When I interviewed for monday, I was asked why I wanted to apply for a role in Customer Experience.
I answered that I wanted a job that would challenge me, where every day would be different and where I would constantly have the opportunity to learn and grow.
Working in Customer Experience has taught me so much, but also changed me as a person outside of work too.
If I had to summarise the biggest lessons I’ve learnt in my time here so far, they can probably be summed up into 4 main points:
1 – Out of the box thinking:
One of the biggest parts of our role as CX is helping our customers to achieve their goals using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s platform. With a platform as flexible and customisable as monday, this can often mean there are multiple routes to the same answer.
Working in CX has helped me to think more creatively so that we can provide not just a solution to the customer, but the solution that is best for their business.
As with any platform, there are also limitations we sometimes run into. That creative problem solving comes to the forefront here, as you learn to find workarounds to get the outcome you need.
Solutions aren’t always handed to us on a silver platter. In many cases we need to test out different options, often combining features together to get to the final result.
Not only is this one of the most challenging parts of the role, but it’s also one of the most rewarding. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of achieving something that seemed unachievable.
2 – Adapting to change
Whilst this is a skill everyone in CX has to learn, this couldn’t be more important than at monday. We can release new updates and features on an almost daily basis, and this means learning to adapt to change quickly.
Our customers expect us to be product experts and sources of knowledge, so we have to brush up on things quickly.
As a person who came into this role hating change, learning to go with the flow and take these new changes in your stride can be a huge learning curve.
If any of the points on this list affected me outside of the office, it’s definitely this one.
Embracing change as a positive and taking it in your stride is the key to success not only in Customer Experience – where new challenges and use cases are a daily occurrence – but is also a crucial skill for any career, regardless of which direction you choose to take.
3 – The art of collaboration
As the Customer Experience team, we want to make sure we provide our customers with service 24/7. At monday, this means we have teams across the globe, literally, all the way from Australia to New York City, to make sure we’re always available.
This of course, also means that we work with colleagues in different time zones, sometimes with different working weeks. That can bring its own challenges, but also provides an amazing opportunity for collaboration.
I personally believe that without effective collaboration, our CX team wouldn’t be half as good as it is. Some of this comes down to processes we have in place, but a lot of it comes down to creating a culture that fosters collaboration.
Promoting a culture of collaboration is something we keep in mind right from the beginning of the hiring process. Our talented HR team have a keen eye for finding this in our candidates. The outcome of this is a team of vibrant, determined and fun co-workers, who create a positive atmosphere.
Another thing I’ve learnt in my time within CX is that two brains will always be better than one. And when you have over 100 colleagues in your CX department, this provides an incredible wealth of knowledge and expertise to draw on. Sometimes getting a second opinion or asking for help can crack that one solution that just seems to be escaping you.
Customer Experience is, at its core, a team sport. Being a team player will not only make you a better CX team member but a better colleague too.
4 – Solving for Success
As the saying goes “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”.
This saying resonates exactly with the service we want to provide to our customers.
When a customer contacts us with a question, we don’t simply want to answer their question but give them knowledge and tools so that they come away from their experience with us feeling more empowered and confident when using the platform.
By having this ethos at the core of our CX team, we are always looking to create added value for our customers.
This means reading every email, or taking every webinar and demo and asking yourself ‘how can I make this interaction the most valuable for this customer?’.
Learning to think this way makes going above and beyond the norm.
As the CX team, we are often the first people from monday that our users interact with. We are the point of contact for most clients from A-Z.
This not only gives us an incredible sense of responsibility but also a unique opportunity to impact their first and general impression of the platform. This is where that outside of the box thinking in my first point comes into play even more.
This nicely circles back to my first point, out of the box thinking. See what I did there? 😉
Overall, working as a Customer Experience Advocate has been the challenging, always-changing and exciting role I hoped it would be. But it also is so much more than that.
If you feel like any of these points resonated with you – whether you already have these skills, or you’re looking for a new role that will help you to develop them, we would love to have you with us! We’re always looking for new people to join our ever-expanding crew 🙂
Get started