Making Others Happy; My Journey to Becoming a CS Manager

I spoke to customer success manager Ayaka Katayama, who interacts with customers via our tools, Prott and Balto, about why she chose her profession as well as why she chose to work at Goodpatch. How does she communicate with her customers? I also spoke to her about what kind of customer success manager she wants to become.

‘Giving it 120% in order to make the other person happy’

Growing up, I watched my father work as a freelancer. My father’s philosophy towards work was the following: to come up with an outcome that far exceeds the other person’s expectations. Today, his philosophy has a strong influence on how I work. Even as a student, whenever I had an assignment or a part time job, his teachings were at the core of what I did; ‘if you give it 120% instead of 100%, the other person will be happy. If the other person is happy, that’ll lead to more opportunities.’

In hindsight, I had worked in customer service a lot of the time, where the distance between the customer and myself was close. I worked at coffee shops, clothing stores, and so forth.

Discovering the right place for myself

After graduating from college, I worked in the sales department at a real estate company for a year, then I worked at a medical support center for 3 years.

Amidst working with the ‘give it a 120%’ mindset inherited from my father, I felt uncomfortable when I saw that every business used the words, ‘for our customers’ happiness.’ Wanting to make someone happy is something that should come about naturally, not something that should be forced upon people. I thought it was unnecessary for these businesses to use these words so casually. However, I understood why such a phrase was needed after encountering a lot of people who forgot to think generously about others due to being overwhelmed with their own work.

Just when I started to get used to working at the support center, thoughts such as ‘I want to show that I can do more and do better’ starting forming in my head. However, I was working as a temporary staff, so the only tasks that were given to me were distributing and managing cases and taking calls. The only other thing I could do was teach the new workers about the nature of the job. However, being 25 at the time, I thought that I was too young to focus on teaching others, as I wanted to polish my knowledge and test out my potential.

Rudimentary problems started to catch my eye after working at the support center with system engineers and customers. The provided tools were hard to use and there wasn’t an apt environment to give feedback about how hard it was to use those tools. As I began thinking about these issues, I started developing feelings that couldn’t be translated into words. I thought that having an environment and mindset of putting the customer first was important.

Funnily enough, I got an email from Goodpatch, whom I didn’t even know of then, around that time regarding a job regarding customer success. I went to the job interview without any expectations.

Compared to the companies I used to work at, it was like nothing I had seen before. I was a bit intimidated by the cool, start-up vibe (laughs). Needless to say, the required skill-level was high, and I honestly wasn’t confident if I could contribute enough to Goodpatch and its customers.

But after listening about what Goodpatch does, what the company’s aiming for, and what customer success is, I felt as though I found the direct solution to the unresolved feeling I had for so long. And that’s why I decided to take a leap of faith and join the company.

It’s been more than a year since I’ve joined the company and in retrospect, I noticed that the notion of ​​’what can be done to make people happy?’ was a very design-oriented way of thinking. Until this point, I didn’t even know of the word ‘design thinking’, but that was what I had all along! It was a ‘eureka!’ moment.

I feel very lucky that the company that I initially went to lightheartedly, turned out to be a company that shares the same values. I also feel lucky because I was able to meet like-minded people that valued the same thinking as me.

The reason as to why it’s called customer success

Depending on the company, the definition of ‘CS’ differs, but Goodpatch’s ‘CS’ stands for ‘customer success.’ In regards to the difference between ‘customer success’ and ‘customer support,’ I think it boils down to whether or not the appropriate actions are set in place with considering the context of before and after an inquiry is made. In other words, thinking about things such as ‘why did the customer make an inquiry?’ or ‘what can I do to make sure that I won’t receive the same inquiry in the future?’

I think that the role of a customer success manager is to inform product managers, engineers, and designers who are developing products, the content of the inquiry/problem, in a visual, easy-to-understand manner.

Upon working in the field of customer success, there are 3 primary things that customer success managers do in regards to inquiries and requests in particular. For example, what does customer success managers do when they decide to develop a new feature? Let me explain.

Wording

We go through place holder texts that engineers or designers came up with, for usage within a service. We’ll then choose words that meets this criteria: can the message be conveyed with this word? Is it easy to see for the customer? Is it balanced with the design?

Feedback

As ‘the first user,’ we give feedback to the development team whilst it’s still in the development stage. We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and check whether there are parts that feel strange and check whether it works the way it’s intended to.

Release

Telling the customer that a new function is complete is also a part of the job. We think about what kind of person we want to deliver the announcement to, and then create content that is easy for that person to understand, and deliver it in the most apropos way.

Aside from the above, we’re working on various ways to make ‘Prott’ and ‘Balto’ better products for our customers.

As I joined Goodpatch and interacted with a diverse group of people with different occupations and backgrounds, I became able to contextualize what I was thinking. I feel as though thinking about ‘why,’ ‘the future,’ and ‘how’ alongside our customers and then turning that into reality is the Goodpatch way of working in customer success.

I want to make ‘customer-oriented design’ normal

One time, someone said that they wanted the CS team to be at the center of things and that was one of the things that made me happy upon working in customer success. It goes to show Goodpatch is a company where the products are made by prioritizing its customers’ voice. It’s rare to find a team that thinks about its customers to this extent. The company’s environment is such that you could learn a lot of things from those around you, regardless of their occupation.

Because this environment encourages learning, I want to obtain knowledge, read the customer’s thoughts, and become the type of customer success manager that could clearly deliver what needs to be delivered in order to connect the member and customer. Until now, I’ve mainly learnt a lot, but I also want to translate that into action. And so, I spoke at an event for the first time the other day! My work life is thriving because I was blessed with this opportunity to demonstrate what I can do.

I would like to share the knowledge I’ve acquired as a customer success manager internally. I hope that eventually, ‘customer-oriented design’ would become the norm in any kind of business.

Originally published at Goodpatch Blog.