Julie O'Donnell is a Trailblazer

After graduating from college, Julie O'Donnell landed a job with Hewlett-Packard in an integration role, requiring her to embrace learning on the fly. She needed to quickly pick up the ins-and-outs of both system integrations and the hardware itself. This experience required Julie to get involved in the back end of systems, sparking a desire to pursue a career built around both technical understanding and business acumen.

When the prospect of upward mobility became stagnant in her integration role, Julie answered a friend’s call to work in a support organization. Even though the service industry was a bit outside her realm of comfort, Julie was open to a challenge that promised an opportunity of professional growth. She started at the bottom, working shift hours answering phone calls. Slowly but surely, Julie moved up to become part of a development team doing heavy support casework, handling challenges that the general support team alone couldn’t manage. During this time, she was first introduced to Salesforce, which shifted her career path entirely.

When Julie’s manager asked her to quickly transition to manage incoming support cases on Salesforce, Julie turned to Trailhead to learn the necessary skills. Trailhead became her go-to way to bolster her understanding of this new platform. She also discovered the helpful Trailblazer Community, leveraging its support to find solutions to tough implementation questions. With the development team’s adoption of Salesforce an ultimate success, Julie went on to lead the onboarding efforts for the company’s end users and agents in customer service call centers.

Since her first implementation, Julie has configured Service Cloud from scratch three times for different employers, enhancing service teams’ ability to serve customers. Her work has included everything from integrating Service Cloud Voice with telephony systems for a unified experience, to creating extensive flow automations for complex business processes. These custom configurations have resulted in personalized, omni-channel customer experiences.

Today, Julie leads a skilled team of Salesforce Admins and Developers at Quickbase, an application platform. She oversees the implementation and integration of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Account Engagement, and Experience Cloud. By automating sales processes and centralizing customer data, Julie and her team provide the tools for the company to better serve current and potential customers. In her free time, Julie is a mentor to others and a volunteer in her community. She is also a passionate Serviceblazer, taking time to connect with other service experts in the community and contribute to paving a better path forward for others within the service industry.