What was your career path to your current role as Customer Success Manager?

I began my career in business travel 10 years ago as a Hotel Consultant (booking agent) with Capita Travel and Events. The company later rebranded as Agiito before being acquired by Clarity Business Travel in 2023. I left the industry briefly a few years later and worked in recruitment, but quickly realised – like so many others – that my heart was firmly in the world of travel so I contacted Capita and, although my old position had been filled, I was offered a role in the online fulfilment team. That’s really what kickstarted my career because it made me realise that I had a love for technology, something I had never considered before. I then held a variety of roles – Online Support, Implementation Support and Implementation Manager – before becoming Customer Success Manager in April 2022. Over the course of my career I’ve been lucky to have a number of amazing mentors, including Donna Fitzgerald, Executive Director, a great supporter of internal development, who has been instrumental in supporting me in my current role.

What are your key responsibilities as Customer Success Manager?

The role has evolved over the years but essentially the customer success team bridges the gap between the technology development team and our customer-facing teams to ensure our customers get the best experience from our technology, namely our proprietary online travel booking tool ClarityGo and our intuitive meetings management platform, MeetingsPro. We have that technology interest and knowledge, we understand how it works behind the scenes and we can articulate that back to our customers in a non-techy way. We ensure our customers get the best experience and, of course, as a result we see a rise in online adoption. Towards the end of 2024 the team was expanded with the appointment of a Customer Success Executive, Marie Lindsay, so we can now spend more time with customers, dealing with change requests and giving customers that extra level of support.

How do you support customers?

Real-time customer feedback has helped us enhance the tool for even better adoption and experience. We support customers with videos tutorials and a live chat knowledge base, which hosts articles and general guidance on how to book hotels, rail and flights or meetings. We develop roadmaps for our clients, keeping them informed about new releases and functionality enhancements, which happen every two weeks. We collect feedback from customers, analyse it and theme it, and then pass this on to our development teams. We also carry out health checks, making sure our clients are using the technology in the best way possible and getting the most out of it. We get involved from the first bid stage and we’ll stay with customers throughout. It’s good for customers to have that consistency and that additional level of expertise. We receive lots of feedback and ‘thank yous’ from our customers, which is really rewarding.

How do you support your Clarity colleagues?

We have weekly contact with the development teams so we can make sure they know what the customers require. By gathering and prioritising that customer feedback, we help our tech development teams understand what they should focus on in order to keep the customers happy. Then, we are able to take that tech development and communicate it to our customer-facing sales team, helping them present our technology in their sales pitches and tailoring pitches to each client’s requirements. Essentially, we sit between two critical areas of our business – our customer-facing teams (encompassing our business development team and our account management team) and our product development team, guiding the discussion and driving developments that are beneficial to both our customers and our business. We’re seeing tangible results. Last year the customer success team contributed to customer retention and new business wins to the value of £38.9 million. We’ve recently supported our Entertainment and Media division at the Media Technology Production Show, we educate externally and internally on all technology aspects,  which has been particularly useful with the integration of Agiito into Clarity. We have two amazing proprietary customer products, ClarityGo and MeetingsPro, and we make sure our customers and our people are kept fully up to date with developments.

Why is your team so important?

A company can have great technology that’s state-of-the-art and built for the future, but it needs people behind it. As with all technology, especially when it’s being first rolled out, customers are adapting to a different look and feel and others changes so there will always be queries. Therefore, it’s hugely important we spend the time reviewing and understanding any concerns, taking onboard feedback, nurturing our customers and making sure they’re using the technology to its optimum. We work with  customers and ensure appropriate changes are made such as policy amendments to provide an improved booking and CX experience. Our tech solutions don’t stand still. We strive for continual improvement and evolution and it’s vital that we continually educate, support and excite our customers about our products and solutions and those that we have coming in the future.

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