Program Manager — Customer Support Operations, Redabothu Lavanya loves solving problems for Meesho users daily, especially when the rule books don’t have the answers
What does it take to run an escalation team at a completely user-driven e-commerce company? Our Employee of the Week and Program Manager Customer Support Operations, Redabothu Lavanya can easily answer this one. She joined the Meesho rocket ship in 2018 September and has helped the customer support team scale up at every phase of Meesho’s journey.
“When I joined Meesho as part of the inbound team for Customer Support, there was no system in place for escalations, and I was a part of the core team that built it from scratch with a Think 10X attitude,” notes Lavanya with pride.
Read on to know all about Lavanya’s Life at Meesho in her own words:
I learned the real meaning of Taking Ownership… while building the system we have in place at customer support, which began and ended with email support. I joined at an early stage in Meesho’s journey, and back then we hadn’t even developed an escalation team yet. Soon after I joined, I was made the lead of the escalation team and was tasked with creating and managing the escalation process. I also set up social media support for business queries around this time.
Even though I came with a few years of experience under my belt, the pace of learning I had at Meesho has been unparalleled. I got a tonne of exposure and was given the freedom to experiment. Over time, my work ethic got defined by two Meesho core values — Taking Ownership and Speed Over Perfection!
The main objective of my role is to manage user experience.
I loathe monotony… and at Meesho, I get to tackle a new problem every single day. No user is the same, and no problem they face is the same. As members of the escalation team, we interact with users who are sometimes dissatisfied with the support agent and demand further clarification. Listening to these users with great patience and always approaching their issues with empathy are two of our biggest priorities.
We resolve their queries as fast as possible and with the most cognisant responses to provide the most satisfaction.
Every day on the job, I come across different scenarios where our training, scripts or canned responses tend to fail. Because nothing can prepare you for a problem faced first hand. And that’s where your problem-solving skills need to come into action. We need to be on our toes, deep dive into the issue, think from the user’s perspective, and connect with them several times to get a 360 degree view of the problem.
Understanding their reason for dissatisfaction, reaching out to the internal teams, being the communication bridge between users and the Meesho team are my prime responsibilities.
I have been able to work so well on the issues at hand over the years, that we have significantly reduced the number of escalations we get. There is at least a 10X decline in the number of escalations today as compared to when we had launched and I feel extremely proud of that.
Today, my team functions like a well-oiled machine…because right from the beginning we had 10X Thinking. We anticipated our dynamic growth and knew that the systems we build need to meet those expectations.
From the beginning, we knew these are what we need to do to reach here. Our projections were in accordance with that. We keep looking for new challenges and ask ourselves how every new iteration would impact our existing system. It also helps that everyone in my team is focused on the same exact goal of improving user experience.
My teammates and I are friends first!
As a team, we are very cooperative, and are always available to cover for a teammate who needs our help. We also constantly discuss our experiences with the users with each other, so that all of us can learn from the different experiences.
From electronic engineering to customer service… my journey has been far from the norm. As I had mentioned before, boredom is the bane of my existence, and that is exactly what led to this field of customer service despite holding a BTech degree. I got married a year after graduating and moved from my home city of Hyderabad to Bangalore, where initially I focused on being a homemaker.
The days of staying at home and waiting for my husband to come back from work really did not sit well with me, and so I decided to work — any work really — to move past my mental disorientation. And so, when I got the opportunity to work with Flipkart’s outsourcing process, I jumped at the opportunity.
As an introverted person, not many would think that I would thrive in this field, and yet I did. Within six months of joining Flipkart I was promoted as team lead, and I worked there for about two years in total before moving on to Voonik, an e-commerce platform that specialises in women’s categories. This is where I met a lot of my friends in the industry who are now also colleagues at Meesho, and one of whom referred me to Meesho.
I am addicted to this job now. I love solving problems for Meesho users.
Meesho is the first job I took on… after I went on my maternity leave and I could not be happier about this decision. Today, I get to manage the user experience of so many stakeholders associated with Meesho, and it’s my greatest joy — other than of course playing with my daughter or watching her enjoy brand new experiences in her life.
If you’re a customer experience manager looking for a challenging yet comforting place to expand your horizons, I would advise you to look no further than Meesho. Here we learn how to solve our own problems, but also to ask for help and work as a team. In my six-year-long career, Meesho is where I have felt most at home. And, I am proud of all that I have been able to accomplish here.
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