In 2011, I walked out of the Pentagon and off active duty. I had ten years of service as a Navy Officer. The first three were spent driving warships and the next seven “telling the Navy’s story” as a public affairs officer.
For those not familiar with how the military works, if a service member stays in for 20 years that dedication pays off with a retirement. Twenty years of military service means healthcare for life, retirement pay starting immediately (very likely around the age of 42) and numerous other benefits. However, if a service member leaves before the 20-year mark the benefits disappear.
At the half-way point, I’d made the decision to cut ties primarily for two reasons:
- Bureaucracy
- My Family
I had just finished a cutting-edge assignment with a very small group of Public Affairs Officers. Our team was established in 2008 to begin launching social media for the Navy. It was exhilarating.
We had the opportunity to tell Navy stories AND to HEAR from Navy veterans, family members and supporters like never before. But it was a battle.
Gaining leadership buy-in was a slow and dragging process. It took the earthquake in Haiti to shake the approval loose and launch the Navy’s Facebook page. I was beyond frustrated by what I saw as the lack of innovation and the blatant disregard for the thousands of voices we were hearing from daily comments.
I was also pregnant at the time with our third baby (so in all fairness I may have been a bit emotional).
I realized that I would likely head to an aircraft carrier next and wasn’t sure my marriage would survive me constantly underway and my husband home on his own with three small children.
Shortly after I separated, I received a call. A friend of a friend was establishing a new trade association and was seeking a community manager to build it. I hopped on a phone call with Bruce Temkin and Jeanne Bliss and they introduced me to the term “CX,” or customer experience.
I remember standing in our home in Texas with my jaw hanging open. This was January of 2012 and all I could think was, “Wow, this was the missing link. This is what was missing from our efforts and all of the voices we were hearing in social media. I am so glad that the private sector has already figured this out and is jumping on it.”
I immediately took the job and got started on developing the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).
The CXPA had a community like no other I had ever worked in. The professionals that navigate into this space have a natural empathy and desire to help others while at the same time are very smart and appreciate and understand metrics.
The community grew fast and almost entirely on the backs of volunteer members. Over the years, it became a huge part of my identity. I respected, admired and became close friends with so many of the members.
During this period in a weird chain of circumstances, I ended up remaining in the Navy Reserve. Primarily to afford healthcare coverage. CXPA didn’t have benefits and that third baby was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis.
In 2018, the Navy came calling. My number was up. It was my turn to deploy. I would need to put my CXPA career and my family on pause.
I definitely saw the irony in my leaving active duty because of my family, and yet now I would have to deploy away from them anyway. This time though it was to benefit my family with medical insurance.
During the year of 2018 while I was on the ground in one of the poorest and most backward nations in the world— customer experience was “going viral.”
When I came back the CX space was different. So much growth was happening. So many more businesses were adopting and acknowledging the importance of both customer and employee experience.
Then came yesterday.
Yesterday, I was back in Washington DC for the Medallia City Tour DC. I was in a room with somewhere around 300 people employed by federal
agencies around DC (including a few from the Department of Defense). All of these people were there to figure out how they could improve their agency’s customer experience, or as Medallia’s team calls it— GX, government experience.
It was like the last eight years of my life had come full circle.
It won’t be easy for the federal government to embrace customer experience, but the results— as we saw yesterday — can be lifesaving. Customer experience, employee experience and the combination that forms government experience require innovation, trust and open listening by leadership.
It is doable. (And if the center of bureaucracy is now adopting the principles of CX, and your organization isn’t —maybe you should re-evaluate CX as a larger priority in 2020)
