PrismHR Spotlight: CSM Lesha Cyphers
If Lesha Cyphers had her druthers, she would spend most of her time at the beach. Whitecaps, white noise, white-hot summer fun.
Just like being at the beach, things can come in waves when you’re a PrismHR customer success manager (CSM). Instead of just going with the flow, Lesha likes to dive in to get to the best possible solution as quickly as possible.
Her customers appreciate her dedication to helping them become more efficient, but they especially like her ability to troubleshoot issues so they don’t have to tread water. One time, Lesha says, she had to help a customer at 5 o’clock on a Friday night with a payroll issue. Since payroll can’t clock out for the weekend, she worked overtime that night to make sure the problem was solved.
“Lesha joined our team and quickly jumped right in learning, growing and building client relationships,” says Melissa Eversole, PrismHR’s director of customer success. “She has the customer service and detailed organization skills to keep her clients happy. She was born to do this role and is a strong team player. We are lucky to have her on our team!”
Sandcastles Instead of Magic Castles
While Lesha can’t always be near an ocean, she often keeps the sea close to her. Above her desk is a painting of a beach that her dad got her for Christmas a few years ago.
“Water has a different energy to me,” she says. “It is just grounding and peaceful.”
She has felt that way for a long time, too.
Read our profiles of CSMs Melissa Eversole, Jason Ward, Michael Wolf and Matt Yuknis.
As a youngster, perhaps as young as 3, Lesha remembers her parents taking her to New Smyrna Beach in Florida before making the one-hour or so drive to the “most magical place on Earth,” Walt Disney World. Afterward, her parents asked Lesha and her siblings, including her twin sister, what they liked best. Perhaps only the perpetually forlorn Eeyore could have predicted this: the youngsters picked the beach.
Picking the beach was easy for the kids, picking a name for Lesha wasn’t as easy for her parents. They wanted an “L” name to match the first letter of her sister’s name, so they settled on Lesha. It means “woman” in Arabic and could also mean “noble,” so some might say her name might be a little kismet. Maybe it means hardworking, too.
She graduated with a degree in business administration with a focus on international business from Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia. She worked full time while taking a full load of classes, too. It’s a testament to her dedication and organizational skills; you can’t balance that type of hectic schedule without big-time time-management ability.
It’s not surprising that her degree was focused on international business either. “I love to travel. I want to go places, and I like to see things I haven’t seen before,” she says.
To help that cause, she studied abroad in Turkey during her junior year. She learned enough Turkish “to get by” and ate a lot of baklava. It’s not surprising she ate more than her fair share of that delicious filo-dough, nut-filled treat. That’s because she was a vegetarian at the time, and there weren’t a lot of great nonmeat options to her liking. Most of her meals consisted of tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. She did, however, develop a taste for strong Turkish coffee, and even liked to eat the sludge at the bottom. Not recommended, of course!
Besides traveling, she also loves helping people. One time, her mom was dating someone from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), so Lesha volunteered to travel to Florida after a hurricane to deliver water and supplies. She also has donated time to helping Habitat for Humanity.
Nowadays, Lesha lives in Covington, Georgia, which is about 35 miles southwest of Atlanta. She lives there with her son who just turned 9. He is a baseball guy through and through.
Before joining PrismHR as a CSM in 2022, she worked for a cloud human capital management (HCM) software company for over a decade as a client manager and later an operations manager. One of the people she worked with there might be quite familiar to you: Kevin Andrews, PrismHR’s president.
He’s a “driver of innovation,” Lesha says. Adding, customers have noticed. Several people have told her how much they appreciate how quickly updates are coming and the sheer number of new features being rolled out of late.
The funny thing is that Lesha didn’t realize Kevin had moved to PrismHR until after she applied for a PrismHR job.
Each day in the life of a CSM is never quite the same. Yes, there’s making sure customers’ solutions and performance is working at full speed. Yes, there are conversations about innovation and new products like PrismHCM and different PrismHR Marketplace partners. But there are also many conversations about the little things as well because it’s a small world after all.
Her motivation to help PrismHR customers is not hard to decipher.
One client recently told her that he was headed to Disney World with his family, so she made a point to follow up when he returned to see how the trip went. “It doesn’t always have to be work-related to create those relationships,” she says.
“Lesha has been an absolute rock star,” says Joel Ter Meer, business analyst, information technology, at MAU Workforce Solutions. “From Day One, she’s championed our issues with a tenacity and curiosity that has provided quick and efficient resolutions to all our critical issues. Her attitude is fantastic, and her follow-through is world-class!”
She has also been going on more site visits recently to see customers in their home offices. It’s a good way to connect and keep the conversation going.
Speaking of keeping the conversation going, if you’re headed to PrismHR LIVE in Nashville this summer (June 2-5), you’ll definitely want to spend some time chatting with Lesha.
Striking up a conversation with her is definitely like a day at the beach.
James Tehrani is PrismHR’s digital content marketing manager. He is an award-winning writer and editor based in the Chicago area.