Meet Stephenie Hoehndorf, Director of Customer Experience at Kyrio. She joined the team in November 2018 and brings a wealth of expertise for creating successful customer experiences for over a dozen years.
In her role, she’s responsible for creating a customer experience strategy for Kyrio. Read on to learn about her work and the impact it will have for Kyrio customers.
Interviewer: What brought you to Kyrio?
SH: I’ve been doing customer experience for more than a dozen years and mostly in the telecom and technology industries. I’ve worked for very large organizations — think Fortune 100 to 500 companies — creating customer experiences. And what drew me to Kyrio is that I was looking for a company who wanted somebody to come in and create a program from scratch.
When you build something from the ground up, that’s where you can make an impact very quickly in an organization. I also needed to be at a company that’s innovative. I didn’t want to work for a static organization, but at a place that has the right culture already. I wanted to work at a company where employees already care about the customers, but needed the framework to deliver a great experience.
What three words do you use to describe your role?
‘Collaborative,’ because I really help facilitate a lot of things. When it comes to fixing a process, everyone else is fixing it. I’m just helping them see where and how it needs to be fixed.
I’d also say ‘creative’ and ‘structured’ are words that describe my role. It’s interesting because these two words are opposites, but it’s because you can design a customer experience that enables you to think outside the box. And then you put structure and predictability around the program so that it’s an intentional approach for the customers.
What does customer experience mean to you?
Customer experience is about designing and executing predictable experiences that are valuable to a customer. It’s about how do we make something that the customers can come back to again and again and know what to expect.
What are you working on for Kyrio?
There are a couple things I’m working on. First, I’m working on establishing a ‘meaningful listening post’, which means I’m conducting customer interviews. We’ll be introducing a new survey so that as customers go through an engagement, we can create a baseline to measure ourselves and evaluate our processes.
I’m also starting to work on operational readiness. As new projects or products are introduced into Kyrio for customers, we need to make sure that we have very firm plans on how we’re going to deliver that experience to the customer. During this process, I help the team understand how we impact and engage the customer, where it is appropriate, how often, what’s the right mechanism, things like that.
What do you hope the impact of your work be at Kyrio?
Number one, I want an experience to be positive and memorable by customers. That’s hard to do in this space since it is so technical. Whether those experiences are memorable because it was easy, hopefully not because it was bad, I want it to be positive and memorable.
Where do you see us going in the long term?
I want customers to understand that we’re here to help them. In the long term, our customers will more closely engage with us as we continue to better align with their long-term strategy. And we’ll start to see our own roadmap aligned to the customer’s roadmap so that we can develop long-term partnerships.
What should customers expect to see?
This is an evolution, a journey, and a long-term movement , committed to by me and the entire leadership team, because customers’ needs are always going to change. All that being said, changes won’t happen overnight.
We need to make sure we get enough customer feedback. Once we start to prioritize the feedback, we will build the needed change and communicate that progress to customers. Things don’t happen overnight, but we really are here to listen and act, and that’s going to be a huge differentiator for us.
What do you want customers to know who are reading this?
Please speak up and let your voice be heard, because we’re listening. And we’re acting.
That’s the difference between what Kyrio is going to do and what a lot of other companies do. A lot of companies come in and create a CX program that consists of listening. And they’ll take those insights and talk to other people in the company, but then there’s no one to actually drive action and change.
So, what we’re going to do that’s very different is listen, learn and act. And that’s what I call that the full loop of a CX program, because it has to be meaningful. If the customer invested that time, whether it was two minutes to complete a survey or 20 minutes for an interview, we owe it to them to do something differently and to respond to their needs that they’ve articulated to us.
Thanks for joining our Director of Customer Experience! Look forward to meaningful incremental changes that will change the way we work with you. Have comments? We want to hear, fill out the short form below.