Meet a Customer Experience Specialist
The Story of Scott Underwood
The Customer Experience Specialist (CXS) team here at monday.com is a small but powerful team of specialists who support our larger Customer Experience (CX) team. Think about it this way: they support our support team!
After seemingly all resources have been exhausted, and all workarounds tried, our CX team turns to our fearless CXS team to offer us the best solutions and recommendations. They give us directionality, advice, and guidance through the sometimes dark and murky waters of customer service.
Throughout my time here at monday.com, I’ve had the opportunity of becoming close friends with one CXS in particular. Scott Underwood is pretty much famous in the monday.com CX world. He’s funny, patient, compassionate, and works tirelessly to make sure our customers have the best experiences.
When asked to describe himself, Scott simply says “I like wiener dogs, hiking, brewing my own beer, and sitting inside with a mask on.” And it’s this same, easy-going nature that translates into a seamless and uplifting experience for our customers.
Some of Scott’s daily responsibilities include helping customers who have had a less than pleasant experience with our CX team.
Whether it be a particularly tenacious bug on their accounts or a billing misunderstanding, Scott makes sure to carve out time in his day to have face-to-face conversations with these customers. Despite the delay that this can sometimes cause on his own workload, Scott emphasized to me the importance of making a human connection.
“I can understand the frustration of some of our users,” Scott tells me. “They are customers of a rapidly expanding business that’s trying to provide amazing support at scale — which is always a challenge. No one solution fits all, and so some people need a little extra attention. I’m here to give them that attention.”
From the very beginning of his career at monday.com, Scott has always known the importance of building strong relationships with our customers. Having started as a Customer Success Manager in the days when our CSMs were on the queue, Scott used to spend the majority of his day handling tickets.
Scott’s seen the CX team double, then triple, and the inescapable pain points that accompany such rapid growth. In particular, the lack of resources and time that each CX team member had, from catching up with each new feature and process update to also following up with customers from previous correspondences.
Hence, the CXS role was born. And as one of the earliest members, Scott was able to pioneer the role, shaping it into what it is today: a role that supports not only the CX team but also the entire company through different product and workflow questions.
“Being a good CXS is all about expressing empathy and building strong relationships with our users. They are the jack of all trades and are self-sufficient in finding solutions. A good CXS should not be afraid of being wrong, but also does their due diligence before offering solutions.”
But good customer support is something that can be amorphous and hard to measure. Sure, we have our customer ratings after each interaction, but it’s difficult to gauge whether or not the customers who choose to respond to these surveys are a good representation of our entire customer sentiment.
Yet the question remains: how do we, on the CX team, know if we’re doing a good job or not? According to Scott, while the team is cognizant of our company revenue, at the end of the day our main KPI is making sure that our customers are happy and feel heard.
One way for us to achieve this is to go above and beyond in anticipating our customers’ needs. As Scott notes, “Reading between the lines of what the user is asking for, and really understanding what their main objective is, allows us to answer questions they may not even have thought of. We can then offer solutions that the user may not have directly asked for.”
Each customer experience is different, and so each must be treated as unique. “It’s all about impression, and how our company treats our users. This is how we can create champions of monday.com. Provide a product with great service and great support, and it will grow naturally.”
In addition to helping our users, our CXS team members are also pushed to pursue projects that are in line with their interests. For Scott, this comes in the form of working with our monday.com API and building out custom integration recipes for our customers.
In particular, Scott’s specialty lies in integrating monday.com with other platforms through the third-party app integration platforms Zapier and Integromat. This allows him to think outside of the box in offering workflows and workarounds for our customers. This way, even if a feature isn’t yet made available in our own platform, Scott still has the ability to duplicate the workflow and functionality by connecting our platform with another platform.
Our CXS team does a lot. From supporting our customers over personal Zoom meetings to making sure our larger CX team feels supported, they are a key component of our success. When asked what his message to our readership is, Scott says: “Everyone should sign up for monday.com!!!”
