Journey of a Customer Success Representative

A ride into the career path of an intern turned team-lead

Please introduce yourself:

My name is Lilian Onochie and I’m the team lead of the Customer Success team at Pocket by Piggyvest. I was previously a customer success executive at Piggyvest, then, I transitioned to Pocket. I currently have 3 years of experience in the CS field and that's basically me and what I do at the moment.

What's a typical day like for you? 

Umm, managerial and operational functions at the moment. I mean, I just started, but even, you know, going down the line, it's not going to be that much different.

So basically I wake up and the first thing I’m doing is checking my work email, checking Slack, checking our CRM platforms and all of that to start my day. Then I go to fix escalations, things that have been forwarded to me to resolve. I also check my team's messages to confirm if there’s anything that needs to be addressed, you know, just so it doesn't go under the radar.

Then there are always 2 or 3 meetings to attend. That's basically it!

Awesome! Throwing it back, why did you choose CS as your career path?

I wanted to actually become an Air Hostess. I kept going to airlines, and the airport, even going to their offices to submit my CV. I did all this while I was serving as a corp member, cos before then, I had always imagined myself on the phone saying, ‘Hi, thank you for contacting us. My name is Lilian. How can I help you today?’ :)

Things like that excite me, I love it. I love customer service. I love hospitality. I love helping and attending to people. But with the Air Hostess thing, nothing was coming through. And then I saw an ad for social media interns on Twitter, and I applied on a whim. Actually, I saw it and then I just kept it. I was like, I'll come back to you. Then my ex-boyfriend sent it to me. He was like, you have to apply. I applied and I got in, and it has been three years ever since.

Three years?

Yes, 3 years of moving from one department to the other. Learning and unlearning yeah, It's been great. Really! It really has been a journey. It has been one heck of a journey, but I'm eternally grateful. I always remind my ex-boyfriend from time to time that he gingered me. 

And here we are. Air hostess turned CS team lead. haha

So on being a Team-lead, you said this was pretty recent, so far are there ups and downs? Things that throw you off your game? Situations that could be a bit challenging to handle? 

I think anyone in any managerial position, the minute you come in or the minute that you're notified that you're going to be placed in a position of management, managing a team or whatever, you already have a couple of ideas that you want to implement and you're like, this is what I would do better. This is what I would change. But you need to remember that managing people is not a walk in the park. Collectively as a team, different people with different agendas, different work modes, and different personalities have to come together to achieve one common goal. And there are always different ways of going about things to get to that goal.
Person A might be thinking, this way is right and person B is thinking, the other way is right. And they might both be very right. But it's that unity that is needed. You know, there needs to be some kind of cohesion in all of their methods. So the managerial aspect is something. There are also processes that I would like to put in place. Like I came in with all these ideas and I need to tell myself that eventually I'll get all these things done right cos I kind of feel like I'm racing against time. I want to do this and I want to do that. And I want everything to be perfect because I think of myself as a perfectionist.

So it's like I'm going through the onboarding process, and I'm still in the process of trying to create processes and onboard other people.
The upside is seeing the processes that you've created, working. Seeing that, just that validation, knowing that, okay, what I'm doing actually has a positive impact, will always be rewarding. Always!

You said you started off as an intern, can you give a summary of your journey?

I started out as an intern at Piggyvest, and I spent about eight months there. I was on the social media team, and then I moved. It was a promotion of sorts to another team, which was the emails team. After a while, I think after about a year and some months I became the deputy team lead of my team, and then I moved as team lead to my present team.
That was it really but then, in between all of that, there were added responsibilities. There were acknowledgements of all the work I was putting in, I would wake up one day and I would see, for your hard work you've moved from this tier to this tier and here's like an acknowledgement and compensation, and it was always very rewarding. With that came, as I said, added responsibilities.
But then in all of this, I also had a manager that spoke up for me.

Like, it's one thing to do the work if you don't have someone actually, not only encouraging you but also highlighting your strengths and the work that you're putting in. And I think that's one of the most important duties of a manager. Like, yes, you manage people, but how much do you care about their individual growth or their growth as a team?
So I had a manager that was not on my neck, but she fights for her team. And I am always gushing about her and everything. But yeah, it was a lot of this growth that I experienced, even the things I know about customer success, all of it, the standards that I now replicate or try to replicate in my own team, is as a result of that. 

What can you say are the misconceptions that people have about Customer success? 

Actually, I don't think a lot of people realise how back-breaking and technical customer success is. I don't think people realise how much goes into it. I think a lot of people just think that, if you're talking to a representative or personnel, all they're doing is just collecting the information that you're giving them and pushing it to someone else. Like they're just the recipients of complaints, inquiries, feedback and all that. But there's a lot of technicality in it. We have technical support. Those people are the ones that work closely with the engineers. They have software development or software engineering knowledge and they can fix things back end.
But then there are a lot of technical things that your regular customer success person in any technical industry has to do, say like at the bank or telecoms etc. A lot of the issues that you complain about, they have to fix it right there and then on the spot. I worked on the calls team for a month and I realised how gruelling it was. They're right there on the phone with you and they have to fix it on the spot. It's really not easy. 

I used to think it was an easy job. It's not so.
When I moved to the emails team, I was required to take a course in customer support and I still use what I learnt in that course till today because there were things that I saw and I was like, Wow, I did not know these things.
Things as little as proper punctuation might not mean a lot to some people. Actually, it might not even mean a lot to the customers that you're responding to, but there's a sense of fulfilment you feel knowing that you're actually doing the right thing. You're following a professional standard, and you are doing your job like a professional.
I think that's where a lot of companies and organisations get it wrong. They just bring anybody and say, respond to the customers. They think that, so far as you're saying, please, I'm sorry and we'll get back to you, they have customer support and that's it. But no, a lot of training goes into it as well.

Is there a time when you had to alter your normal approach with the customer to fix an issue?

When you work in the financial industry, you need to be diplomatic in whatever you're doing. This one time I was at the office and this person who had an issue came by the office with a whole squad and demanded to speak to the manager. So at that point, I took the position of manager, calmly but firmly explained and de-escalated the issue, and they all left.

So typically I would be a lot more polite, but then I had to be very firm. Sometimes you have to be firm on the job. A lot of people will say the customer is king and the customer is right, but when you care about the integrity of the job that you do and the integrity of the organisation that you work with, you have to find a way to navigate this kind of sensitive and tight situations.

How do you maintain a healthy work-life balance? 

I try to do this thing for myself where I start work at a certain time and try to end it at a certain time. I found that having a routine actually works very fine for me. I wake up before seven, do all I need to do, try to freshen up and start working minutes before eight. 

At one point my life was very organised. I used to be able to make breakfast, Now it's just vibes lol.
But I try to stop working at like 4 or 5, do anything else that I need to do or want to do, come back to my laptop later at night to work and then sleep and repeat.
It really isn't always like that but I make sure I always have time for myself.

Who would you consider your three top thought leaders in the customer success industry?

Very interesting question. I actually have not necessarily cared or I just haven't come across anyone aside from my manager. That's the honest truth. Aside from her, I don't have any. Maybe I haven't made the effort to look them up, but I have someone who does a fantastic job and it really does show.
I'm able to refer to this person, I can ask this person for guidance, I can ask them for tips, I can ask them for assistance. And they are, in fact, managing me. And so far that has been sufficient for me.
There are professionals in other fields that I look up to for their work ethic but for customer success in particular, it’s just my manager and that's the truth. Her name is Bukola Willoby, you can look her up here.

Do you have any advice for newbies coming into customer success as a career path? 

This is advice that I give anyone who joins or wants to join Customer Success, I tell them to provide the service that they would want to be given. Depending on the industry that you work in or the organisation that you work in, you as a customer success person will have to tailor your responses accordingly. 

I tell my new teammates how would you feel if you were speaking to someone in a telecoms company, or in a bank and they were responding to you so informally, would you not think that you're talking to a fraudulent person or an account that's just trying to impersonate the organization? You have to be very professional. You can be diplomatic and professional even when you are being insulted or when the user is being difficult. You can be firm, professional and polite all at the same time.

Also, in all of this, you have to be empathetic, particularly because of the industry that we work in. I always tell them to put themselves in the person's shoes. 

Even if you can't, you should want to. I want to know what this particular customer is feeling. And there's also your organisation. There is a sense of fulfilment every time you're able to provide excellent service and you receive good feedback. Once you can have that and you have great communication, you really will be fine as a professional.

Are there any courses that you would recommend for them?

There are actually a couple of them on Coursera, I don't know the names in particular but I know the University of Columbia offered one and I took that one and it was great. So yes, Coursera or any other e-learning platform works, just search for customer success on these learning platforms. They tend to use an international standard and teach you things as little as grammar, punctuation, proper use of language etc. Just simple things that you might have taken for granted or that you might have assumed that you know so well.