Main Takeaways
Burcu Tzitzi, our dedicated Customer Service Supervisor, shares colourful stories about what it means to be a hardcore Binancian.
A knack for dealing with people, combined with the ability to ask the right questions to arrive at the right answers are key skills needed to excel at Burcu’s role.
Burcu has balanced her leadership role at Binance and motherhood like a pro, partly thanks to Binance’s fully remote working culture that allows her to multitask effectively.
Burcu Tzitzi does not immediately strike you as “hardcore.” She is exceptionally warm and gregarious, all smiles and colors from her ever-changing highlights to her bright choice of attire. However, do not mistake this friendliness for an easygoing work ethic. As a Customer Service (CS) Supervisor for Europe, Burcu is probably one of the most hardcore Binancians you’ll ever meet.
Her biggest flex? During the first week in her role, she unexpectedly had to single-handedly support all of Türkiye's customer requests, thus getting the most intense hands-on training one can imagine.
Read Burcu’s story to find out how she became our latest culture star and how she continues to excel in Binance.
A Knack for Dealing with People
Having grown up in Türkiye and worked various jobs, Burcu decided to move to Greece to pursue a career in customer service at a big tech company. After 5.5 years in that role, she has polished her intuitive ability for dealing with all sorts of people, which helped her excel in customer service roles.
As Covid-19 came around the corner, a friend of hers, a manager at Microsoft who worked in her building, shared the news about applying for a job at Binance, a company that Burcu had never heard of before. It turned out that Binance had been looking for a new customer service representative at that time, so Burcu applied too.
She thought that it would be an opportunity for her to learn more about cryptocurrency, diversify her customer service experience, and step up her career.
“I joined the team in September 2020. Once at Binance, I never looked back,” shares Burcu almost four years later.
Asking the Right Questions to Get the Right Answers
Burcu’s early days in Binance seemed to portend the pace of the rest of her journey with the company. During the first week following her onboarding, as a native Turkish speaker, Burcu found herself having to support all of Türkiye’s customer service requests.
“There was one night of my onboarding week when my senior Turkish colleagues got so sick, so I ended up having to do the work all by myself, as a total new joiner!”
It was that one intense night that Burcu learned everything in her training materials by heart. She was determined to do a good job and forced herself to memorise all the training files at lightning speed, while attending to customers' queries in real time.
“Back then when I joined, there were only about 60-70 people in the CS team. There was only one Google sheet to organize all the CS schedule, it was all so primitive,” Burcu recalls. “Now our CS department has grown exponentially, we have over 2000 team members. We support 17 different languages and we have enabled direct AI translation tools in the system. We have also incorporated an AI bot to help handle customer queries.”
Burcu finds balance in doing high-intensity training daily, combined with yoga and breathing meditation.
Binance has improved its CS systems significantly over the time Burcu has been with the company. Today, most user requests are picked up within 1 minute and resolved within the first CS chat.
To do well as a CS representative, Burcu observes, she had to develop the skill of asking the right questions in order to get the right answers.
“I have to be good at understanding exactly what a customer wants. For example, there was one elderly user who came to the chat room and asked how to withdraw his money from the bank. He thought he was talking to a bank. I had to know how to talk to this customer and understand critical information about his account, what exactly he wanted and how to help him through the chaos and confusion. It’s not unlike being an investigator or a doctor trying to figure out the right diagnosis.”
When presented with complex cases and questions she does not have ready answers for, Burcu relies on her ability to connect the dots quickly and engage different stakeholders across different business units to come up with a collaborative solution. She also makes a point of developing and maintaining relationships with colleagues wide across the company to improve collaboration efforts in the future and to keep growing her knowledge about how Binance operates.
Pushing All the Way Through
At the end of January 2021, a bull market had just begun, creating a backlog of users wanting to transact and having queries — sometimes up to 20,000 tickets at a time. Burcu found herself working constantly until 4 to 5 am to solve cases. She was also heavily pregnant at the time.
One day, when the price of BTC hit $64,000, as Burcu vividly remembers, she went to the hospital for a regular check-up and found out that she had been further along than she had realized, giving birth to a beautiful baby daughter shortly thereafter. Burcu insisted on going back to work even before the twelve weeks of maternity leave she was entitled to had expired. Every hardcore Binancian has their own definition of "hardcore," and Burcu's is that she is always impatient to spring into action when she feels that users need her.
“Yes, I was so hardcore, come to think of it. There is no money and title that can keep me in a company, it is about the sense of purpose and fulfillment I derive from my work. Binance is the first company in my life where I feel truly valued, where I feel belonging. Look, I even have Binance tattooed on my arm,” says Burcu, rolling up her sleeve to reveal a Binance logo engraved underneath.
The baby, three and a half now, has grown up following Burcu’s work and meetings at all times. Burcu jokes that her daughter might really know how to read corporate charts and graphs by now.
Binance’s remote working culture helps tremendously as it enables Burcu to multitask, completing household chores and attending to her child while at meetings. She also enjoys the luxury of being able to travel and work from different locations that recharge her, including at her family’s place where she can get additional childcare support.
“Juggling motherhood and being a team leader at Binance is not easy, but nothing good ever comes easy.”
Freedom to Be Herself and Keep Growing
One other thing that Burcu loves about working at Binance is that the company allows her to be free and to be truly herself. As a manager, she can really think outside the box, and no one is dictating her how to achieve her targets. Everybody is allowed to exercise their personal leadership style, and there is barely any micromanagement. There is also a lot of freedom for Binancians to own different projects, collaborate with different departments, and even transition to different roles.
Burcu, having been identified as the most senior supervisor in the CS team, recently got offered a brand new position to lead KYC Operations.
“As a member of the CS team, I was the first point of contact to solve problems for our users. I was critical in building trust and satisfaction with customers, ensuring their loyalty and confidence in our platform,” Burcu explains. “Moving into KYC, I will help to maintain the security and integrity of our platform. This means I will help safeguard users’ assets and protect the ecosystem overall.”
If you are interested in building the future of finance alongside hardcore Binancians like Burcu, check out our open roles here.