At technology-driven companies, there's a crucial element that often goes unnoticed: the human connection. As Head of Customer Success, Andrea Bilbao brings her engineering background and passion for sustainability to help wind farm operators leverage the power of AI-driven turbine monitoring. When she's not fighting for customers' goals, you might find her kickboxing or strength training - activities that mirror her professional approach: focused, energetic, and always ready to take on new challenges. In this conversation, she shares her journey from industrial engineering to leading customer relationships at Turbit.
Patricia: Could you share a bit of your background and the journey that brought you to Turbit?
Andrea: I come from an engineering background - I studied industrial engineering and my career mostly involved loads and calculations. I joined engineering because I really like solving problems and I'm very hands-on. But at some point it became a bit monotonous. I realized that what I enjoyed most was when customers would come in because it brought diversity and change. I needed to give my job a purpose in terms of impact on sustainability. I've always been interested in sustainability, and wind energy was a major interest of mine even during my studies. So the role at Turbit fulfilled many of those boxes.
Patricia: Since when do you work at Turbit?
Andrea: Since two years now.
Patricia: So you understand the business better than anyone, right?
Andrea: Not better than anyone, but I understand well some parts of the business... hopefully! In the end, even though we're an IT company, our customers are technical operators and asset managers - people with deep know-how of their wind turbine portfolios. We really need to understand and be able to lead those technical conversations with them.
Patricia: As the head of customer success, what are the main aspects of your role and could you walk us through some of your key responsibilities?
Andrea: This role opens a lot of doors at once. Customer success is such a central role because we're the bridge between technology teams and customers. We're constantly in contact with customers operationally, but we also work with our internal teams to ensure that technology, data engineering, and data science develop products that fulfill our customers' needs. We work closely with sales to ensure smooth customer handovers and bring value. As head of the department, it is also important to look into the future - where do we want to take the department? What's Customer Success' vision at Turbit? Even though we're a small team, I think it's important to ensure everybody feels happy and fulfilled in their job.
Patricia: What does a typical day look like for you?
Andrea: We check many boxes! There are lots of meetings with customers, either because we're onboarding them or they're at different stages, but there are always customer conversations happening. Then there are internal meetings for setting priorities and improving processes. We've grown a lot in recent months, which involves internal alignment, process improvements, and updates. And sometimes, hopefully, we get some focus time as well!
Patricia: Can you tell me about a recent project that you're particularly happy with?
Andrea: I'm really happy that we're finally taking the first steps toward integrating our Turbit app into our customer success tool. This means we can get insights about the tools directly in our customer success platform without needing to check everything manually. It's just starting to take off, but I'm very excited because it's such a promising initiative.
Patricia: What's your vision for customer success in five years?
Andrea: The vision is to work as proactively as possible and less reactively. We need to really distinguish between support and success, and ensure we deeply understand our customers' goals and challenges, taking this journey together with them. That could be the ideal world. For that, we need a product that's easy to use so we have time to develop our customers strategically. We need more insights with less effort about our customers and better understanding of the KPIs and metrics that give us important information about them so we can make data-driven decisions.
Patricia: How does your expertise in customer success contribute to Turbit's mission?Andrea: Turbit's mission is achieving 100% renewable energy in the world. We'll achieve that by enabling our customers to reach their goals. Right now, the industry faces two major challenges: rising risks and a shortage of skilled professionals. Our aim is to enable customers to monitor and manage more wind energy assets with less effort. For me, the goal is to make the wind industry innovative, and I think Turbit should take a bit of the lead here and push innovation with our customers.
Patricia: What does customer success mean at Turbit?
Andrea: Turbit is a technology company, very innovative, but we don't want to lose that human approach. Behind Turbit there are people, and building long-term relationships with customers is something that only humans can do today. Building these relationships and helping customers scale up and manage bigger portfolios with less effort - that's our way to achieve 100% renewables and reach the goals set under the Paris Agreement. The human approach and long-term relationships are key.
Patricia: How do you manage and maintain team dynamics while working remotely?
Andrea: Working 100% remotely definitely makes a difference. You need to take an extra step compared to people who aren't remote because you don't have those coffee breaks or lunch chats. You need to actively reach out to people, even if it's just taking five minutes before a meeting. Sometimes I'll call someone to say, "Hey, I noticed you were a bit quiet in the last meeting, is everything okay?" Because remotely, you can miss those subtle details or context. We're building a strong community culture at Turbit, and team events are a big part of that. Attending these whenever possible is a great way to bond with colleagues.
Patricia: What inspires you the most in your daily work with customers?
Andrea: The highlight is when customers tell us their challenges and what they want to achieve. At first, these challenges can seem quite complex. But then things start happening. For example, communication with OEMs is typically challenging for our customers. So when I hear "we notified them about an anomaly as you suggested, and they accepted it and confirmed they'll check it" - that's a huge win! It shows we're adding real value and making a difference. There's a clear before and after when using Turbit.
Patricia: How do you see the customer success landscape evolving in the renewable energy sector?
Andrea: To be honest, I don't know many customer success departments in renewable energy but I am part of the Customer Success community in the B2B industry. At Turbit, customer success is unique because it requires technical background in understanding turbines. It's not just building relationships - it's finding that sweet point between those two. That makes it both unique and complex. Finding people with this combination of skills is definitely challenging.
Patricia: What are some of the challenges you face in ensuring customer satisfaction?
Andrea: Two years ago, I would have said resistance to innovation and AI was our biggest challenge. Then ChatGPT came along, and that resistance started falling away. But we still face a significant challenge in the wind industry - there's a certain conflict of interest between stakeholders like OEMs and asset managers. I see this as a beautiful challenge because we believe that working together, we can achieve more. It's amazing to see how we've moved from "we don't want our engineers to lose their jobs" to "if you're not working with AI, you're falling behind" - and that happened in just two years!
Patricia: What do you like to do outside of work? Do you have time for that?
Andrea: I think it's our responsibility to make that time. At Turbit, we're very understanding about work-life balance - we all want that. After spending many hours at the computer, movement becomes essential for me. I love getting out of the city when possible, enjoying nature, doing morning strength workouts, dancing, kickboxing - anything that gets me moving! Plus spending time with friends and family - it's another way of staying connected.
Patricia: Where do you see room for improvement at Turbit?
Andrea: We need to keep looking at where we can get better, what we can grow, how we can do things differently. Our products are dynamic, not static - there's always room for improvement. We need to keep scaling up our products, making them better, really listening to what the industry is telling us, and adapting to lead that change. In customer success specifically, we need to shift from being reactive to more proactive. This means ensuring our product grows at the right pace so we can focus more on strategic initiatives for growth.
Patricia: How does living in Spain influence your work at a German-based company?
Andrea: I really believe happy people perform better, and we all have private lives that matter. Being able to stay close to my family while keeping a job I love is a huge advantage. When a company is properly set up for remote work, location shouldn't make a difference - our customers don't even realize I'm working from Spain! It actually brings some cultural diversity to our already diverse company. Plus, it helps us cover more ground - while the Berlin team handles German industry events, we can attend events in Spain. The key is having a company with the right tools and setup to make it work.
Patricia: You’re absolutely right! Thank you, Andrea, for sharing your journey with us today. Your perspective on customer success really shows how Turbit is creating meaningful relationships in the renewable energy sector.
Andrea: Thank you for having me, Patricia. It's been great to share these insights about our work at Turbit.
コメント