Numbers, Romance & Automations: A Story of Our Regional Customer Service Associate

This segment features Shopee’s employees and the roles they play in our company. We hope this helps you find something you might like to do for a living!

This week, we speak to Liu Shengmu, our Regional Customer Service Associate based in Singapore.

Hey Shengmu! We heard that you were sent to Shopee Thailand as a 3-month-old hire. That must’ve been quite the adventure! How would you describe your experience? What did you do there?

S: Adventure is an understatement! (laughs) I couldn’t speak any Thai back then, so I was in deep shock when my boss asked me to quickly pack up and go lend the local Customer Service (CS) team a hand. I only regained my normal breathing when he told me what he needed from me – to design metrics for CS agent performance, analyze results and develop solutions for bringing up CS performance levels. I had imagined the language difference to be inconvenient in a business setting, but I ended up settling into the team very quickly – in huge part due to my Thai counterparts’ friendliness and the strong support system given to me by both the Thailand and Regional teams. I suppose it helped that numbers are universal – it’s a language on its own!

You make numbers sound incredibly romantic. What about numbers fascinates you so much?

S: It’s not numbers per se, but more of what you can do with them. For instance, using email answering rates, ticket resolution rates and customer satisfaction levels, I’m able to draw conclusions on the performance of our agents. I then explore these figures and inferences by asking the “why” questions. Why are the email answering rates high but the ticket resolution rates low? Why are customer satisfaction levels for this particular agent consistently so high – what is he/she doing right that other agents can learn to do? The answers I get help me make recommendations to the agents and that helps to guide their future interactions with customers.

So this is why I love numbers – from simple digits, I can derive meaning; with meaning, I can create solutions that impact the way people work and perceive their roles in the company.

Haha! This really is the right role for you, Shengmu. Are there other parts of the job you particularly enjoy?

S: I think so too! (laughs) Well, some of the main things I do in Shopee is to automate manual processes, process data and integrate results into the data warehouse. When I first joined Shopee, data collection and processing were very manual; everyone used Excel sheets and organized their data differently, which resulted in frustrating and sometimes confusing circumstances. Since then, I’ve teamed up with my colleagues from the Operations and Data Engineering teams to develop the entire data processing pipeline – from deciding which data to use, to extracting and cleaning up data, to analyzing aggregate scores, to communicating insights to the team. My work helps to guide Shopee’s operational decisions, which is very exciting when you think about it!

It’s great that you found such a suitable part to play in Shopee! Now we know how much thought goes into every interaction between Shopee’s customers and CS agents. Thank you for sharing, Shengmu!

Liked reading this interview? Follow the #ShopeeInsider and #lifeatshopee hashtags on LinkedIn for more role features like this. If you’d like to be part of Shopee’s Operations team, find out more at http://careers.shopee.sg/.