Proactive versus reactive

My first role in CS had me managing a book of 150 clients. The enterprise SaaS product was the leading platform for employees to submit expense reports for travel and other business-related expenses. Like many platforms, this was a mission-critical tool for employees to often retrieve their money back for expenses incurred. As you can imagine, if there were questions or issues with the software, they were always urgent due to the nature of wanting to be reimbursed. With 150 clients, this led to 30–40 reactive emails daily from clients.

In the beginning, I wanted to show internally that I could do the job and impress my clients with my responsiveness, but over time, I realized that my days got stuck on replay and my interactions were not making me a strategic partner. I felt like support, and even worse, my customers treated me like support. Also, I was not earning any awards for the fastest email response time or the highest monthly support tickets...