A Career Evolution in Customer Service: From Rep to Ops Analyst

Irina Ewomba shares her career evolution from a customer service representative to an operations analyst within the Customer Service (CS) team. She tells us about her motivation, the courses she took to level up her programming skills, her career development framework, and the support she received from her team and managers.

Before moving to Berlin four years ago, I lived in Paris for nearly 13 years. I originally studied town planning and worked in the field for five years. Then, I felt that something was missing. I needed to do something beyond the administrative work, something more creative.

Developing skills in visual communication made sense because it was a small part of my previous occupation, and the one I loved the most. So I followed a seven-month training in graphic and web design and learned how to code in HTML and CSS. I really enjoyed it, and the experience piqued my interest in a full-time career in programming.

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Programming is not something creative in the sense of art, but the skill enables me to create, build things, and adapt them to specific needs. For example, writing a script that will contribute to automating complex or repetitive operations in large tables is something I've now been able to build up from scratch.

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With an interest in programming, why and how did you become a customer representative? How did you stay on the path to work in data analysis?

Of course, developing new skills required patience and financial stability. In the summer of 2018, the opportunity arose to join GetYourGuide in Berlin. My friend referred me for a role as a customer representative in French, English, and German.

I had been learning German a year prior, and I speak French and English fluently. While a customer representative wasn't a direct path leading to a programming job, earning money at a data-driven tech company would give me financial support and a better understanding of how businesses use data.

When planning a trip, you first need to know where you want to go before booking a flight or a hotel. It's the same with self-development. Planning your journey allows you to make coherent decisions and to put your efforts in one direction.

Getting the customer service role after studying German was proof that fully committing myself to learning something would pay off. In France, I had learned German with Babbel. This app is great, it's very visual. I could practise between ten minutes and one hour depending on the days. I also followed a German TV show online with German subtitles – it's Lindenstrasse if you want to give it a try. After settling in Berlin, I took two months of intensive courses at Deutschakademie.

Being a customer service representative was very rewarding as a career, but I still had the goal of pursuing a professional career related to programming. After a couple of months in our data-oriented company, it became obvious to me that data analysis would remain the path I'd follow.

There were opportunities in the CS department to work with data. For example, in the Customer Operations Support team, there is a lot of data that's used to run our operations. Each sub-team (e.g., Workforce Management, BPO, and Platform and Applications, Implementations team) need data to measure KPIs.

You might also be interested in: Owning your development: Supply Project Manager to Frontend Engineer

How did you expand your skill set with a full time job?

I enquired within the company on resources that would help me develop my skills. My colleague, Michael Silley, a senior product manager, gave me excellent tips on how to improve my programming skills. He recommended the platform Coursera and explained to me how to follow courses for free.

I chose a professional certification in data science provided by IBM because I wanted to learn things used in the business world. This course covers a broad spectrum of specializations: databases and SQL, data-analysis and data-visualization with Python, and machine learning. It took me a bit more than two months to complete the certification, as I was still working as a CS agent.

I was passionate about the topic. It felt so great to learn such exciting things like:

• How to create and update a database
• How to write a query to pull the data needed
• How to run fast operations on large tables — it could be several million lines
• The different ways to predict an output based on the analysis of data

I could already foresee how we could use them. I spent most of my free time learning, testing, coding. It was intense, I worked a lot, but it was worth it.

At this point, you’re working as a customer representative and taking a data science course — how did you continue to push towards a path towards a career as an analyst?

One year after I joined, I shared my interest in the topic and to learn Python within the company with my manager Eric Schittulli. I had read that it was relatively easy to learn compared to other languages, it's popular, and there's a large dynamic community around it. This is important because you're more likely to find answers to your questions in a forum to solve a specific issue.

There is probably something you've always wanted to do or learn, but you never found the time. But reconsider this belief because the keys to your development are in your hands.

Python has many applications (web development, data science, game development, and so on), so I thought it was a great time investment.  Eric and I built my personal growth plan (PGP) with the objective of becoming an analyst dedicated to customer service within six months and set up the action plan.

How did this personal growth plan tie in with the company’s plans?

A month after setting up my growth plan with Eric, a Customer Excellence Representative position opened up to support the analytics squad on the Customer Excellence team. I applied and mentioned that I was about to finish a programming course and would be interested in using this skill within the team.

Ask your peers: We have the chance to work with world-class colleagues who are the best in their field.

Around the time I completed the data science course, I was promoted to the Customer Excellence Representative position. That is how I started working on customer satisfaction reporting. But as a result of particular circumstances, my workload evolved towards tasks different from what was initially planned.

My new manager in the new Customer Excellence team was also very supportive. Amadeu Tasca, a customer experience project manager, gave me constructive feedback and provided me with advice on how to further develop my analytical skills within the department. This was particularly valuable as he could see my evolution since he recruited me for the CS representative position.

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Having adequate training is essential to get the basics, but it's when putting them into practice that one learns the most.

One of the challenges defined in my PGP was to complete a data-related side project. That's how I started working with Roman Siepelmeyer, operations support manager. He offered me a chance to work on an operational project: use machine learning to predict the volume of future customer interactions Customer Service will have. Forecasting the customer interaction volume is essential for correct workforce planning.

When did you finally make the leap to the operations team?

About five months after I joined the Customer Excellence team, Roman opened an operations analyst position in his team. It was a great opportunity, the one I had been waiting for since I started my self-development journey. I applied and got the job. That was exactly six months after my personal growth plan was defined.

It was important for me to stay in customer service because I wanted to combine my new skills with everything I already learned. In the end, both of these roles benefit the customers' experience directly.

My previous role as a representative focused on the quality of the interaction. The new analytical role focuses on the cost efficiency. The biggest impact of this is the improvement of our SLA (service level agreement). In other words, by keeping track of the time we spend with customers, we can improve the response rate to their request, which influences customer satisfaction.

What are your daily responsibilities as an operations analyst?

Within the Ops Support team, my role is to assure that the data required to run our operations are available and accurate. Each sub-team needs data to measure KPIs.

To achieve this, I work closely with the Data Platform team, centralizing CS requests for data integrations. On one hand, I understand the knowledge of CS needs, and on the other, I know the technical constraints. This allows me to facilitate exchanges between the two departments.

My other duties as an operations analyst include:

• Building dashboards for in-house and BPO teams
• Creating daily performance reports for the outsourced teams' reports
• Continue working on ways to improve the contact volume forecast.
• Creating documentation for all CS metrics in Looker, our BI tool.

It is sometimes challenging but in a very stimulating way.

How did the rest of the team support you in developing new skills?

The best part of this job is that I keep learning every day. For example, Zoran Stipanicev, a senior business intelligence engineer, gave me material to learn more about Looker. As he is our dedicated contact person for that tool, he is there when I have data-related questions, which is extremely helpful.

Yonatan Aharon, data platform manager, took the time to walk me through the backend of Looker and showed me how to solve some Jira tickets. I also reached out to Michael Silley for SQL and Marco Venè for forecast questions. Is there a better way to learn?

What advice do you have for anyone thinking about a career development?

Trust your abilities

There is probably something you've always wanted to do or learn, but you never found the time. You may have postponed it, or you thought you couldn't make it. But reconsider this belief because the keys to your development are in your hands.

Plan yourney

When planning a trip, you first need to know where you want to go before booking a flight or a hotel. It's the same with self-development. Planning your journey allows you to make coherent decisions and to put your efforts in one direction.

I'll be using my free time to continue to strengthen or develop new skills. There are so many topics I'm interested in, but I'll focus on learning Italian and a new programming language.

Involve your manager

It's important to let your manager know how you wish to evolve, especially when your new skills could be of interest to the company or your team. The four managers I've had are outstanding. They have been a crucial part of the success of my professional growth.

Roman has been very supportive, even before I joined his team. Daily, he gives me enough freedom on the tasks I have to do. I feel trusted, which allows me to develop new ideas, initiatives, and go the extra mile.

Ask your peers

We have the chance to work with world-class colleagues who are the best in their field. Having adequate training is essential to get the basics, but it's when putting them into practice that one learns the most. It's normal not to know or to make mistakes at the beginning, but there are always people around who have been through it before and can help.

For updates on our open positions, check out our Career page.

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