Taggstar’s Abir Cherif is a driven woman who aims high, which makes her role as Head of Customer Success at Taggstar a perfect fit. “I’m hardheaded,” she admits. “When I have an idea in my head, I know what I want and that I can achieve it, and I want to achieve it.”
Abir originally came to London at 18 to study international business at Middlesex University after a long-held dream to study in the city. She joined Taggstar in July 2021, working for the then-Head of Customer Success Management. Now, only two years later, she heads the CSM department and leads a team of three others. “It’s very challenging, but I love the challenge.”
Abir thrives on supporting her team, she says. “I love being able to work with my team and to be there to guide them and be the person they can rely on and learn from but also to learn from them too. I really enjoy that.”
She also loves how integral she becomes to the retailers and brands she works with. “We work with them in a very consultative way to help make them successful. Essentially their success is our success. The way we make them successful is by being able to continuously optimise their experience onsite and on other channels to deliver the best customer experience that will generate the best revenue and best conversion.”
“My role is not just about having a catchup and checking in; instead, it makes me feel like I’m a part of their strategic team and I’m helping them. In every call with my customers, I have to dive in and be able to advise them on the best way possible to use social proof to achieve their success and their KPIs. It’s feeling that the customer really trusts me with my ideas and being able to brainstorm with them, which I really enjoy.”
The importance of social proof
After an initial background in email marketing, Abir became interested in user-generated content. “That’s how I got into tech without really intending to because I fell in love with all that space which talks a lot more to me and people of my generation.”
When she saw for herself how well Taggstar worked as a UGC tool, she wanted in. “I like to be well-prepared, so had done my research before my first call with Taggstar, and one thing that stood out for me was that the tool works. That makes the job a lot easier. You know that it works and can be confident to talk about it, and we continuously thrive in proving the value of Taggstar,” she says.
“As the conversation evolved with Taggstar during the interview process, I discovered more about the customers we work with and how we work with them, which I really liked. There was also the idea that it wouldn’t be a routine and every day would be different, so at 10am I’d speak to one customer and be part of that team and later part of another,” she says.
Abir says she was also inspired by the idea of working with a strong female CEO. “The fact that our CEO is a woman is great. Marjorie is very inspirational and very strong-minded, and being able to speak to her and learn from that and being able to know I don’t have to doubt myself because she doesn’t doubt herself is great, especially with my background where I come from a minority.”
Indeed it’s her background and wanting to make her parents proud of her that is her strongest driver. Although she was brought up in Brussels, her parents grew up in Tunisia and had modest upbringings, which drove them to want the best for her. She describes her dad as her personal motivator and explains how he had to be taken out of school because his family couldn’t afford a pencil. “My dad used to say the way he brought us up with my brothers was to make sure we had everything for us to achieve our dreams,” she says. “My dream is to make my loved ones proud and to feel they are happy with what I’m doing. So it’s all about knowing that every time I have a challenge, I can do it because my dad told me I can do it”
Poster girl
Abir admits to being very goal-driven both at work and home. “I like to have a goal or something I need to achieve to be able to keep going. So whether that’s with renovations for the house I bought earlier this year or before when I used to do powerlifting, I wanted to compete but didn’t actually want to do the competition because I found it too stressful but wanted to get to the level where I could, so I used to train and lot and keep my motivation based on that.”
I ask Abir what else others around her might not know about her. She laughs. “I used to work for Paddy Power and was interviewed once for their Be Gamble Aware campaign. I had my face in every single betting shop in the UK but didn’t know. I was on all their window displays and a lot of people recognised me and said are you the girl from Paddy Power.”
Outside of work, when not working on her house project, Abir says she and her husband now have a new puppy, so take lots of walks. They also love to travel to experience new places and cultures and meet new people. She says she has ambitions for the future of a sabbatical to volunteer in a third-world country. “I’d love to go into a school and perhaps teach a language or anything that I can do that would put a smile on their faces. I’d love to do that and hope that one day I’ll be able to.”
Abir certainly does inspire with what she has achieved in only two years in her role, but what advice would she give others? She says to be open to new experiences. “You don’t have to know what you want to do – you just have to discover and find out how good you are at something and touch on different things to see what works for you. And you have to work hard. It’s about finding the thing that you are passionate about. Work can become a real routine, and to go through that challenge every day, you have to love what you are doing. So it’s all about finding that one thing you really enjoy and doing it the best that you can to make sure you reach the best level of yourself,” she says. Abir is certainly taking that advice to heart.
