Chris Taylor
Head of Customer Operations
Tyk Technologies
United Kingdom
Initially recruited by Tyk to help the company’s product engineering team manage the customer service process, at a time when Tyk had no dedicated service staff, Chris Taylor has been instrumental in making support a key function and customer experience a core focus.
While his initial goals were to support Tyk in scaling up their customer operations, and implement processes to make the customer experience better, Chris decided to create a strategic plan for the customer operations area, the strength of which led him to taking up the role of head of customer operations.
Crafting the strategy in collaboration with stakeholders from product, commercial and operations teams to ensure cohesion across the business, the strategy was built around the idea of developing a team of customer support engineers. With all support work having previously been dealt with by product engineers, there was little control over the quality of the support being delivered, and when Chris first joined there were 2,000 open tickets because they weren't being managed.
Alongside a team of customer support engineers, a ticket management process was also established, and a full suite of customer service reports, so the entire business can see what's going on in a transparent way. The existing helpdesk tool was also replaced with a large cost saving, with little impact to end users.
Across the business, Chris has worked to demonstrated the value that good customer experience can drive - getting support and buy-in from the CEO down. To foster interest and engagement in this, CSAT results are sent to the entire business weekly, while Chris also blogs on the the Tyk website about how the organisation approaches customer service and experience, to demonstrate the focus to clients.
As a result of Chris’ work, three-quarters of all tickets are now dealt with by the support engineers, meaning the product team has more time to spend building software! NPS has improved while CSAT is impressively high.
I've turned what was a helpdesk role into something far more wide reaching, touching success and support, commercial activity, customer documentation, training and assets. I have brought in new staff to a skeptical business with great success, built relationships with stakeholders from across the business and championed the customer throughout.
Return to CX Leader of the Year 2020 finalists>>>
Brought to you by
