A few weeks ago, I lost my wallet on a train in New York City. This wallet contained all my money, my insurance cards, the post-it on which I’d scribbled my to-dos, and (worst of all) my two favorite Pokemon cards and my lucky penny.

"But what exactly do you do?" The operations team hears this question a lot. To help answer it, Jackie (one of our Senior Operations Associates) let us walk a mile in her boots!

Here at ZocDoc, our enthusiasm for service isn’t limited to the patients and doctors on the other end of the phone line - and it doesn’t stop with the Service Team either.

It’s often remarked that the Operations Team is drawn from a strikingly eclectic range of backgrounds. While it’s true that we have actors, photographers, computer whizzes, an opera singer and even a Canadian, these labels feel flat when compared with the loveable weirdos that stand behind them.

I was introduced to this term when I was working at Apple, Inc. The idea is that every decision the company makes is for the benefit of the customer – everything from product to decor to warranties. When I learned about it, I loved it. What could be better than working for an organization like Apple, where your job is to change people’s lives through technology and experience? For me, it turns out the answer is ZocDoc.

Whether leading a meeting, chatting up a doctor on the phone, or just goofing around in the kitchen, we Operations Associates spend an extraordinary portion of our time listening and speaking. Language is our primary tool and we all love to use it – even though our team has been gathered from such an eclectic range of backgrounds. It might be the one thing we have in common.

Customer Service Representative. If you’re anything like me, those three words inspire unspeakable terror, traumatic nightmares, and maybe even a short-lived loathing for existence.

Many companies have names that offer a fairly straightforward glimpse into what their business entails. Brands like General Motors, Bank of America, and Grubhub give even the completely uninitiated a good chance of landing a guess in the right ballpark. But with ZocDoc, things are a little different.

As a Service Team, we're presented with unusual and unexpected situations every day. Each situation allows us to discover new ways patients and doctors interact with our service and find where confusions arise. Many times these are user experience issues that we report and help refine. Sometimes we help solve larger system bugs, and even identify new products and features.

“What made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.” - Kurt Vonnegut