PrismHR Spotlight: CSM Elizabeth Shields
The emotion is real, the concern is real, and the warmth is real.
Morgan Shields quickly swoops into the frame from the left of the Teams video call to give her mother a huge hug after a raw, honest moment that brought tears followed by a quick smile.
Morgan clearly takes after her mom, Customer Success Manager Elizabeth Shields—or Liz as she prefers. Liz not only deeply cares for people but also is passionate about the work she does.
In other words, she’s the real deal, and it’s been that way for a long time.
Life Lessons
Before joining PrismHR in June 2024, Liz made a career out of caring and problem-solving. She was an intervention specialist for kids in kindergarten through fifth grade in Fairfield, Ohio. Her job was to help students with emotional and behavioral needs, and she specialized in children with moderate to severe disabilities.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 7.5 million students (aged 3 to 21) with special needs in the 2022-23 school year, the most recent data available. The national average of students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was 15%, and Ohio was 2 percentage points above that at 17%.
Dealing with students with special needs can be difficult, of course, and one of the biggest challenges “is making sure that all the adults in a child’s life are all working for the same goal for that child,” Liz says.
That’s not always easy.
Read our profiles of CSMs Melissa Eversole, Lesha Cyphers, Jason Ward, Michael Wolf and Matt Yuknis.
Liz holds a master’s degree in special education, but she learned firsthand from a young age what it’s like for a kid to have a difficult childhood—because she lived through one. She was always the first kid at school and the last to leave because of her situation at home. Liz depended on friends and their families to help provide a sense of normalcy along with a safe place for her to stay. It wasn’t always easy as her family moved around Ohio so much. Thirteen times in 10 years to be exact.
As an adult, Liz has focused on stability. She lives with her husband of 25 years, Mic; their two adult daughters, Morgan and Lydia; and two goldendoodles, Max—who sat in on the interview from afar—and Luna. A third dog, Lily, a beagle mix who the family rescued, passed away a couple of weeks before the interview. She was 14. The Shields didn’t really know what type of dog she was until recently. Morgan insisted on getting a DNA test for Lily shortly before her furry childhood friend passed away.
In her spare time, Liz also likes to use her Cricut cutting machine to design T-shirts. She likes to make them for friends and family, especially around Christmas time. As a special-education teacher, she would make matching sweatshirts for her department of six focused on different holiday themes.
A Young Student Struggles
Unless you have seen it in person, it’s sometimes hard to imagine how a child as young as 5 could be a danger to themselves or others, but Liz experienced that with some of the kids she worked with.
“A lot of teachers fear these types of students because they can be dangerous,” she says. “They can misbehave, they can throw things, they can attack.”
The previously described emotional moment came after Liz started discussing one student in particular.
“One of the most dangerous kids I had was one I got in kindergarten,” she says. “He threw a binder at a sub, and it hit her right across her face.”
The teacher needed stitches.
When dealing with difficult cases like this, Liz explains it takes time and patience. It’s “not only building relationships with those kids but building relationships with their parents,” too.
Some parents were more involved than others. Liz would get messages first thing in the morning saying things like, “ ‘Johnny’s’ off today. He’s refusing to take his meds. He wouldn’t go to bed last night, so he was up all night, but, hey, he’s on the bus.”
How do you deal with a challenging child like that?
“You have to go in with an open mind, and you have to figure out what was going on. … You also have to guard against those preconceived notions that come with every other teacher or every adult before you got into that child’s life,” she says. “My job—and my first job before I ever met the child—was to go through all that stuff, and I would always make a list of what had been tried, what worked a little bit, what didn’t work at all. And I made sure that we didn’t go backwards.”
Always Moving Forward
As a PrismHR customer success manager, Liz uses her background in special education to help her customers. She follows the advice that she often gave her students: “Tomorrow’s a new day” and “I’m going to love you through it.”
And her customers definitely feel the love as she listens to their challenges and helps them navigate them.
CEO, Pinnacle Employee Services
“I particularly appreciate Liz Shields’ personalized approach to customer support,” says Beth Eckert, CEO of East Syracuse, New York-based Pinnacle Employee Services, “especially when it pertains to our internal staff development and training.”
Eckert adds that Liz “takes the time to understand our unique business needs and tailors her recommendations accordingly. Liz is extremely responsive and follows through on her promises. We are lucky to have such a great PrismHR partner and asset to our team.”
Liz also can tap into her background in human resources to help her customers succeed.
While she majored in education, she took a detour that gave her an education in the HR space, too. To help pay her way through college, she worked for a small organization as a call center agent coordinating assembly deliveries for big-box stores like Toys R Us.
As an agent, she had Atlases laid out in front of her and phone books from all major cities so they could find local delivery companies. Pre-Google, of course. Does she appreciate the automation that PrismHR brings to the table based on her analog-related experience back in the day? Absolutely, she says.
She also got some HR-related experience helping with open enrollment and other HR-related duties along the way. Liz even authored the company’s first employee handbook by modeling theirs on others she had seen.
Liz eventually moved on to become an HR coordinator at a mail-order pharmacy. She had to take a pay cut to go into the education field after she was married, but it also gave her more time to spend with her young daughters during school breaks.
“It made me realize that I could do whatever I put my mind to,” she says.
Putting Her Mind on PrismHR’s Customers
After a long career in education, what enticed her about the field also led to her exit from it. She originally wanted to have more time with her children, but after years and years of helping other kids, she realized she was not able to give her own children as much time as she and they desired. The pandemic had changed some teachers’ work ethic, she said, so Liz found herself working longer hours to keep up with ever-growing demands.
It also took her away from her family time far more than she wanted.
“I found myself comparing them [my daughters] to my students as far as, ‘You girls have no idea. You have it way better than others do.’ It’s not what they needed to hear.”
She wanted to make things right for them, so when an opportunity opened, Liz jumped at the chance to begin a new career as a PrismHR customer success manager. She was able to bring her passion and compassion to a role that helps customers navigate the complex and fast-moving world of HR tech in the Professional Employer Organization (PEO) space.
It also gave her the chance to do something she’s always wanted to do—travel the country. She never was able to go on trips growing up. She is excited about visiting customers in Salt Lake City, for instance, on an upcoming trip.
She also loves her team. The CSMs are “all great,” she says, “and they’re all more than willing to help. They all have certain strengths.”
The CSM team appreciates her, too.
“In the six-plus months she’s been here, Liz has become a leader in customer satisfaction,” says Melissa Eversole, PrismHR’s senior director of customer success. “Liz has demonstrated a commitment to excellence and an unrelenting focus on putting the customer first. She has set the benchmark for what it means to be customer-centric.”
Being customer-centric is what’s it all about.
And that starts with meeting the customers in person, she says. “You see where they work, you see the people in their office and how they interact. You really do become kind of another member of their team.”
Just feel that warmth; it’s the real deal.
Class dismissed.