Ever wondered what happens here at Marshmallow? 🤔 What are the software engineers building? Where do the designers find inspiration? What tools are the Customer Happiness team using?
Now you can find out! 👏 We’ve spoken to Marshmallowers from across the company, asking them 10 quick-fire questions to reveal what life is really like at Marshmallow.
First up, Chrissie Davies from the Fraud team.
1. What team do you work on, and what’s the team’s overall goal?
I’m on the Fraud team, and I’m a Fraud Operations Executive. Our overall goal is to cancel fraudulent customers as soon as possible. To do that, we make sure everyone’s details are accurate. We also make sure customers’ premiums reflect their level of risk.
Overall we help the company as we prevent fraudulent customers from going on to make fraudulent claims or risky customers going on to make preventable claims. That means we can make sure fraudulent claims don’t occur, and the money saved from this can be passed on to other customers through cheaper premiums 💸
2. What does a typical day look like for you at Marshmallow?
The big thing we’re doing every day is reviewing policies. We use lots of tools and data points to look for any discrepancies in customer details and request documents if we see any red flags. If there’s enough evidence of serious fraud, we cancel policies as quickly as possible.
We also chat with customers regularly, checking that their documents are legitimate. Even though we’re not the Customer Happiness team and our work is less focused on customer relations, we still make sure we’re giving them the best possible experience we can 💕
I’m also on the Fraud Complaints team, so I respond to complaints if a customer is unhappy with a decision one of our agents has made. I go back and reinvestigate the circumstances, try to find out why the customer is unhappy and what we can do better next time.
As you can see, my day is usually very varied!
3. What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while working here?
When I first joined, I didn’t feel confident in making important decisions about customers’ policies. It’s a big responsibility, and you don’t want to cancel the wrong customer or accuse them of doing something if they haven’t!
I had some really helpful feedback early on about how I could gain confidence by changing my language when asking for reassurance and advice from my teammates. Instead of saying: “Should I do this? Should I do that?” I was told to reframe the problem by saying: “I think we need to do this.” Taking more ownership of my thinking when asking for support helped me realise that I knew what I was doing 💪
4. What tools do you use daily to empower your work?
The Fraud team uses a huge range of very industry-specific tools that I learnt how to use on the job.
We use a mixture of internal tools and models we built ourselves and some external tools and data. These help us to prioritise and visualise how risky a policy might be, so we can make decisions ourselves. We also use a tool called Intercom to communicate with customers.
I also find using my calendar is really helpful so I can plot my day to make sure I get everything done in my hours! And — the classic — Microsoft Excel to keep track of cancelled policies 👩💻
5. Looking back at your time at Marshmallow, what are you most proud of?
I think it would be one of my first projects at Marshmallow. The Fraud team were struggling a bit with customer service as our work can sometimes be an inconvenience to the customer. It’s a difficult position to be in when you’re having to cancel someone’s policy or ask for more proof of identity, and it can be really hard to communicate that in the right way!
So, I set up a Christmas competition to help Fraud get 5* Trustpilot reviews. The goal was to make people aware of what good customer service looks like and how they can de-escalate conversations while making it a fun and competitive activity. Overall, we managed to get around 48–49 5* reviews in just a month! 🌟
6. How have you developed your skills while at Marshmallow?
I’ve done quite a bit of internal training in different things:
- complaints training
- de-escalation training
- how to write police reports
I also did a mental health first aid course. Although it’s not career-specific, it was really good to start the conversation around mental health 💚
7. How do you see your career progressing at Marshmallow?
Opportunities for career progression are really good here. There’s a culture of “if you’re interested in something, try it out!” People are always happy for you to shadow them or to give you a bit of training or info around projects. There are lots of projects in the Fraud team to get involved with and lots of areas that people can take ownership of. There’s really good support from managers in Fraud.
In the future, I’m hoping to go from Fraud Operations to an Investigator role. Investigators do the higher risk policies and help support the rest of the team with their more extensive knowledge 🕵️♀️
8. Favourite Slack channel?
I know everyone says it, but I love the #Pets-at-Marshmallow channel. It’s just really cute!
9. Favourite emoji?
This isn’t an official emoji, I think we designed it at Marshmallow, but I’d have to say the half sunglasses, half crying one.
Or the raising hands emoji 🙌
10. Favourite work from home lunch?
Fancy stir fry or last night's leftovers!
Thanks Chrissie for giving us a glimpse into your daily life at Marshmallow!
If you’d like to be part of the Marshmallow team (and scroll through the #Pets-at-Marshmallow Slack channel 🐱) make sure to check out our current openings.
