Ansel Burch

I’m a professional relationship builder, customer service advocate, and data enthusiast; dedicated to helping people work smarter and see clear results. This professional profile lists my recent positions. I’m always looking for new opportunities to create teams, build better systems and tell a story.

I am a team leader and CSM with eight years of experience in leading teams, increasing customer confidence, and managing change with good planning. Your team will love working with me and my empathy-based approach to motivation and coaching. You’ll love my focus on actionable, accurate metrics that tell the whole story. 


I bring a lot beyond customer success leadership and operational management. Those roles work so well for me because I love digging into new experiences. It’s one of the reasons that this website exists. Organizing TTRPG Pickup Con, writing and producing podcasts, doing photoshoots, and all the other side projects make my brain tick and provide a healthy source for fresh approaches, techniques, and modes. I sincerely believe that breadth of experience breeds facility with each new challenge.

Professional Experience

Director of Client Services

Neighborhood Housing Services . Chicago, IL 

12/2023- Present

Reporting to the COO of a nonprofit housing agency. 

  • Reinvigorated team confidence, motivation, and resourcing.

  • Established and coordinated team knowledge base with an ongoing maintenance plan. Soon to be expanded to a company-wide initiative.

Consultant and Copywriter

Indecisionist Productions. Chicago, IL

10/2021- present

Entrepreneurship, Business Organization, Communication, Lead Generation

Over the past few years, I have been surfing from one contract to another, building competencies and getting exposed to new process styles and tech stacks at every turn. It’s given me so much opportunity to learn that I feel compelled to put that experience to work where I can. I’ve used this brand as a home for more than my content creation but also to assist clients with business processes, content resources, and even essential work like copywriting and data entry.

Client Success Manager

LCP Media. Chicago, IL 

5/2023- 8/2023

Reporting to the CMO of a SaaS media company serving the multifamily industry. 

  • Contributed to team capacity, working towards key metrics and methods. 

  • Collaborated cross-team to guide revisions to existing work platforms for full story metrics and workload management.

User Enablement Manager

Avalara. Seattle, WA (US-Remote) 

7/2022- 10/2022

User Experience, Feedback Gathering

What an experience. Through Swoon staffing, I got the opportunity to work with the team at Avalara, a company whose products I’d gotten exposed to years previous in another position. This position involved looking at the deployment of a project management and communications tool and finding ways to connect the user to the tool. I worked with stakeholders to identify critical challenges holding back usability and built a feedback and tracking cycle that would lead users to engage more closely and feel that their concerns would be honored. Ultimately this position did not work out. I feel good about the work I did. I’ve done implementation and rollout for apps like this from the beginning, but rarely have I needed to come in post-implementation with an eye for building user confidence and compliance.

Manager

Nan McKay. Chicago, IL (US-Remote) 

3/2022- 5/2022 (3-month contract)

Management, Scheduling, Outbound Calling, and Managing a temporary team for a government contract.

  • Manage a team of 28 customer service reps, making an average of 50 outbound calls per rep/per hour. 

  • Train and prepare the team with minimal oversight and guidance. 

  • Monitor employee workflow through the nuanced use of live metrics.

Customer Success Lead

HeySummit. Edinburgh, UK (US-Remote) 

7/2021-3/2022

-Management, Strategy, Documentation.

  • Managed a team of 4 customer success agents processing an average of 126.8 customer tickets each week. Responsible for KPIs, evaluations, feedback cycles, and unit strategy.

  • Saw 20% improvement in NPS scores within five months. 

  • Introduced new processes to help increase team and company efficiency as well as process feedback cycles to assess their effectiveness.

  • Evaluated and adopted a new customer success platform (Freshdesk) balancing ticket load requirements, stakeholders and team member needs, and platform compatibility.


Producer, Co-Founder

Starlight Radio Dreams. Chicago, IL.

9/2015-2/2022

-Entrepreneurship, Branding, Communications, Technical Acumen, Content Production.

  • Manage marketing and support through social media and Patreon backing to create a self-sustaining revenue stream and surplus. 

  • Spearhead live streaming solution to maintain production in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

  • Manage all elements for physical production including venue, equipment and cast for in-person presentations. 


Customer Success Lead

LEAP Innovations. Chicago, IL. 

1/2021-4/2021 (3-month contract)

-CRM Management, Communications, Business Process Review.

  • Swiftly assessed and corrected inefficiencies and redundancies in the process while recommending opportunities for automation and synergy of reporting. 

  • Designed and implemented automation to reduce task completion time by 80%.

  • Simplified main reporting to one essential workbook with dashboard for ease of reference by combining process documents from a dozen disparate sources to two main references. 

  • Subject matter expert for CRM re-implementation and maintenance. 


Head of Vendor Management/ Operations Manager

Purchasing Platform inc. Chicago, IL.

1/2020-8/2020

-Account Management, Communications, Business Writing, Logistics.

  • Built an organizational framework from the ground up. 

  • Re-defined company-wide processes within the first 2 quarters in position. 

  • Played a key role with pricing strategies and catalog, using data from all departments.

  • Revised and negotiated 50% of existing service agreements to ensure clarity and re-set customer-centric expectations, increasing total working vendors by 25%.

  • Developed COVID-19 supply response in conjunction with cross-departmental stakeholders. 


Head of Customer Success

Purchasing Platform inc. Chicago, IL. 

10/2015-1/2020

-Communications, Customer Support, Skills Training, Hiring.

  • Framed KPIs based on usage and in collaboration with stakeholder consensus. 

  • Identified gaps in the workforce and defined positions to fill the need, growing the team 500%. 

  • Maintained 5-star ratings in customer satisfaction for 4 years.

Education

Bachelor of Arts- English Literature and Theatre Arts (acting and directing).

Beloit College. Beloit, WI 
9/2004 - 5/2008

Minor in Medieval Studies.

Skills

People management, Stakeholder Engagement, Project Management, Contact Management, Content Creation and Release, Copywriting, Event Planning, KPI setting, Iterative Development, Multi-team Logistics, Training Design, Social Media Management, Patience, Resilience Under Stress, Podcast Editing.

Proficiencies

Office: Sharepoint, Slack, MS Office (full suite), Google Workspace, Clickup (Project Management), Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Zoom, Teamflow, Humaans (HR), Workfront.

Customer Success: Freshdesk, Zendesk, Groove, Salesforce, Hubspot.

Media & Social: Canva, Crowdcast, OBS, Patreon, Reaper, Squarespace, YouTube, Zoom Recording Equipment.

Operating Systems: Windows, macOS, Android user.