How long have you been with Asurion and what brought you here?

I joined Asurion 2.5 years ago wanting to pursue a new opportunity to expand my current skill set while wanting additional exposure working with clients and their customers instead of exclusively working direct to consumer. I’d previously worked for a retail ecommerce company where we had an intimate knowledge of our customers. I wanted to pursue an opportunity that allowed me to leverage that customer focus and obsession in an entirely different way and in an industry in which I didn’t have prior experience.  

Additionally I was at a point in my life where I needed to find a better work-life balance. I wanted to have a career that challenged me and stretched me to grow, but I no longer wanted to do that at the expense of my family and personal time. Asurion offered (and continues to offer!) that balance where I can benefit from the rewards of both a strong work and home life. The fact that Asurion encourages this balance, and our leadership team models it daily is a testament to the great culture here at Asurion. 

What does your job entail?

As part of the Customer Experience (CX) team, I lead the insights & improvement arm for our New Products & Capabilities group. Whenever we launch new products across Asurion, I’m there to locate & listen to customer feedback about those experiences & provide improvement recommendations back to the business. This includes reviewing a variety of listening posts and data sources to paint a full picture of the customer experience. 

One of the recent projects I’ve been working on is setting up a new customer listening post within social media. By working with our social media & text analytics vendors, we’ve been able to integrate social mentions about the brand & key experiences into our existing listening platforms to help identify new trends and share the feedback to our Marketing partners. This work will let us tap into a brand new source of customer feedback to provide a more holistic view of the customer journey & what matters most to customers.

What have been your biggest accomplishments on your team?

Over the last year, the Customer Experience (CX) team has made incredible strides expanding how and where we listen to our customers. Many unfamiliar with CX may think of customer feedback as surveys alone. While surveys are an incredibly valuable resource for gathering customer feedback, there are many other ways we can gauge customers’ reactions to experiences and their preferences.  

The team has been diligently compiling many new listening posts – operational data, surveys, call/messaging transcripts, social media, etc., and developing robust models to pull all this data together to tell a single story. It’s taken a lot of work, but we are now able to showcase the value of looking at feedback in this holistic manner vs. being focused solely on a single metric at a single touchpoint in the customer’s journey. We are very excited to see how this approach matures over time and are constantly looking for new data sources to pull in to continue to round out our customer listening capabilities.

What’s the best career lesson you’ve learned so far?

My prior boss and mentor taught me a valuable lesson – don’t be afraid to take the risk. By nature, I’m a planner and hate the feeling of not being well versed on something before sharing my opinion with others. I know I’m not alone in that boat, but that desire to have thought something all the way through runs the risk of missing out on opportunities or thinking I’m alone in not fully understanding something.  

The idea of taking the risk – whether it’s asking the ‘dumb’ question, signing on for a new project, or applying for the job you want but aren’t sure you’re fully qualified for – is what helped push me ahead in my career. Without that element of risk-taking, I wouldn’t have been able to identify some of my greatest passions and skills or have had the opportunity to hone them.

What’s a fun fact about you that people may not know?

Many people don’t know this, but I’ve had a fairly non-traditional career path to get me where I am today. I started my career in corrections, of all places, working as a substance abuse counselor. Graduating from college and then grad school in the late 2000’s saw a bit of upheaval in the job market, and I ultimately ended up moving into retail ecommerce customer support where I used many of the soft skills I’d learned as a counselor to grow as a customer service representative. I climbed the latter in that company over the next 8 years, finding my passion in project management & process improvement. That experience ultimately led me to Asurion where I use skills and knowledge I gained in all of those roles daily.  

I say all of this to show that there’s no single or “right” path that can get you to your ideal career and regardless of where you are in life, there’s always something to learn that will help you down the road.

Time for a wild card. What’s your favorite cereal, travel destination, TV show, book, or what’s something you can’t live without and why? 

My teammates and family can attest to this – I thrive on project plans and lists. Managing multiple projects at work? Build a project plan. Planning to buy a new house? Need a project plan. Organizing a Disney trip? DEFINITELY need a project plan. It’s definitely not the most glamorous thing in the world, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that level of order brings me peace and even the act of building out tasks, dependencies, and deadlines makes me feel more in control. I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with some great ‘big picture dreamers’ at work and in my personal life so in the end it all works out and everyone is happy.