“Customer Success is tied to almost everything in the company: marketing, product development, everything. Everyone ties back to the CSR team because we’re the ones who work directly with the customers.”
Augustino Nguyen, Customer Support Representative
Augustino spoke to one of our marketing directors in November of 2021, six months after having joined HeadLight. This interview was inspired by an infographic that Augustino created explaining how memory, hard drive, and processing capacity within computers work using a Thanksgiving meal analogy. In this brief interview, Augustino and his colleague also discuss why he joined HeadLight and what he appreciates about working with his colleagues.
Q: What is your role at Headlight and how long have you been here?
A: I’m a customer support representative. I joined HeadLight about six months ago. It’s been really fun and a great learning experience; I’m just excited for what’s ahead.
The support cases I deal with come in from our users throughout the country. It might be that they need more information about how to use our products or they could be experiencing a bug or something. I’m on the front lines as far as trying to partner with customers. And it’s really rewarding work, because sometimes people just need help. Sometimes it’s simple; sometimes it’s complex. And, even if I think it’s simple, for some of our customers, working with technology can be like learning a new language. Especially with the newer products, I treat it like we are all learning together.
Additionally, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been on an apprenticeship with our learning experience designer. That’s something that I would love to move into at Headlight: being a learning experience designer and technical designer. Which ties into the infographic that you saw.
Q: How do you and your team treat customer feedback and issues?
A: We always value user feedback. We prioritize that feedback and treat it with a lot of urgency. Since we are growing so much, and especially in ways that enhance the customer experience, we take that feedback and convert it into feature requests so we can make our products even better and make our customers even happier.
It’s especially cool if a user has a feature request and I bring it up to our development team, and they’re like, “Oh, actually, we’re already doing this. It’s going to come out in the next update.” It’s super rewarding to be able to reach out to the customer right away and say, “Hey, we’re actually working on this. It’s coming out real soon and I’m really happy that you reached out.”
Q: What inspired you to join HeadLight?
A: HeadLight’s foundation in infrastructure really hit home with me. My dad, my grandpa, and my dad’s brother, are all in the infrastructure business. They all have their own landscaping companies or construction companies. It’s what I heard about growing up: my dad telling me all the stories of inspectors and materials and all those kinds of things that he has to deal with in his daily life.
“Working at HeadLight is an opportunity to stick to my roots and help advance the field of infrastructure. So when I saw the opportunity to join HeadLight’s customer experience team—I’d already had a couple of years experience within customer service—I really wanted to jump on the opportunity to make an impact here.”
Q: What do you appreciate most about working with your colleagues?
A: Ever since day one, everyone has been so ‘open arms’ with me. People genuinely want to know what I want to accomplish while I’m with the company. In my first month of training, I thought that I was going to be watching training videos for, like, 40 hours a week. But it ended up being me, connecting with colleagues across the country via Zoom and picking up a ton of knowledge.
Being part of the HeadLight team feels like a family to me because I came from a really big company. Moving into a smaller startup has allowed me to connect with other people.
People here support me growing into a role that taps into my core skills and passion. I graduated from UW with a bachelor’s in design and our current CSR lead, James, has said that he’s happy I’m with the customer support team and that I am good at it but also that he supports me “doing something [I’m] passionate about.” I appreciate that.
Q: Tell me about the infographic that you created and specifically what inspired you to create it.
A: So, the infographic takes the components of a computer and builds an analogy with Thanksgiving dinner. It’s an idea that James brought up to me because we were just talking about our past experience of talking to customers and explaining how a computer works. And I really wanted to create a lighthearted, fun way of teaching this idea. We all deal with technology everyday—through work, entertainment, through how we connect with each other…But most people don’t know how it works. Understanding how the components of a computer (or phone or tablet) work can help people be more productive and I also believe that once they understand this, they can push their understanding of their technology tools even further.
I wanted to make something fun and relatable, but also something informative that relates to technology. It’s fun to relate it to dinner—who would think that the components of a computer can relate so well to a Thanksgiving meal? For example: the idea of a turkey being the storage: because the bigger the turkey, the more you can stuff inside. It’s the same thing with a computer: the bigger the storage on the computer, the more information you can keep in there. So it was really fun putting it together, and it pushed my creativity. It was really rewarding to send to James and my other colleagues. People have enjoyed it and have told me it has helped them think about computers in a new way.
Q: Is there anything else that you would like to share about working at Headlight or yourself and your career
A: Sure. Two things: First: art is a huge passion of mine and it always has been. It’s really rewarding to be able to grow up, get a degree in it and work for a company that allows me to push that creativity and tie it into the work we’re doing. I hope that I continue to be able to use my creativity to help people learn. There’s so much to learn about technology!
Second: if you look at the infographic, there’s GranGran there. And I really want to put Gran Gran in, because throughout my three or four years of customer experience, there was nothing more rewarding than when I was helping resolve an issue for someone who is older or just newer to technology. And it’s just delightful to be able to explain how to fix something or explain how something works to someone who isn’t familiar with technology: seeing that smile on their face when they get it.
