US software company ActiveCampaign currently employs around 160 people in Dublin. Last year, it announced that it planned to grow that to 300 by the end of 2023 to fulfil its ambitious expansion strategy.

The customer experience automation company is already “ahead of track” on achieving its hiring goal of 300, according to John Lamphiere, regional vice-president and EMEA lead for the company. It is valued at $3bn, having reached unicorn status last year.

Dublin-based Lamphiere joined ActiveCampaign last year to oversee the company’s Dublin hiring strategy.

He told SiliconRepublic.com about his progress so far with the hiring campaign for the company’s Dublin office, which, he explained is more of a “hub”.

“We have what we classify as hubs globally as opposed to just offices. Dublin is a pretty significant hub for ActiveCampaign. Based here, we’ve got go to market teams, we’ve got customer success teams, tech support services and we’re also building an engineering hub.”

The company has around 1,000 staff globally. Lamphiere said it is currently hiring several engineers in Dublin.

“We’re looking for more engineers; we’re rolling out the team pretty rapidly. We also announced a European data hub a little while ago. So, a lot of our engineering resources will go to support that as well.”

Dutta Satadip, ActiveCampaign’s chief customer officer joined Lamphiere to speak to SiliconRepublic.com. The executive is in charge of a global team and is normally based in the company’s headquarters in Chicago.

He said that the Dublin team’s hub had moved to a new office to accommodate its growth.

Satadip explained that 50pc of the company’s 150,000 customers are based internationally, with a “significant number” located in EMEA.

“One of the things that we want to make sure we do as a hub in Dublin is that we are supporting all the languages that we do business in, which is French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,” he said.

“And Dublin actually happens to be in a great spot for us as a hub because it has such a multi-lingual, semi ex-pat community here.”

While the company is making the most of the talent pool Dublin offers, Lamphiere said that around 10pc of its staff in Ireland are “remote in Ireland, so they’re not in Dublin.”

“We’ve always had an attitude to flexibility and personal choice,” he explained, adding that even before the pandemic, ActiveCampaign has always been conscious of the “right to disconnect” for its employees.

Lamphiere said that the company will “continue to offer that choice and that flexibility” to its newest batch of hires.

However, Satadip said the company is still retaining its physical office in Dublin: “We want to give employees the flexibility to choose the place they want to work in, but also have like communal places to come together, collaborate, be creative, problem solve and go back and execute wherever they feel comfortable whether that’s in the office or outside of it.”

‘Super active’ in the Irish market

“We’re super active in the Irish market… I think we’ve been at the sort of centre point of helping a lot of companies sort of move online, especially the smaller businesses that traditionally wouldn’t have thought about it,” said Lamphiere.

He was recently asking an SME client about how their operations had changed since the pandemic. The client responded that while they had used Facebook and Instagram, they never realised they had a marketing stack.

“I think that’s where we’ve seen attitudes change,” Lamphiere said, “Companies have been forced to do business in a very different way from what they’ve done. That means that they needed to find efficiencies because most small businesses started having to have a greater dependency on the online channel.”

“That takes work because you’re not talking over the counter to your customer every day, or whatever the case may be,” he said of the sudden pivot to online operations, which was challenging for businesspeople who had always dealt in person prior to the pandemic.

According to Lamphiere, much of the marketing work and growing customer bases online was done outside of working hours as it ate into running a business.

He concluded that ActiveCampaign’s customer experience automation software has been “really successful in helping businesses” automate some of the online aspect of growing their customer bases over the past two years and more.

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