A Day in the Life of Lia Childers, Customer Success Manager at Evident
August 13, 2021
A Day in the Life of Lia Childers, Customer Success Manager at Evident
“One of the cool things about working for Evident is that there’s a good balance between heads down project-based work and customer meetings, so you really get the best of both worlds,” explains Lia Childers, Customer Success Manager at Evident. “Engaging with customers really satisfies a need for community, but heads down work feels most meaningful and satisfying because you’re driving something forward. I really enjoy that we have the flexibility to work remotely or not remotely and that we can come into the office, but it’s not a requirement.”
Lia joined the Evident Customer Success team in February 2019, and serves as a dedicated point of contact for all of our biggest accounts, as well as a customer advocate. That means she’s working hard to train new customers on our insurance verification platform capabilities and develop best practices while reducing churn and delivering on customer expectations and contributing to their growth.
“CSMs at Evident wear so many hats. One day, I might create customer training materials such as Knowledge Base articles or a product education deck to prepare for a new or recent release. The next day, I might be troubleshooting escalated items that come up in our support channel,” Lia added. “I’m also responsible for tactical action items like responding to emails, answering one-off questions, creating support tickets, or completing an investigation into a bug. In addition, I might be tapped to help drive forward specific strategic objectives for the company or work on a larger project that helps build internal infrastructure. Customer Success at Evident is about supporting customers where they are at and delivering the right product education to guide them to where they need to go in order to achieve their business objectives.”
To give you an idea of what it’s like to work at one of Atlanta’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies, Lia gave us some insight into her daily schedule, her role at Evident, and why she loves being part of the Customer Success team.
The Night Before – The night before I go to bed, I check my calendar to see which meetings I have tomorrow, and determine what customer-facing items I need to prepare. This helps me make decisions about the following day, like waking up early to make sure I have customer information in place before I jump on a call, or assessing time between meetings to see what I can get done.
8:30 am – My alarm is always set at 8:30. I get dressed, grab a cup of coffee, and about 3 days out of the work week, I’m hopping onto our standup Zoom call where the CS team circulates things we’ve been working on over the last few days, things that we will be working on over the next few days, and asks each other and our VP of Operations questions. We’re usually taking this time to make sure the right information gets disseminated to the whole team.
9:30 am – 12 pm – At this point, I’m usually in back-to-back meetings, documenting action items on the call with customers, answering questions around product functionality, and reporting back to them based on internal meetings. If I don’t have a meeting, I’ve already got something urgent that needs to be done, but if I’m having a quiet day, I’ll take some time to review my action items from other customer meetings and identify the most important thing that must be completed that day. I’ll add in anything that was missed and make sure it’s associated with the right account. I like to take time to organize my work in the morning.
12 – 1 pm – I sometimes use my GrubHub budget to order lunch, but if I’ve just finished up a bunch of meetings and just need 30 minutes to decompress, I’ll take a quick ride on the new bike I bought with my personal development budget and get some fresh air and physical activity before I head into another meeting. I’ve really enjoyed the freedom that comes with being remote-first.
1 – 5 pm – After lunch or my bike ride, I spend the afternoon knocking out action items like checking on a support ticket, putting together a response for a customer, or working with another employee to figure out how we can help our customers. Most days, I’ve got a few more meetings in the afternoon that might involve things like syncing up with a product team member to ask questions that only they know the answers to, or working with my CS engineer to help with a customer integration, or providing a customer with updates on action items from their tracker. Every customer has an Asana project associated with them – that way I can review every task at once and figure out which ones are the most important ones that have to be done today to make sure customers are getting what they need.
5 – 7:30 pm – I like to schedule all of my meetings between 9am and 5pm, because after that, I’m typically doing more project-based, heads-down work where I can’t be interrupted. It’s an important job, and, to me, it’s very rewarding and exciting. I love that I get to be on calls with customers that are very big brands asking me about detailed product functionality, and I can help explain how it works and how they can make the most of it from a strategic standpoint.