Are you easy to do business with?

When people see my job title, I’m often asked: what does a Head of Customer Experience do? Put Customer Experience or CX into Google and there are host of different answers covering everything from call centres to product branding but, in reality, I see it much more simply than that. My job is to make Panasonic TOUGHBOOK easy to do business with.

Just like all large organisations, we rely on processes to drive our company. Sure, our public-facing teams are very in tune with our customers. We have a reputation for listening to the customer and incorporating that feedback into the next generation of our rugged computing products. The ability of our professional services team to create tailormade solutions for our clients – from docking stations to mobile applications – is second to none and has helped to make us the European market leader. But sometimes the processes that evolve to run our business are simply not as customer friendly as they could be.

Can customers receive demo equipment fast enough, is it easy to place an order and can our teams respond quickly enough to specific enquiries?

In a successful business with a long history, these processes can often develop over many years and are updated and adapted to the emerging needs of the business; and sometimes those process end up having a negative impact on the customer experience without it ever being anyone’s intention.

My job is to spot those issues, ideally head them off at the pass before they become reality or resolve them quickly when they do.

For me, no two days are the same and I enjoy the variety. I could be discussing the supply chain in one moment and then looking at the purchase order system or servicing and maintenance the next. About 40% of my time is spent handling issues and 60% on planned business transformation projects to help improve the customer experience.

My project management experience and ability to juggle multiple tasks is a blessing. My brain likes to think that way. In fact, I created our transformation mind map for customer experience in the kitchen while cooking dinner one evening!