I love work and being valuable to others. I like making work become easy to me, not work to be easy. I am self-motivated. A self-starter. A problem solver, and result oriented. Customer-centric. Learning is my pastime. I take ownership of my growth, and I expect a challenging job to be the growth opportunity a company has for me.
Although I didn’t mention this as a experience, I worked for two years as a sales representative in a family business, generating high-quality opportunities in industries such as banking, healthcare, and government, selling queue management systems. This experience helped me achieve my role at Accenture, where instead of focusing on quality, I had to focus on quantity, selling technology services, including cloud solutions and productivity applications. Is worth mentioning that the family business I worked for, also sells the same services.
My familiarity with this technology, thanks to my programming background, made the learning curve easier. However, adjusting to high-volume prospecting required me to adapt my approach. I take an analytical approach to everything, and avoid just following what others do without understanding how and why. This is something I’ve applied in the past successfully, for example, in customer service; where more often quantity matters more than quality, and this doesn't end up in ideal experiences for both the customers and the employee. My approach made it so gratifying for both, that customers were expressing their appreciation to my work every day, and all of that stigma around customer service, ended up not being true for me; all of this while being able to balance all aspects of my performance requirements.
On this experience, I was able to approach customers in a meaningful manner, by researching briefly the customer’s business and industry, and worked gradually on reducing the time needed to achieve the goal of engaging with the customer. I made sure to refine my profiling methods to prevent rejection from gatekeepers or phone call attempts with no answer. By thoroughly researching the services I was selling and positioning them as tailored solutions for specific industries rather than general offerings, I gradually became more effective at handling client objections, if not preventing them altogether, which I consider even more important.
I was assigned to the risk department, to help customers for an online banking service with issues related to account takeovers, transaction disputes, account closures and identity theft. Although we are generally instructed what to say, resolving these issues rather than focusing on handling customer's push back, required an important listening and rapport building skill, as well as analytical abilities and not just an elemental knowledge about the services, but about terms, policies and in some cases, laws. This made me standout from the rest and allowed me to handle customer's issues with success and real ownership, reducing pushbacks and manager escalations.
This was my first take at customer service, and this opportunity helped me realize my interpersonal skills are above average, as well as my English fluency and my problem solving abilities. I contributed outstandingly with new approaches to solve issues while maintaining compliance. I focused heavily on customer satisfaction and resolution rather than metrics solely, always balancing all aspects of my performance.
I proved outstanding ownership and quality, by being one of the few who rarely had customers demanding their cases to be escalated, and rarely had customers express dissatisfaction at me, even at odds considering how aggravating are the issues they are experiencing.
I constantly analyzed my performance to appropriately provide feedback to my superiors, and followed up and searched cases to improve the accuracy of my resolutions. If necessary, I got in contact with other teams whenever the cases I handled were not resolved appropriately or as expected, for explanation and feedback.
I work with different specialists to build projects for small businesses in the 4-figure range, including project managers, designers, copy writers, SEO and Ad specialists. Although I have knowledge in design with software like Figma and Photoshop; and knowledge in SEO and Ads, I specialized mainly in web development, using tools like Wordpress and builders like Generatepress, which I prefer due to how close it is to building a website with code, rather than other builders oriented to non-technical users.
Nevertheless, I am able to code, using markup such as HTML, scripting such as JS, Python, PHP, styling such as CSS, SASS, Tailwind and Bootstrap and query languages such as MySQL, PostGRE, MongoDB; and often I’m required to do so, for further customization and features light and performing themes often do not contain.
This job usually involves communicating with stakeholders, including clients themselves, who often are English speaking, and from different countries. Here I’ve put into practice not just lean and agile methodologies for development, but for managing projects, to make sure projects get finished on time, given the limited time I have for working on these, and the limited resources our clients have, which often are small businesses and non-profit organizations.
I have experience in every part of the process that takes to develop a digital marketing strategy, from design, to development, including data analysis. In the past, I've had one of the most enlightening marketing experiences, doing a market research for a startup I was building. This experience also helped me grasp management concepts that otherwise would have remained mostly theoretical. And I would like to add the importance of my background as a seller, which I believe, is deeply related to marketing, and probably the medium with the most helpful and immediate feedback.
I decided to pursue a bachelor degree in business administration enrolling all the subjects. While I haven’t had any difficulties in relation to time or subjects, I was not satisfied with the learning methodologies this university applies. So I decided to stop these studies at least with this university. And I will try later at the University of Costa Rica. In the mean time I felt various online certificates more valuable, as well as learning French and Portuguese, which I am closer now to become able to apply professionally.
While this program was interesting, I was not able to find it viable or worth it in a competition and cost to benefit point of view. So I decided to move on with the certificates I was working in, and I will eventually find a different path to move into data analysis.