Thanks, Max.

The universe, I'm told, has a funny way of putting people into your life for a reason and there's no such thing as a cosmic accident. I tend to believe it is true. Sometimes we are blessed with great teachers or business mentors, amazing friends, loved ones, or even aspirational strangers who touch our lives ever so slightly and yet impactfully. Regardless, things happen for a reason, and perhaps those reasons only reveal themselves well afterward.

I want to share a bit of a personal story about one such person who had a profound impact on me, my old boss, Max Israel , the founder and CEO of a company I was lucky enough to be part of, Customerville.

For those who may not know Customerville or Max, I'll say this. Customerville was a feisty and energetic group of technology and business missionaries who came together to make even a small dent into the world of all too common bad customer surveys. Customerville and Max made beautiful surveys that told stories, evoked emotions, and most of all, truly connected with people. They were a bunch of people who made a career of explaining that you can't measure amazing customer experiences with crappy surveys. If you gave them enough time, they'd even explain the science behind those assertions, and frankly, they were right.

I grew up professionally in the customer experience solutions space for nearly twenty years and spent most of that time working with others who were some of the most brilliant minds and founding thought leaders in the industry. Whether it was working for Dan Schimmel at OneSource, Barak Pridor at ClearForest, Sid Banerjee as he was first getting Clarabridge off the ground, Adam Edmunds at Allegiance ( InMoment ) or Lior Arussy to help build the fantastic CX consultancy, Strativity, or even now, at a new role I took late last year helping to accelerate growth at a terrific company called QuestionPro with some brilliant CX folks like Valerie Peck , Vivek Bhaskaran , and Ken Peterson , none affected me quite the way Max did. At least, not yet.

I remember the day I cold-emailed Max, probably close to seven years ago, and unsolicited told him I'd love to join him and his team in any way he wanted. I was intrigued by their business, and I just wanted "in" at Customerville and wanted to become one of those missionaries who worked there. I was hooked on the notion that bad surveys are responsible for a lot of the negativity associated with asking for feedback and that Customerville, back then, had a unique lock on making surveys better than the rest. They didn't just poop on surveying and write them off as "necessary evils" but instead extolled how beautiful and engaging they could be. It was a shockingly simple, yet huge idea.

The funny part is that I matured in my business life by working over the years to develop my "left braininess". I took great pride in my ability to analyze and act decisively in business situations and was trained to think objectively and pursue clear and decisive, and often data-rich decisions. "That's how great business is done", or so I thought and was led to believe for most of my career. The interesting wrinkle was I was also a "right-brained wannabe" and admired great artists and those who could infuse art and aesthetic into business. Yet, in many ways, Max and I were perfect foils for one another. I was coming in to help bring some sales and operational rigor to the business while Max and the team introduced me to phenomenal design. Imagine Apple, for example, if they never had a guy like Jony Ive running their design team to partner with Steve Jobs for all of those amazing, formative years of their meteoric growth and dominance. The iPhone could have come with a rotary dial and not the elegant touchscreen and UI we now all love and expect in our devices. Max, it turned out, was the king of the right-brained rebel geniuses and I had no clue what I was getting myself into when I asked for a job from him.

Max took a few days and flew to meet me for the first time f2f here in North Carolina, coming in from his home in Spain. We spent time discussing ideas for Customerville at a local Durham Bulls minor league baseball game on a swelteringly hot summer afternoon and over a couple of nice meals and shook on a deal to give it a try before he went back home. The deal was set and I would start at Customerville a few weeks later.

Coming to Customerville was at first a little jarring and alarming to me as it turned out I wasn't prepared for just how much importance they placed on the beauty of great design in everything they did. We argued over previously benign things like the choice of a font for a client proposal or a particular stock image I wanted to use for a piece of collateral. Max was in his own way teaching me to not brush over these things but rather, stop and appreciate what thoughtful design could do for the customer experiences I was helping to create. I remember thinking Max was a little overboard at first, but as soon as I agreed to have an open mind to his views on elegant design in everything we did, no matter how seemingly inconsequential the more I came to see he was, after all, right. It didn't take long for that right-brained wannabe in me to emerge from hiding and in some ways, take over. A couple of months later, I even became a bit of the company "design cop" myself and found myself preaching the importance of design to subsequent hires, all along hearing Max's voice in my head as I did so.

I praised great design and was quick to criticize work I would have been entirely accepting of just a short while before, not just the work my team and I produced, but everywhere. I rallied for people who made their living in disciplines like human-centered design, UX, human factors, usability, and yes, even communication and celebrated great work when I saw it. It was fun to see the contrast between good and, well, not-so-good and to see the correlation between the best and some of the more amazing brands who did it. Great work tended to come from great companies, and vice-versa, too. It didn't take long for Customerville to become the go-to-guys for amazing UX in CX and we grew as that reputation got out.

I find myself reflecting on that time with Customerville and Max for a couple of reasons now. First, in my new business role at QuestionPro , the team here and I have had a series of discussions about some of Max's teachings that I learned to deeply believe and we have begun bringing some of those same ideas to life and even more so, in a next generational approach which truly excites me. (You'll be blown away by what's cooking up here!) Also, this week was both Max's birthday (Happy birthday, Amigo) and also the launch of his new venture, Y.Chroma Apparel , the perfect intersection of business rigor, design, and innovation. This is Max's first new venture since exiting Customerville after 艾菲诗软件 acquired the business a little more than a year ago.

Max, I'm so excited for you and for the adventures ahead that are yet to play out. I know you'll continue to thrive and teach the next generation of old-school left-brained analytical types why beauty, in everything you do matters. Thank you for being such a great teacher, mentor, leader, and most of all friend.

Marc Mandel is the North American VP of CX at QuestionPro, the Customer Experience solutions company (www.questionpro.com) but these thoughts are obviously my own.