“At Webbing, I can manage my own career”
Cara Cook, CSM Team Lead at Webbing, talks about her journey from linguistics to the cellular connectivity realm and explains what clients and family have in common
I was born in Provo, Utah, and now I live in Salt Lake City with my family, I have six children with an age range from 5 to 22. I like family activities: we ride motorcycles, we go snowboarding, we love camping and hanging out with our extended family.
I studied linguistics at the University of Utah, and that allowed me to travel and teach English as a second language. I taught kindergartners and preschoolers in the Czech Republic and spent a semester in Mexico.
Immediately after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I was hired by one of the major MNOs in the U.S. as a supervisor in their business and government operations center. I learned cellular terminology and technology very quickly, worked with different departments, including technical support and customer service, and eventually joined their Business Solutions sales team. I worked with them for almost eight years, and then moved to different opportunities.
I decided to stay in cellular communications with a company that was a billing aggregator. They exposed me to different carriers, and after several years with them, I came to work for Webbing.
Joined Webbing to have more impact
I liked Webbing because they focus on the IoT part of data, and I was really interested in how connected our world was becoming. The machine-to-machine technology was intriguing to me, from the vending machines to improving agriculture and just every vertical with digital technology, it seemed to be a good fit to join Webbing.
Also, it was just after the pandemic when we first had to get vaccines, then work from home and then we were forced to go back into the office. I had a newborn at the time, and it wasn’t possible for me to go into an office every day. I needed to find a position where I could balance my work and my life – a role where I could avoid the stress and health risks of commuting and be at home with my family.
Besides, I pursued this position because I wanted to work for a global company and have more of an impact. I did not have that in my previous position. Being a customer support person, you’re typically taking your marching orders from the C-suite and enforcing them upon clients. It’s very difficult to make an impact at this level, when you want to improve things. But working for a smaller company allows you to do that.
Webbing surprises me every day
I have a deep old-school background in MNO technology, and I am surprised every day with what Webbing can bring to the table for every vertical, customizing a solution for different businesses in a way that seems very honest and transparent.
When I worked for the MNOs, there was always major corporate messaging behind every plan. It was very cookie-cutter, “either take it or leave it” kind of thing if they had a plan or a price that was set. I remember having to stand my ground with a $1,000 bill for a guy whose teenager had gone crazy with text messaging and had no idea that the costs would be so high. Those companies were not very transparent, with unlimited data not being actually unlimited and always having a throttle on the back end that we could never let customers know about.
What I like about Webbing is that our clients are in charge of their own network. They can set their own restrictions, they know exactly how much they’re paying for each and every megabyte of data that goes through the system. They can pull back the curtain and look at network events logs and see that the data was actually transmitted by that device. Honesty and integrity are a huge part of what we do. It makes my job easier, and it makes sense from a business-to-business perspective, so I’ve been very happy here for the last two years.
Taking things to the next level
With that same integrity that we give to our customers I feel we operate internally. There are no closed-door meetings behind your back and no one’s telling me what I need to do to improve. We all have one mission, and every idea is a good idea. People can bring all their points of view together to operate in a dynamic way. Although we’ve grown a lot, we act like a very small business and that’s something I had not experienced previously.
As we go into different verticals and examples of how data is being used, working through that has really expanded my knowledge. Yet I still learn something new every day about different options that clients have. And it seems to me they could potentially have any kind of solution. If they’re looking for anything specific, Webbing has a solution that will allow that to happen. And we keep expanding, we keep pushing the envelope of what might be possible with connectivity. To me, Webbing means forward-thinking and transformative. We’re taking things to the next level, and it doesn’t feel like we’re going to stop any time soon. There’s always something on the horizon.
Caring about the people I work with
I absolutely adore the people that I work with, and it extends to clients as well. I get excited when they have big wins. I want their experience to be fantastic. I want them to feel that someone cares about whatever’s most important to them. That motivates me to do the very best I can. I don’t feel like there’s a huge difference between how I run my family and how I treat our clients. They feel like family, they feel like friends. And we’re all able to be successful together because we can have those close relationships while not taking our eye off the ball.
Now I have gone from a customer success manager to the customer success Team Lead. Our team is expanding, and I’ve been able to focus on training new team members, but my overall role in making sure that the clients are happy has not changed.
Because my work is not a traditional “clock in – clock out”, I try to be disciplined with my schedule, but also there’s flexibility. It is probably the most balanced I have ever been in my life, being able to manage my own career and set my priorities for the things important to my clients.
And the same goes for my colleagues. Although we’re not in the office together, when I talk to anyone it doesn’t matter if they’re from Latvia or Sweden or wherever, we do act like a family. It has a wonderful positive impact on my life to enjoy the people that I work with and to care about them. And I feel that they care about me.
