CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TEAM

Customer Experience has become an increasingly established term in most industries over the past decade. It usually refers to supporting customers to adopt your product, through providing professional services to aid them. Customer Experience teams are usually measured on things like churn rates, upsells and customer satisfaction metrics.

In April 2023, I became responsible for setting up the team that would support Automata's customers. Not just once our automation platforms were deployed, but throughout their entire journey with Automata: through design, build, testing, training and beyond. In most businesses this team would be called 'Post-Sales', or 'Deployment', or 'Integrations', or several other terms. We chose 'Customer Experience'. Despite the slightly confusing implication of using this term outside of the industry-standard definition, we felt that it best represented what we were trying to achieve.

We believed that the technological barriers of implementing integrated lab automation had, for the most part, already been solved by ourselves and the wider industry. We also believed that the vast majority of wet labs, from Pharma to Biotechs, will want to, and in fact have to embrace integrated lab automation over the next decade. However, the challenge that remained, and was largely being ignored by the wider industry, was the issue of adoption. To truly benefit from integrated lab automation, wet labs would have to completely change their day-to-day processes, and the job of the bench scientist would never look the same again.

We started this team to tackle that challenge. To partner with our customers through their system design, build, testing, training and beyond. To ensure they would be comfortable adopting their systems and automated workflows in their day-to-day operations. Metrics like system utilisation and workflow success rate became our north star, not churn rates or CSAT scores. Over the past two years we have built the team to focus and prioritise relentlessly, driving towards its namesake: Customer Experience.

Personally, I've loved the journey so far: delivering to and supporting our customers across the UK and Europe, setting up our US team, and preparing the business for scale. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in being a part of, I'd recommend you take a look on our careers page for roles within our Customer Experience team.

Oli Hoy

Global Head of Customer Experience

While Customer Success is well-established at Automata, our US team is still in its early stages — and that's exactly what makes it such an exciting place to be. When I joined, the team was small, the challenges were big, and the opportunity to build something meaningful was enormous.

Growing a team at this scale and speed hasn't been easy. What we do — bringing lab automation to life for our customers — is complex. The magic of Customer Success is making that complexity feel seamless. That takes a diverse mix of skills and personalities: the loud voices that rally a team to the finish line and the quiet ones who consistently carry the torch. Scientists who think in As, Gs, Ts, and Cs, and software engineers who think in 0s and 1s.

But if there's one thing that truly defines success in our team, it's care. Care for our customers — staying until the issue is solved because we know their work can't wait. Care for the details — listening, understanding, and taking action when our customers need us. And care for each other — jumping in when a teammate needs support, because we win as a team.

As we continue to scale over the next 12 months, we're not just growing in size — we're evolving. We're building stronger processes, deepening our expertise, and ensuring that Automata's groundbreaking technology is supported by a world-class Customer Success team.

If you're someone who thrives in an environment where your work has real impact — where you get to build, solve, and innovate alongside an ambitious team — this is the place for you. What we're creating is nothing short of incredible, and we're just getting started.

Kathryn Liles

Director of Customer Success, US