A day in the life of James Gundry, Customer Experience Manager

It’s been a few years now since I last wrote one of these, and I’m sure it comes as no surprise that a lot’s changed.

We’ve quadrupled in size, moved offices – twice, launched in a whole bunch of international markets, opened new offices overseas, welcomed new investors through several funding rounds, successfully navigated the minefield of GDPR requirements, and even won some awards.

In the four and a half years I’ve been with GoCardless, I’ve been on the front lines as a support analyst, a customer support lead, then manager, and I’m now our Customer Experience Manager.  

As you can imagine, this role comes with a wide variety of responsibilities and hats to wear, and no two days are ever the same – a big part of why I love it!

I won’t bore you with too many details of the early morning - it usually includes some degree of regret resulting from ambitiously setting my alarm for 6.30am the night before. Let’s just say I like the snooze button and leave it at that.

When I get into the office, I’m immediately hit by a waft of some sort of homemade sugary baked goods. This is a common occurrence amongst the team and a big part of why running has become necessary!

It’s a big day today, as we’re presenting our new 2-3 year vision for the Customer Experience team to the rest of the company in this afternoon’s Business Update so first on the agenda is to finalise the slide deck and speaker notes.

Collaborating with other teams

Then it’s time for my first meeting of the day – a catchup with our design team. We’re currently working on visualising our customer’s journey through GoCardless to help teams align to the various stages when building improvements into the product and/or our operational processes. 

The meeting ends with a clear agenda on what needs to be done and the delivery date.

In other news, we’re having an all-team lunch today, where our awesome Office team organise someone to cater for us. We aim to do what we can to minimise our impact on the environment here at GoCardless and so the food is brought in on metal catering trays, rather than in individually portioned disposable boxes as we have done previously. 

In an attempt to make the most of the last few sunny days before winter well and truly sets in, we decide to brave the elements and sit outside in our office courtyard to eat.

Lunch over and it’s back to work.

We have half an hour until the Business Update where we’re presenting our team’s vision and mission – just enough time for some last-minute preparations before we head down to our bleachers area to make sure the presentation will all run smoothly.

Gathering customer feedback

We recently ran a survey with a subset of our customer base on their experiences through our onboarding/verification flow. This afternoon, we’re holding interviews to follow up on some of the feedback we received. First though, we need to make sure we’re prepared with what we’d like to probe on. The feedback we get will help to shape the improvements we work on with our product teams, so it’s important that we get to the crux of the issues to ensure any work we do will address the root causes, rather than merely mask problems only to have them surface again at a later date.

Three back-to-back phone interviews later and the working day’s almost at its end. 

We got some really great feedback from the customers we spoke to. Getting this sort of information first hand is invaluable and something we’re working on building out into a more robust Voice of Customer Programme moving forward.

For now though, it’s time to join our Rainbow Group at the pub down the road to round off the day with a couple of beers whilst we brainstorm ideas of what we could do as part of next year’s Pride event. 🌈 

What's next for Customer Experience?

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this little insight into day-to-day life within our Customer Experience team. 

We’ll be publishing more posts on things we are working on moving forward - from key learnings and insights from our Voice of Customer Programme, through to new features and developments as we work on bringing new initiatives to fruition. So, if you’re interested in finding out more, bookmark our blog and stay tuned!