Biggest Achievement (in Customer Support)

I just applied for any engineering management position. They asked in the application submission process, "Tell us about your biggest achievement or personal success in customer support".

Personally, I think it's nice to have a space just for that sort of question, pre-interview, that doesn't take up space in the resume or in the cover letter, so I appreciate the question. This is what I said:

I have a few impactful stories, but the biggest was at Qualcomm when I took a phone call from an old lady that caused a cascade effect of massive process improvement over 2+ years. It was early in my career, but I learned a lot and I played a major role in driving the company to be more aware of the customer experience. I became knowledgeable in many aspects of a large business, from sales to manufacturing. I engaged program management, UX and design, QA, IT, and legal, and most importantly to my career path, made the transition from customer support to software development. I didn’t forget that what got me there were the interconnections and relations of hundreds of hard-working, often non-technical people, as well as a million or more customers who, ultimately, just wanted to have a good experience with our product.

I share it here a reminder to myself of how I got started in software development. Though I had gotten my CS degree two years earlier, it took a bit to find a job at that time (not unlike now, ha!). I was a bit miffed that I couldn't find a straight up software position, but in hindsight, taking on a customer service role like this was the better position for me. It was right up my alley, as I'm keen on taking care of people, and as a customer myself, I know how annoyed I get when I'm not served well. This job gave me the direct opportunity see how the cookies got made, as it were.

And in the couple of years we worked to fix the host of problems the company had, we managed to make much better cookies and greatly improve not just our customer service, but processes across the board. The improvement to inventory management alone save the company tens of thousands of dollars, and that improvement could be directly tied to the myriad of conversations I helped open up between teams that weren't otherwise cognizant of one another (as least as far as the customer experience was concerned!)

That time in my life was a huge challenge that I'm glad I took on. I committed to the point of view that the customer's needs are the company's needs, one and the same. So much of my professional personality came out of that time period. I had a few noteworthy experiences before then, and many more there after, but this one period in my life let me learn and experiment in a way I haven't really had a chance for since (well, maybe the few years at Viva! Vision might give it a run for its money).

I guess this really is a nod to my co-workers, really. I couldn't have done what I did without their support. I was scary at first for me, but I think back to some folks who were amazingly supportive. I saddens me whenever I end up in a company that doesn't have that degree of internal collaboration, but I always make it my goal to try and replicate the best parts of that time (assuming the new company isn't even better!).