CustomerSuccess.cx is a consultancy specialising in providing services for business-to-business software companies to help them to improve their customer support and retention practices. My first service is coaching for customer support professionals.Having a focused and experienced coach on your side can have a positive impact on how you handle the challenges that come your way each day. If you’re struggling to find the support you need within your team, then an external coach (like me!) may be able to guide you along your path. This is likely going to be particularly valuable for people who don't have ready access to mentors with CX expertise within their team (hello, early-stage startup hires!).Alongside serving my clients, that has also involved: * sharing content on LinkedIn* writing a newsletter* guest speaking on podcasts* and speaking at the ElevateCX London conference

Support Driven is a community of professionals in Customer Support, Experience (CX), and Success helping each other and transforming the Customer Support and Operations industry.

Alongside the earlier support & account management role, I grew my people development responsibilities over my career at Expensify. In that time, I was recognised as a Mentor (to a total of 12 people), Leader and Senior Leader (alongside informal mentorship of another 5 of my colleagues).Each has a set of defined roles and ongoing responsibilities, which I work to complete for five years. That involved discussions around performance, providing critical feedback and direction, and proposing, supporting and leading performance improvement plans (PIPs).These responsibilities often involved supporting our teams through complete overhauls of their roles, which happened roughly every two years for our team alone.As the first full-time hire outside of the US, I helped expand our presence in the UK office (London), including interviewing candidates and onboarding new hires in the region. These responsibilities lasted the whole of my career at Expensify. During my entire time at Expensify, I worked remotely, from London (UK), Birmingham (UK), Auckland (Aotearoa New Zealand), and elsewhere as I travelled for fun and business. I have a well-honed set of work skills that makes remote my default and preferred working style.

In my middle years at Expensify, I generalised my work, mixing a range of skills and responsibilities.Account managementWhile only part of my later role, I managed a portfolio of Expensify’s highest-value customers to make the most of our product and services. Rather than appearing for contract renewals (which I did manage), account management at Expensify involved proactively finding opportunities for our customers to get better value from their spend.Escalated customer supportDriven by my strong product and customer knowledge, I handled escalated support discussions that were more complex, or required detailed and specialised knowledge of Expensify’s product and API, or accounting systems and processes. I also frequently identified patterns in customer reports to spot the early signs of product incidents, and add context through independent research such as reviewing logs for those customers, and recently deployed code. This allowed us to reduce the time to resolve the incident when our engineering colleagues got involved to create and deploy a fix.In one notable incident, I identified a pattern of fraudulent behaviour by a bad actor and I led the escalation of that incident. Addressing the issue involved making temporary risk process changes, immediate product changes, and a larger user-facing authentication change that affected the majority of our customers.Support process projectsIn one substantial project I led, we removed our internal support team from customer support interactions entirely (moving these to our existing outsourced vendor teams). While the project was initially expected to take 14 months, we managed to have such a strong output that we wrapped it up in 3 months.In another project, I proposed and oversaw changing a fraud process that resulted in much faster resolutions for our customers, reducing the wait time for false positive results.

I joined Expensify as the first of four Success Coaches, our first team designed to provide long-term relationship management. In my first three years as a Success Coach, alongside defining the team and our processes, I worked to build relationships with a portfolio of Expensify's highest-value customers around the world. In short, I was helping our customers be successful with Expensify, by doing expense reports that don't suck.A typical week would involve customer projects ranging from integrating their HR system with Expensify via our API, re-implementing their setup to support their changing needs, reviewing and adopting processes for local regulatory changes, demoing, clarifying and implementing the Expensify Card, or helping them adopt new features that we had rolled out.As with later roles, our smaller team size led to a lot of independent work and research, and directly engaging my colleagues on the legal, compliance and sales teams to resolve questions, concerns and problems that our customers brought to us. No matter what, it was my responsibility to get the job done.These were not transactional interactions. I built lasting relationships that lead to trust between their teams, and ours, for long-term growth and opportunities.

My role as CEO of Resiflex can broadly be broken down into four sections: Sales and marketing, product development, support, and strategy development.In general, I was responsible for founding the company in the UK, and for starting the process of developing the product, sales, marketing and support for our earliest customers.Sales and MarketingThe role involved in-depth market research and analysis and customer research. In addition, I developed and maintained our marketing materials, such as our website, interacted with peers and customers via social media (primarily Twitter), used our CRM (Highrise) to manage information about customers, and made outbound contact (via phone calls and email) with prospects and leads.Using analytics tools like Intercom (for customer interaction), Google Analytics and Wistia (a video hosting service), I made informed decisions about the content to produce and the strategic moves to make.Product DevelopmentI used the results of our customer research, with both existing customers and potential customers to guide product development. This development was conducted by a supplier, whom I managed remotely. I frequently used qualitative hypothesis-testing in order to direct product development.SupportAs the primary contact for all support queries, I proactively solicited feedback about Resiflex’s product, as well as responding to any issues that arose to resolve them to our user’s satisfaction. I also used support problems and questions to guide further product development and marketing materials.Strategy DevelopmentAs CEO, I frequently had to “step back” from the day-to-day work in Resiflex and focus on the strategic plan for the company. As CEO of Resiflex, it was crucial to communicate effectively and clearly with our key stakeholders; our shareholders and board members. I also recruited and managed Resiflex’s first employee in the UK (our Marketing Manager) and two Virtual Assistants.

Overall, my role as the Director of Information and Communication is to enable PCI to improve and grow and maintain a leading edge with regard to our competitor through the effective use of information management and information technology, and excellent communication. My main responsibilities are to ensure that internal and external communications and our information systems are user-friendly, efficient and a true asset to the organisation. We use information and communication to make our systems the best-in-class and keep PCI innovative.

I provide part-time IT support to Positive Care Ireland, developing their internal systems and fixing things when they break. Our systems are based on Microsoft's BPOS and we are currently transitioning to Office365.

As founder and director of TaskLight, I manage the day-to-day activities of the company, as well as acting in a sales and development capacity while we grow from start-up status.

While studying for a Masters in Political Psychology in Queen's University, Belfast, I co-founded the Belfast Skeptics. The aim of the group was to explore science and culture, and provide free talks to the public on a variety of topics. The talks included those by the Science Communicator from the Armagh Planetarium on UFO reporting in the UK, mentalist David Meade and Dr Lesley Storey of Queen’s University Belfast on myths in psychology. In that role, I wrote content for the website, sought out, invited and arranged guest speakers, created press releases, communicated with the public and publicising our events.

I was involved in setting up PBI and registering it as a charity, while also working on the marketing and the website