Inside Constructive: Client Success Managers, Lizzie and Emma

Welcome to our Inside Constructive series! We talk with Constructive team members across our teams and offices to get to know the people inside the company and learn about their journey to working at Constructive.

Meet Lizzie and Emma, Constructive Client Success Managers.

What was your journey to working at Constructive?

Lizzie: I started at Constructive in July, 2020. After being in the building industry for over eight years I was ready for my next challenge. The building industry is what I know and love, so when I saw the ad for the CSM role I thought it was an exciting opportunity to stay within the industry, but also challenge myself in a different type of role.

Emma: Having worked in the building industry for over eight years and working my way up to Customer Experience Manager for a well-known Perth builder — where I had influence over the entire Customer Experience strategy — combined with four years in residential real estate, I’ve always been invested in making the home building experience a positive one for clients.

The opportunity to join Constructive has allowed me to take my passion for customer experience to another level. Every day feels like we’re working towards making the home-building experience a better one for thousands and thousands of people across the country!

What might be a typical day for a CSM at Constructive?

Lizzie: I always start off with a coffee from the office barista and a quick check-in with the other CSMs. As we’re spread across a few different states, we always make sure we’re chatting as a team and keeping each other in the loop.

From here, it’s answering emails from new and existing clients, reviewing any support tickets, working on a progress template or selection template for a new client and generally a training session with both new and existing clients. So, on any given day I’m working with clients that may have been using Constructive for a few years, some that have just gone live to some still in the implementation phase — it really varies each day which keeps it interesting!

Emma: The days vary a lot, which is great! It’s a good balance. Some days see me very busy on the road, out visiting local clients at their offices for training sessions. We do a lot of our meetings and training sessions online, too.

Client meetings happen regularly throughout the implementation phase and beyond as our development team is continuously enhancing the features we offer and evolving the product. Your business isn’t stagnant, and neither are we! I’m always making sure my clients are across the latest versions and features.

We have regular team meetings where we discuss updates to the software and new features that we either suggest ourselves, or take on board from our clients via our Support Portal (where clients can make suggestions).

There’s also some admin work that comes along with the job. I might be building a selection template, assisting a client with writing descriptions or the flow of the progress template and always some day-to-day nurturing and support for clients who are live.

What previous experience led you to become a Client Success Manager and what’s it like to move from a building company to a software company?

Lizzie: Having previous building industry experience is crucial to be a Client Success Manager. To be able to understand builders’ terminology, processes and operations is something that can take time to learn. Although processes can differ from builder to builder, having a general understanding and empathy is so useful.

My experience moving from a building company to a software company has been really enjoyable. It is different though, in a good way! Our company is small, so when you see something that can be improved, it gets improved; there’s no red tape here. This is the same for our clients. When they suggest improvements that could be made, we listen and act upon them.

Emma: My experience within the building industry has been essential. I understand our clients’ goals and can empathise with their needs and challenges. It means I can relate to a builder’s unique circumstance because I’ve personally walked in their shoes.

I was involved in the implementation of Constructive at the builder I worked for previously which was great experience for my role here. I can guide clients from a place of personal experience on how to seamlessly integrate Constructive into their existing processes and let them know which features are going to drive the best outcomes for the problems they are trying to solve.

How do you go about guiding builders through setting up their Customer Portal, Online Selections and 3D? 

Emma: It’s all about understanding the balance between our clients, (builders), and their clients’ goals and hurdles combined with current market conditions. I’m always asking myself: What challenges is the industry facing as a whole? How can we introduce various features contained within Constructive to help alleviate these issues, for both the builder and their clients?

I provide feedback to my clients at every step of the way, for example, with Online Selections I’ll ensure we are putting in enough choices to feel comprehensive, but not so many that clients will feel overwhelmed.

Or with the Customer Portal, I’ll guide builders to include enough items in their progress template to help reduce inbound enquiries from clients. We’ll talk through and strategise how much time we’ll schedule between progress updates, again making sure we’re not overwhelming clients to the point of spamming them with too much info, but that weeks and weeks aren’t going by with no activity.

We guide and educate our builders on best practice implementation of Constructive into their team’s day-to-day workload too, ensuring staff don’t feel overwhelmed and have the buy-in needed to integrate the software seamlessly into the business.

Lizzie: We go deep to understand their internal processes, their needs and their wants. We can then guide them based on this information combined with what we’ve previously implemented for clients — our industry experience and many implementations under our belt means we know what works and what doesn’t.

For example, we might provide advice on the best times to send surveys, how many surveys should be set up, what to simplify in Selections or what to include in their progress template. This all stems from knowledge of being in their shoes in the past, as well as working with multiple builders at Constructive.

Can you share a moment of your time at Constructive that you’re proud of?

Lizzie: Internally, helping to create a new process. It’s working well, the team is all on board and the result is it’s reduced the time frames of responding to and resolving support tickets!

With clients, I’m proud to have implemented Online Selections and Customer Portal for so many clients across Australia, and also in the UK. I also really love when I get to connect with existing clients to run through everything with them and help fine-tune their use of Constructive for continual improvement and return on investment.

Emma: Every time a client goes live is a huge achievement. It’s very exciting for our clients to go live with Constructive after all the hard work that goes into setting it up. Internally, we are all really excited for them too, so that’s always a win!

I also love when an existing client adds a new feature. I’ve had clients already using the Portal, then add other features, such as messages or surveys, and this always feels great as I know the benefits they’re going to soon see from using the full suite of features.

I’m proud when we collaborate as a team, too, on a new feature or an enhancement. Seeing this roll-out from the development team is really cool. I love letting clients know when we have a new feature to offer — sometimes even the smallest enhancement can make a huge time-saving difference in a builder’s day-to-day operations.

In what ways do you feel a connection with your teammates?

Emma: CSMs communicate with each other daily, being a small team.

Day-to-day, we work most closely with our Software Engineering Development team who assist us with the set-up of client integrations. Every builder is different, so we collaborate to do our best to customise Constructive to suit their needs.

New features may come as suggestions directly from our clients — we’re always actively engaging around how we might enhance Constructive, so we work together on brainstorming ways of how to best include suggestions in future releases.

We connect with the Marketing team regularly to provide experienced, best-practice advice and information to inform content for our blog, release notes and other materials.

Lizzie: As CSMs, we heavily rely on our tech-y Development team. They help us with anything support-related we can’t do ourselves. They also set up integrations to make everything interface smoothly.

The Dev team is constantly working on issues, bugs and feature requests either we, or our clients, have submitted.

We have a small, friendly team and a full office chat, so any time we need to ask anyone from another team to help with something, we very easily can.

Do you find Constructive flexible around your life and family?

Emma: Yes, absolutely! Working at Constructive provides me with a great work/life balance. We’re very efficient with solid, customer-centric processes in place, so there’s no culture of feeling like you need to be working hours and hours of overtime or answering emails after hours.

The whole team has a good balance of working in the office and from home, hybrid-style. Some days we’ve got lots of team members working from our office, (housed within a cool, co-working space in the Perth CBD), which is fun, plus it’s sometimes easier to collaborate in person.

Lizzie: 100%. Working full-time with a young kid brings its challenges, but at Constructive I enjoy the flexibility of some work from home days and the flexible start and finish times.