Introduction
For the latest in our series of meet-the-team articles, we thought we’d catch up with someone who is a familiar face to our customers. Jess and the Customer Success team are the next stage after you’ve been onboarded by Ella Hill, our Implementation Manager.
As Jess said when we caught up with her recently over Zoom for a chat about all things customer service, she spends a lot of her time helping Yumpingo users, “To get the most out of our platform by working closely with brands and becoming one of their team.”
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Could you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Jessica Orton, Client Services Director at Yumpingo.
How long have you been at Yumpingo?
I've been with the business for just over two and a half years.
What does your typical workday look like?
In my current role, I wear a few hats, but I am still extremely hands-on. I help look after some of our larger enterprise clients. I get a kick out of working directly with Ops Directors, Marketing Directors, culinary teams etc., to help navigate some of the challenges the industry is facing by using the services and the outcomes that Yumpingo provides.
What does the customer success team do?
Well, first off, if you've made the right choice and decided to roll out Yumpingo, We’ll already have met some of your brand’s key stakeholders in the earlier stages of the onboarding process.
From here it’s me and my team's responsibility to ensure you are set for success, from defining reporting, customising your review journey & importantly, building routines to drive improvement.
It’s important we understand your core business objectives and pain points, this allows your CSM to take a laser-focused approach to share best practices and give you actionable insights fast.
We have an experienced team, with extensive backgrounds in hospitality tech or managing fast-paced restaurant locations, this enables us to understand where we can offer the most valuable support and share our wider industry knowledge.
We place a lot of focus on ensuring we make it ‘easy’ for our customers, we know how many plates teams and stakeholders are spinning every day. We ask, in return, for operators to embrace change and take a proactive approach to guest satisfaction growth.
So you have to be open to developing and changing to manage the changes in the industry.
One size doesn't fit all when it comes to working with the brands that we have as customers. Of course, there are industry-wide concerns but there are also some big differences in brands, and we work on tailoring our services to suit them.
It's an exciting role, to see the differences our support & data make to operators, from boosting front-line team engagement & morale to giving senior leaders the answers to make confident decisions at speed.
I've also had quite a lot of creative freedom and strategic freedom, whether that be from hiring and mentoring my team or through developing some of the efficiencies, processes and KPIs that we've got within the department. That's enabled me personally to grow my career significantly over the last few years. I have learned so much about wider businesses and departments and yeah, my journey at Yumpingo so far has been extremely exciting.
Who inspires you?
When I'm asked to talk about my idols, women who inspire me, it's really difficult to reduce that even just to a handful because there are so many. So if I think about who inspires me every single day, it's still just a handful of people, but it's my closest family and my closest friends.
They're the kind of people who would be the first to say that they're not inspirational, but that's a load of rubbish. I see their strengths and weaknesses, the challenges that they've overcome, the incredible things that they've done that they thought they couldn't. Land that job, that they never thought they could. Rip up the career book and start a business of their own, move their families halfway around the world for a new career, overcome, really challenging and sad and very stressful times and just exist and balance work and life and kids and all those kinds of things as well.
What is your advice for anyone looking to get into the hospitality business?
I was asked to talk about this for International Women's Day and what struck me about my answer, even though it was for IWD, was how relevant that advice is for the whole year. There is still some way to go before we have complete gender parity when it comes to wages and opportunities, but my advice to any woman looking to join the hospitality or hospitality tech industry is straightforward, even if it's not always straightforward to put into action!
The first thing would be to come and say hello, either online or at events. There's a strong community of women in hospitality, and I'm in a variety of WhatsApp groups. I attend several events and there's a solid group of women who advocate for each other always.
I think the other one is: that you don't have to be the loudest person in the room. But know your worth, get comfortable sharing your opinion and make sure you have a seat around that table.
