Career paths rarely follow a straight line, but few are as wonderfully unpredictable as Lynn Knauf’s journey to becoming a Technical Service Manager at Zayo. Her story demonstrates that success often comes not from following a predetermined plan, but from embracing unexpected opportunities and applying transferable skills across diverse industries.
Lynn’s journey from aspiring police officer to jewelry sales champion to telecommunications expert highlights a powerful truth: building strong relationships and understanding customer needs transcends industries. At Zayo, she now applies this expertise to help strategic customers optimize network solutions through proactive monitoring and collaboration. Here is how her storied career began.
Pivoting When Life Changes Direction
Lynn initially planned to follow her brothers into law enforcement, but a temporary role at a jewelry store changed her trajectory. On her first day, an unexpected staff shortage thrust her onto the sales floor without any product knowledge. “I embraced the challenge and found my passion for connecting with people,” Lynn recalls. That leap into the unknown became a defining moment in her career. She thrived, rising to District Sales Manager and earning top sales awards.
The jewelry industry taught Lynn that successful sales go beyond product knowledge; it’s about understanding people and their needs. These invaluable lessons would later drive her success in the telecommunications industry with Zayo.
Following Passion While Balancing Priorities
Following her successful career in consumer sales, Lynn faced a familiar challenge for many professional careers: balancing career ambitions with family responsibilities. As a district sales manager with three young children and two dogs, the extensive travel requirements of her role began to conflict with her priorities. Rather than simply finding another corporate position, she chose to pursue a creative passion.
Lynn and her family renovated part of their home to create a licensed bakery specializing in custom designer cakes. Her entrepreneurial spirit drove the business to thrive, highlighting her talent for building a strong brand, managing client expectations, and delivering tailored solutions with precision. All skills that would later prove essential in technical account management.
However, the demanding schedule of weekend work and long hours eventually conflicted with her kids’ extracurricular commitments. Once again, Lynn demonstrated the courage to make another strategic pivot when circumstances required change.
The Telecommunications Breakthrough
Sometimes the most significant opportunities come from casual conversations. A chance encounter with an old friend led to Lynn’s entry into the telecommunications industry. The friend’s husband, a manager at a telcom company, was seeking a strong salesperson. Despite no telecom experience, Lynn remembered her successful transition into jewelry sales two decades earlier.
“Although I knew nothing about telecom, I remembered how I had known nothing about jewelry 20 years prior,” Lynn explains. She applied for the position and immediately immersed herself in telecom training videos and educational materials. But her success didn’t come from her studying; it came from applying the years of relationship-building skills she’d honed across different industries.
“I found tremendous success, not because I had learned everything about telecom, but because I understood that whether I was selling a diamond ring or a network solution, if I get to know the person or business, listen to their needs, understand their concerns, I could tailor the perfect solutions while building incredible partnerships.”
Transitioning to Technical Service Management
In 2024, Lynn made her most recent career evolution, transitioning from sales to her current role as Technical Service Manager (TSM) at Zayo. This move represented a natural progression of her customer-focused approach, allowing her to work more closely with strategic accounts while applying her problem-solving skills to technical challenges.
As a TSM, Lynn collaborates with Zayo’s most strategic customers to ensure our managed solutions exceed expectations. Her role involves driving day-to-day incident management, while proactively monitoring solutions for improvement opportunities. She describes herself as “a quarterback for my customer’s managed services,” coordinating between various teams to prevent issues before they impact business operations.
The Art of Relationship Building in Technical Services
Lynn’s approach to client relationships centers on genuine investment in customer success. “Build a relationship that makes you feel as if you are part of their team, and what affects them, affects you,” she advises. This philosophy transforms the traditional vendor-client dynamic into true partnership.
Her method involves several key practices:
Deep Customer Understanding: Lynn invests time in comprehending not just technical requirements, but business objectives and challenges. She conducts weekly cadence calls to discuss business changes and monitors for issues like overutilization, jitter, latency, and high ticket counts.
Proactive Monitoring: Rather than simply responding to problems, Lynn actively watches for potential issues. When she detects business-impacting concerns through monitoring and analysis, she coordinates with customers, engineering, and strategic support teams to resolve issues before they escalate.
Collaborative Problem-Solving: Recent success stories include working with data lake professionals to create a custom report that initially seemed impossible. By clearly explaining customer requirements and facilitating communication between teams, Lynn helped develop a solution that identified and addressed two problem areas immediately.
Balancing Technical Excellence with Human Connection
One of Lynn’s most valuable insights concerns the balance between solving technical problems and nurturing human relationships. While industry standards emphasize listening, clear communication, and collaboration, Lynn believes these practices are meaningless without genuine care for customers as people.
“If you don’t genuinely care about your customers and see them as people, those are just empty words,” she explains. Her approach goes beyond standard customer service protocols:
- Active listening combined with empathy to truly understand customer impact
- Clear communication that aligns with customer needs, wants, and expectations
- Collaborative process that always considers customer wellbeing throughout
This human-centered approach has proven especially valuable in managed services, where technical complexities can sometimes overshadow the personal relationships that drive long-term success.
Driving Innovation Through Customer Insights
Lynn’s unique position as a customer advocate provides valuable intelligence for Zayo’s managed services evolution. Her strong customer relationships give her “a front-row seat to both the positive and negative impacts of their managed services.” This perspective enables her to effectively communicate customer experiences to Zayo’s product team, driving improvements and innovations in service offerings.
Using her varied experience to the fullest, she actively identifies opportunities for customers based on their business changes. With her out-of-the-box thinking, she approaches each situation creatively to find the best solutions. When companies are in growth mode, she researches utilization patterns to determine bandwidth increase needs. Conversely, when clients downsize, she looks for cost-saving opportunities through bandwidth optimization.
Building Your Own Relationship-Centered Approach
Lynn’s journey shows how building strong customer relationships can drive both career growth and business success. A consistent focus on understanding people, building trust, and delivering real solutions can be found through diverse experiences. Whether you’re in telecommunications, professional services, or any customer-facing role, Lynn’s approach, investing in customer success, collaborating proactively, and putting people first, can inspire your path.