This Zendesk Relate article includes a snippet about my career path from customer service to learning & training.
Just like most other things on Relate, it’s a considered and interesting article with a lot of different angles on career pathing in customer service.
Here’s what I contributed, but do click through to check out the entire article, as it’s a great read.
Kaye Chapman entered the world of customer support absolutely unplanned. Fresh out of college, unsure what to do (been there, done that!), Chapman got a job in a call center to pay the bills while she figured out her next move. She never left.
After some time, she could see that there was room for improvement. Quality assurance was patchy, there was no internal knowledge base or help center, and training was subpar at best. Her overworked manager was all too happy for Kaye to step in and provide some help, so she took the bull by the horns and made improving those things her focus.
Chapman built an extensive knowledge base, strengthened quality processes, and provided training for her team, all while holding down the role of senior customer service rep. From there she realized she had a real knack for training and expressed the desire to become a full-time trainer.
The company she worked for at the time agreed to sponsor her to go back to school and she spent her evenings learning how to build effective training programs, work with adult learners, and other skills like coaching, change management, and talent development. She’s since gained plenty of experience in roles at Fortune 500 companies, startups, and nonprofits, even earning a Masters degree based off her professional qualifications, despite not having a Bachelor degree.
All of this led her to her current role as Learning & Development Manager for Comm100. In our chat, she told me, ‘In that very first customer support role, if I had shrugged off all of the things I saw that could have been improved and wrote them off as none of my business, I’d never be where I am today. I definitely see my career growth as fueled by having a real desire to drive improvement and change, even in areas that aren’t within my job description.’
Read the Zendesk article here.