How Past Experience is Essential in Building a Successful CX Team
Here at monday.com, our offices span four continents. As you might imagine, we have a very diverse Customer Experience (CX) team as a result. We love our CX team. We think it’s safe to say that the team, being closest to our customers, is the heart of the company. The people we hire define CX. Of course, each person’s past experiences are a significant part of their success in their roles. We’re lucky to have CX members who come from a large variety of backgrounds.
Our team’s past roles
University Lecturer
One of our team members taught French as a University Lecturer. They said teaching played a big part in helping them prepare for the various responsibilities of this position, from assisting users with workflows to running webinars! They mentioned how developing empathy in their previous role helped immensely in this role.
Masseur
A team member was a masseur who helped people overcome pain and sore muscles in a previous role. They emphasized how having empathy in that role helped them adapt to this role.
High School & Middle School Teachers
We have more teaching backgrounds. While these teammates did not come from university-level teaching, they still came from an educational environment. These roles revolved around patience, understanding, and empathy to help students succeed.
Lawyer
Before monday.com, one of our team members was a lawyer. Their work consisted of a 2-year program where they were able to experience four different departments. They practiced commercial and corporate law but also had the opportunity to work with a charity. They leveraged their experience working in a professional environment, writing for different audiences and explaining topics in an easily digestible fashion. They also learned effective time management and organization. These essential skills allowed them to excel in a CX role at monday.com.
NYC Tour Guide
Lastly, we have a teammate who was a tour guide for a little while in one of the biggest cities in the world! Not only did they have to learn about landmarks, but they also had to learn how to engage people and talk with them in an easy-to-understand, digestible way. They then brought these skills to monday.com to help them convey information to users.
Environmental Waste Management
Then, we have me. I came from an industry unlike the others. In my previous role, I worked in water treatment and environmental waste management. My work included cleaning up polluted groundwater leftover from industrial sites.
My day-to-day consisted of taking readings from various meters around our facility and assuring things were operating smoothly. I worked with chemicals to balance water pH and clean water tanks. All of this was to ensure the water we were putting back into the environment was within local standards.
During this time, I collaborated with the client that hired us to manage this plant, allowing me to develop and work on my client-facing, empathy, and teamwork skills. Regularly, I had to inform and keep in touch with this client and make sure we were all aligned and on the same page regarding the plant’s operations and the completion of projects.
We had many projects that revolved around me working with multiple clients and organizing project details. These projects were highly meticulous as they involved several different parties. They included the client, me, another outside vendor, and a local or state government representative. These were the times where I had to flex those empathetic and client-facing muscles. I either learned or developed these skills, or the project turned into a disaster.
The skills we have in common
Whatever industry current CX teammates are coming from, they all come with the same skills: empathy, teamwork, and client-facing experience.
Empathy
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, empathy is defined as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience communicated fully in an objectively explicit manner.
Basically, can you identify and understand the person you are talking to? Can you put yourself in their shoes?
In all the roles mentioned above, empathy was front and center. My teammates and I leveraged and grew our empathy skills in each of the roles we were in. This skill is so important, if not the most critical skill, when working in CX at monday.com.
The ability to empathize is a trait we look for when hiring for CX. Applicants must be equipped with the foundations of empathy to succeed in this role. It is essential to solve the issues or questions that users write to us with. It is just as important to solve in a way that makes the user feel heard and understood.
Teamwork
Another common trait found among the team is teamwork. In all of the team’s previous roles, team members had to work in groups to succeed. Teamwork is an attitude that we want to facilitate in CX. While we each have our own KPI’s and personal goals, we all work together for one purpose; providing our users with the best support possible.
We deliver the best support by coming together to ‘crush the Q’ or replying on a ticket previously responded to by another teammate. We all have a commitment to each other. To help each other on tickets and make sure we are progressing a ticket the best that we can to ensure that when another teammate picks up this ticket, they can easily pick up where the previous person left off.
We look for applicants who have demonstrated teamwork as this is what we want them to bring to our team.
Client-facing Experience
Client-facing skills are the last overarching skill shared by our team. In all these roles, our teammates had to report to or work with stakeholders. For me, it was a client. For our teammate who did city tours, it was the people on the tours.
Coming into a client-facing role like our CX team with experience working with stakeholders is vital to this role’s success. These teammates already understand how to act and facilitate a relationship with people who are receiving their service.
This foundation is paramount in becoming a successful CX employee at monday.com.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what role you had before or what industry you worked in. As the saying goes, “It’s the friends you make along the way.” What matters most are the skills you gain along the way. We all come from different backgrounds. All these experiences and perspectives come together to make us successful in our roles and make our coworkers better. There are not many better ways to learn than learning and gaining different perspectives from people. In CX, where no two backgrounds are the same, this has never been more true.
