you think are relevant to the decision?

Again, please get your resume and cover letter to alex@fanduel.com as soon as possible and we will get back to shortly.

June 8, 2011 at 11:09 pm Leave a comment

New draft screen is live!

With a new season of MLB approaching, we’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning. We are thrilled to announce the release of our new draft screen design! Some of you will already have seen it in beta, and it has now been switched on to become the default for everyone. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback in the beta trial process.

We evolved this screen to overcome some of the problems with the old design. It had started as an early FanDuel prototype and was starting to look pretty crowded, especially for big contests. The new and improved version is better in several ways:

• More compact – the height is approximately 30% shorter than the previous design, making entering more convenient
• Improved player navigation – made easier with position tabs and game matchup filters instead of drop-down boxes
• Entry list – for leagues and tournaments you can now see who has entered already
• Prize list – the prize total and prizes by position are shown more clearly
• Clearer entry fee selection – brought to the top and made more prominent
• Better user feedback – explaining why you can’t add some players (e.g. because you’ve already selected their position)

Our other priorities on the development side have been getting things in shape for MLB season, including scaling up our infrastructure to cope with what we hope will be a huge influx of new players. There will also be plenty more exciting on-site developments to come over the next few weeks and months so watch this space!

March 16, 2011 at 6:30 pm Leave a comment