How Growing up in South Africa Set Meghan Griffiths on a Mission to Save Our Climate

This article was written by Abby Lee Mosconi and originally appeared on Technial.ly.

They say inspiration can come from anywhere. Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure who “they” are. Regardless, for Meghan Griffiths, Retention Services Director at Inspire, inspiration came from her childhood in South Africa.

“In South Africa, a lot of low-income housing has solar panels and hot water heaters,” she said. “When my family moved to the U.S., I didn’t see any of that, anywhere. That’s when I decided I wanted to work in the world of renewable energy.”

Griffiths went on to earn a degree in energy and environmental policy from the University of Delaware. After working for one year as a residential service coordinator at Standard Solar in Maryland, Griffiths discovered Philadelphia based clean energy company, Inspire. Its mission to build a brighter energy future reminded Griffiths of why she went into the biz in the first place, and in 2014 she was hired as a manager of Inspire’s member support team.

Today, a little over six years later, Griffiths graciously gave Technical.ly the lowdown on her rise up the career ladder at Inspire.

You started as a Member Support Manager. How did you transition into your current role of Retention Services Director?

Working on the member experience team gave me an excellent baseline understanding of how the business worked and how customers felt about our service. As I learned more, I got more curious. I wanted to know how things worked, so I asked many questions. How were inbound calls routed to an agent, and how did we bill a customer? Luckily for me, I had a supportive team around me who was willing to answer my questions, hear my feedback and teach me a few things along the way.

I reached out to the head of the operations department — he is a mentor of mine — and he helped me navigate the transition into operations. From there, I found my passion for automation and process improvement and started working more closely with our technology team on improvements to our internal tools and driving automation in our business.

In my product-focused role now, the customer is still at the center of every decision I make. My focus is on retaining our members and ensuring they are getting the best possible experience with Inspire.

Describe a day in your life as the Retention Services Director.

Every day is different, which is exciting! My top priority is identifying and understanding the business problems needing to be solved from a retention perspective. This involves getting the problem into a product brief, where we further define what we are trying to solve.

Some issues are easy to understand, where others require much more discovery and collaboration. If more discovery is needed, I kick off conversations with the relevant stakeholder groups to further define what needs to be true. Once the problem is defined and the brief is done, we start conversations with technology on how they would solve the problem and start getting an idea of the development lift it would take to implement.

Throughout this process, I’m working in lockstep with our marketing, member experience, operations, and regulatory teams to solve the problems that will have the most significant impact on our members.

Tell us about the culture at Inspire.

Inspire is a place where everyone genuinely cares about seeing and helping each other succeed. While our office has gone virtual due to the pandemic, we are connected throughout the work day on Slack. We have an open, collaborative work style and curiosity is encouraged. Tapping someone’s shoulder (virtually for now) to ask a question is a norm.

Inspire values getting to know your coworkers as people and does a great job of making the (socially distanced) space to do so. We were lucky enough to have a few socially distant get-togethers over the summer.

Slack has also given us the space to bond virtually through the pandemic. We have groups like #skincarelife for the latest skin essentials, #peloavengers for the Peloton fans, and #recipe-sharing, for you guessed it, sharing those tried and true recipes.

Any other unique facts about you, in addition to being from South Africa?

Throughout the pandemic, I have become obsessed with three things: coffee, my dog Piper and plants. An ideal weekend for me starts with a good latte, taking Piper for a walk, and pursuing the plant stores in Philly. I also love propagating and swapping plants. I recently even co-hosted a plant propagation lightning talk for our tech team.

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