My Journey to Customer Obsession

From managing change and talent, to transforming companies and cultures to embrace the entire customer lifecycle, my career has led me to a deep understanding and obsession with the customer experience (CX).

This personal journey began as a kid, as my family moved around due to my father’s job in the U.S. military. While living in different states and countries was exciting, as a quiet, fairly shy and introspective child, I was forced to sit back, observe and take everything in. I learned how to be flexible, meet new people, adapt to changing situations and understand patterns of behavior—all in an effort to fit in, make friends and thrive within each new environment.

This personal need to learn about and understand human behavior helped me growing up and led me to study behavioral psychology in college and graduate school. There, I further honed my skills to include how to understand why people act the way they do, how to shape and change behavior and how to adapt to meet these behaviors.

In my first job, I learned to identify, track and reinforce top employee behaviors. I then led executive training and organizational management, deciding to shift and become a business leader myself. My responsibilities increased, and I was now able to drive change by focusing on CX and understanding the entire customer journey across business lines. As I moved forward in my career, each step led me to better understanding customer behaviors, adapting to and anticipating changing needs and getting to know customers—often better than they know themselves. I spent time with them, collected data and learned their stories. And with each customer interaction and touchpoint, I became more hooked and determined to make things better for them, and as a result, better for the company.

As I changed companies and industries, now working with a variety of organizations as a consultant, I realized that although the jobs and situations were new, one thing remained the same. And that was that many of these large companies had become distracted from the core of their business—the customer. There’s a strong opportunity to bring that back as a methodology and discipline to become a centralizing force, cause and mission for the organization. Bringing customers back to the heart of business – it’s a winning proposition for everyone.

Have thoughts about customer obsession or the customer journey? Leave them in the comments below.