Spotlight: Haley Tran @ Unify

How did you get into CS?

I started on the business operations team working as a close partner to the customer success and account management organizations. My job was to basically make their lives as easy as possible with better reporting, efficient ops processes, and tools that freed up their time to manage customers. We ended up restructuring and creating a whole org focused on Customer Activation, and I was really lucky to be a part of that transition! I got to be more hands in talking to customers and was focused on building a better self-serve onboarding experience with both product and sales. Since then, I’ve made the jump back to an early stage startup as one of the first post-sales hires at Unify. I’m currently playing the role of both CS and support as we grow the team and figure out the long-term roadmap - it’s been really fun actually onboarding customers and building out our support process (with Pylon of course :))

What's the most rewarding part of your role in post-sales?

You’re at this fascinating intersection between product, engineering, and sales. You develop incredibly deep insight on how your customers are using your product today, are constantly building empathy with the actual decision makers and power users, and serve as a conduit between them and the team building the product roadmap. I see customer success and support teams as both advocates and educators - they’re making sure customers are heard and prioritized while also enabling them to be * hopefully * power users of the product. I personally love getting to talk to so many customers everyday - I get to learn about what they’re building and partner with them to solve key challenges in their business.

It’s also a pretty humbling role! By talking to customers everyday, you have to confront where there may be gaps in the value proposition of your product or identify opportunities to make the experience more intuitive and user-friendly. It’s so important to have these difficult conversations with your team to figure out how to improve the customer experience and deliver more value with the product.

How do you stay motivated during challenging support cases?

Every challenge is a learning opportunity to make the experience better for the next customer! I also feel really lucky that I’ve worked with such incredible engineering teams - it’s really motivating to see them put so much attention and care in solving customer issues. I always try to frame these cases more as opportunities to collaborate and improve both the product and support processes long-term, ensuring we're continuously making the experience better for future users.

Who is your role model in the support/CS space?

My first manager at Ramp, Megan Yen! We actually both took the jump from business operations directly into the customer activation organization at Ramp. She’s done a pretty incredible job at scaling the team there and diving into a new role headfirst that was much more customer-facing. It was really fun for both of us to make the transition into customer-facing roles - we took a lot of the core principles from our time in BizOps to streamline processes and be very data-driven in how we approached problems. It’s awesome to see how far the org has grown since then!