Customer Success & Experience Topics
Customer success strategy, customer satisfaction, customer-centric problem solving, and customer experience optimization. Covers customer retention, success metrics, and cross-functional collaboration to drive customer outcomes.
Operational Data Analysis and Reporting
Focuses on using data and reports to drive day to day operational decisions. Candidates should demonstrate familiarity with common operational metrics and reports such as ticket or request volume trends, resolution time distributions, customer satisfaction scores over time, channel or segment breakdowns, top issues and themes, and individual or team performance indicators. Expect to describe how you would approach an operational problem: what data sources you would gather, what questions you would ask, how you would slice and segment data, how you would form and test hypotheses, and how you would validate findings. Show comfort with dashboards and analytics tools, designing recurring reports and alerts, communicating insights to stakeholders, and recommending concrete changes. Also discuss limitations of metrics, data quality concerns, sampling and outlier effects, and how you would triangulate multiple indicators to avoid misinterpretation.
Customer Escalation and Deescalation Management
Covers the interpersonal techniques, operational processes, and cross functional coordination required to manage frustrated or angry customers, resolve disputes, and handle formal escalations across technical and commercial contexts. Candidates should be able to demonstrate frontline deescalation skills such as active listening, empathy, validation, acknowledging feelings, clarifying the problem, managing expectations, owning outcomes, explaining remediation steps, and following through with confirmation of resolution. The topic also assesses diagnostic and problem solving abilities including triage, severity assessment, prioritizing root cause analysis versus quick fixes, creating remediation plans, and implementing prevention measures. It includes escalation management practices such as defining escalation thresholds, incident and communication plans, handoffs to senior leadership, coordination with product, engineering, support, finance and account teams, negotiating trade offs between customer requests and product capabilities, and conducting postmortems and remediation. At senior and staff levels, candidates should show political awareness and influence, leadership of cross functional resolution efforts, handling procurement or executive sponsor dynamics, protecting company strategy while preserving long term relationships, and measuring outcomes such as time to resolution, customer satisfaction, churn reduction, and recurrence prevention.
Customer and Merchant Experience
How operational design and execution influence customer and merchant experience, including mapping customer journeys, measuring satisfaction with operational metrics and surveys, diagnosing root causes of poor experience, and designing interventions such as onboarding, verification, incentives, and support workflows. Candidates should discuss tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality, metrics to track improvement, and examples of operational changes that improved merchant retention or order reliability.
Customer Focus and Impact
Evaluates an outward oriented approach that centers customers and key stakeholders when making decisions, designing products, and prioritizing work. Candidates should demonstrate active empathy for end users, methods for collecting external inputs such as customer feedback, surveys, interviews, testimonials, and market signals, and show how those inputs influenced roadmaps, product or engineering trade offs, or operational changes. Interviewers look for examples of customer advocacy where the candidate influenced stakeholders to choose customer centered solutions, resisted internal pressures that would degrade customer experience, and balanced competing stakeholder needs. This topic includes translating technical and analytical work into measurable customer value, defining and tracking customer and business outcomes, prioritizing features and investments by impact, considering long term customer value, and taking ownership for customer success across contexts including product features, internal tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements.