On September 17, INMA awarded 30 young professionals around the world with its debut “30 Under 30” award as part of its Young Professionals Initiative. This is the 25th in a series of 30 features about these impressive rising media stars who are shaping our industry. 

Naomi Wills was studying classics and linguistics at Harvard University, then joined a small education start-up in Tokyo after graduation. A desire to serve a broader audience sent her back to school for a master’s degree in forensic linguistics, where she discovered the role word choice and narrative structure reflected and influenced media audiences. 

Wills was hooked and joined Business Insider’s customer support team as an intern. A year later she was in her current position as a team lead during a sudden company merger.

In her first 10 months, she rebuilt her team, streamlined the customer support process, and took ownership of churn initiative and customer insights.

Words still matter to Naomi. 

She transitioned her team from “customer support” to “customer success,” organising coffee-and-conversation presentations with other departments to show them “we could do more than only react to customers.” 

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