A day in the life of GoCardless Customer Success

Who am I?

I’m Avani Painter, and I joined GoCardless around 11 months ago as part of the Inbound Sales team. I then moved over to the Customer Success team, where I am today. My role here involves working with our biggest clients, making sure we’re managing our existing relationships effectively and finding growth opportunities.

Before joining GoCardless I worked in finance, while working on my own startup idea. When I was looking for my next career move, GoCardless seemed like the perfect combination of the two!

What does my typical day look like?

I normally go to the gym in the morning and reach the office by 8.30. This gives me enough time to eat breakfast and read the news before starting work. The first thing I do is check my calendar and see what my priority tasks are for that day.

If I have any spare time, I make sure everything is scheduled in my diary so I can get a good idea of how my day’s going to look. On most days, I either have a call or a face to face meeting with a client, so I plan my day accordingly.

I first spend some time preparing for the meeting, which along with the meeting itself normally takes up about a third of my day.

Once that’s done, I start work on more internal projects, for example, right now I’m making an API timeline guide for merchants. This is to give them a better understanding of how long a typical integration might take to implement.

Moreover, it also aligns well with our overall product strategy at GoCardless. Sometimes ad hoc issues come up, which can change my entire schedule, but this just adds more excitement (most of the time) to my role!

My team catches up three times a week to make sure everyone is updated about what's going on with all our managed clients. We can share any questions or merchant requests with the team to see if anyone else has run across that particular issue.

If the query is something that we’ve encountered for the first time, it gives me the opportunity to work with various teams around GoCardless, such as Support, Marketing, or Product.

In an effort to get out of the office, I often arrange various coffee chats with other members of my team to catch up on both work and personal life (mostly personal)!

What do I enjoy most about working at GoCardless?

As cliched as it sounds, it's the people. I’d describe them as ‘super-smart’ and ‘driven’. If I need someone’s help on a task, I can always count on them to go above and beyond to help me.

Also, so much is happening at the same time, just within my team and also on a higher level within the organisation, meaning no two days are ever the same. The more I settle into my role, the more I enjoy it.

I’m building good relationships with our clients, and increasingly they are coming back to me to help them with their payment problems and requests. My role also allows me to discover more about their company strategy and evaluate how we can assist them going forward.

What’s more, so many people at GoCardless are into fitness, so it’s great to talk about being fit and healthy while not getting a blank look from your teammates! I’ve always been into fitness so it’s nice to be surrounded by likeminded people.

What are some of the challenges in my daily work?

Sometimes our clients have various feature requests that we can’t always fulfil. Communicating that fact back to the merchants isn’t always an easy task!

Also, with so many things to do, managing my diary can sometimes be a bit of a challenge it’s something I have to stay on top of constantly.

All things considered, GoCardless is the best career move I've ever made. It was a big change coming from a professional services background, but I don’t regret a single thing!