Denise Twum Manager, Customer Support instagram: niseyknits
I
ended up in customer support quite by accident. I majored in biology and women’s studies and wanted to work in adolescent and women’s health in developing countries, as I’m originally from Ghana. After college, as a Watson Fellow I conducted independent research on responses to domestic violence in the UK, India, Trinidad, Uganda, and South Africa. My Watson Year experience gave me an appreciation for people living in different countries and cultures, and I came away with two lessons. The first, that life is richer and fuller when you embrace difference and appreciate variety. The second, to keep learning new things, which is why I studied Hindi during graduate school and Korean for the past two years. I joined my husband in California in 2008, and it was quite difficult finding a job in public health because of the recession. My husband, a software engineer, suggested that I look into the technology companies in the area, as the qualitative research skills from my public health training could be applied in a user support role. It wasn’t as difficult a shift as I thought it would be, and I quickly realized I enjoyed helping users succeed using the product I supported. After contracting at Facebook and Color Labs, I joined issuu in 2013 as the support team lead. issuu appealed to me as an occasional knitwear designer and full-time K-pop fan because I could see how easily small- and medium-sized creative businesses could incorporate the platform into their marketing efforts. (In fact, I like to create knitting patterns and K-pop newsletters to use for imagery in our product tutorials.) My role requires working with all the teams at issuu, which makes my job pretty demanding and infinitely exciting at the same time. My team communicates with customers more than any other team in the company, and so while keeping an eye on the company’s goals and wellbeing, I have to make sure that I’m advocating internally for our customers as well. Speaking of appreciating variety, I work out of Palo Alto, but my team is based in Denmark and at one point comprised people from six different countries. Talk about diversity! And not only is my team diverse, so are all of issuu’s employees, as are our customers too. This means I’m always learning something new from both colleagues and customers, which keeps me motivated and energized.