5 years at Refined: 3 reasons Raj Sehmi has thrived in Customer Success and Support

Our customer success manager in Malmö, Raj Sehmi, originally from Kenya, moved to Sweden in 2016 for university studies. Right after graduating in 2018, he started working at Refined. Ever since then, he’s been an integral part of our team, witnessing first hand our growth from 13 to more than 50 employees—and learning a ton along the way.

Since he joined, Raj’s career has shifted from customer support to customer success as our teams and functions evolved. In the future, they will keep evolving as both are at the core of our growth journey as a global, product-led SaaS business.

So what’s kept Raj around for five years, and hopefully many more? Read on to find out.

Right now, we’re looking for a Technical Support Team Manager to join our team in Helsinki!

3 reasons Raj has enjoyed his career with Refined so far

#1 Varying customers & problems to solve

According to Raj, what makes the customer support work interesting is the variety of different customers and problems you get to solve.

“We are a part of the Atlassian ecosystem,” he says. “It means that we build complimentary apps for customers that use Atlassian’s tools like Confluence and Jira. This in turn means that we get support questions from all over the world. At the moment, our team of 50 people are serving 5000 customers.”

Refined’s apps are built for both server and cloud deployments. Depending on the environment the customer works in, the context of the support questions vary considerably.

“When I started at Refined, a bigger part of our customers had server deployments. In these cases the customers we served were more technical people and the support they needed was in bigger parts very technical,” Raj describes.

As Refined has shifted more and more into the cloud, technical enablement is deprioritized slightly, and the problems in customer support can be more on the creative side.

“Our customer support helps the customers with different types of questions and there are a lot of different customer personas, which I think is a lot of fun,” he says. “You might have to dig deep into a technical problem or the answer might be more straightforward. Sometimes you have to get creative and help the customer to come up with ideas on how to build a site that does a certain thing.”

In his work, Raj has learned a ton and developed as a professional. At the moment, Raj works in customer success, which means more proactively reaching out to key customers and finding out ways to serve them even better.

“When I started five years ago, we were a small company and the role descriptions were more fluid. Soon we started talking about having a separate customer success team. A year ago we broke them into two teams,” Raj explains.

#2 Product business with huge growth potential

“One of the interesting things about Refined is the product-led growth mode,” Raj says. “We don’t sell directly to customers, rather they try our app and get started on their own, and this makes customer support our primary way of being in touch with customers.”

Raj mentions that the next person joining us in the role of technical support team lead has a great opportunity to take things to the next level. Our customer base is growing and shifting to the cloud. 

“Our strategy is to build apps on top of the Atlassian tools,” he explains. “So in principle all users of Atlassian tools are also potential customers for us. I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of that and the potential problems we could solve. There’s huge potential to grow the product and customer base.”

According to Raj, it’s an exciting time to be at Refined, as we plot where we want to grow next. Customer support and success teams are at the core of this as they are our customer advocates within Refined.

#3 Culture that supports wellbeing and happiness

Raj says it’s been really fun for him to be involved in growing the company from 13 employees into a team of 50 in just five years. Fun, but not easy.

“For sure, we’ve experienced some growing pains, for example in terms of cross-team collaboration,” he says. “As we’re growing, processes are put into place and not everything is ready. I am sure that as we continue to grow, there will be rapid changes and the fast-paced everyday life of a growing company,” Raj says.

In the midst of it all, it helps to have a great culture that supports people’s wellbeing and is built on a strong foundation and values.

“Culture is a big part of why I’ve enjoyed my time at Refined. At Malmö and Helsinki, too, we have a good emphasis on work but we balance it all well by having relaxed time with colleagues outside the office as well.”

Working hours are flexible: Everyone is available from 9–15, but you can schedule your work outside of that how you want, aligning it with your team. We also have fun together—three times a year, we gather in person to spend a week having dinners, workshops, afterworks, hackathons, and working on creative projects.

“These get-togethers are a big part of the culture,” Raj says. “What's more, we’ve always had quite a flat hierarchy, which is common in the Nordics. Everyone in the team is approachable and I have always felt that I can bring any kind of ideas on the table. There’s also a certain level of humility in the culture.”

Can you see yourself at Refined? Read more about the open role of the Technical Support Team Manager to join our team in Helsinki!