In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, and the customer experience to “just ship it.” Business goals don’t seem to overlap with customers’ needs. Companies hire anybody who threw buzzwords on their resume without knowing how to assess talent. We normalized “Minimum Viable Privacy,” which is no longer acceptable. Customers don’t want minimally viable anything. They want their problems solved and their expectations met or exceeded.

Customers notice when we get it wrong. Our competitors, investors, shareholders, the press, bloggers, and social media notice. Morale suffers, and we might have trouble retaining or hiring the best practitioners. Great customer experiences require the right team and strategies in place to predict and mitigate the risk of delivering wrong or flawed products, services, and experiences (PSE). Marketing and sales initiatives have uphill battles when we are offering PSE that are difficult to learn, frustrating to use, or not meeting customers’ real needs.

What needs to change and how can we start to create this shift on our teams and at our companies? It’s not always easy or straightforward. In this session, we’ll look at a model for a small or large business transformation back to high quality products and services that meet and exceed customers’ real needs. We’ll look at better ways for teammates to collaborate and partner with CX and UX so that what we learn from metrics can lead to further customer research and knowledge.

Debbie Levitt, CXO of Delta CX, has been a CX and UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a “serial contractor” who lived in the Bay Area for most of the 2010s, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Etsy, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure. Her “DevOps ICU” book and training teach non-CX roles about CX, why it’s done by specialists, and how to integrate it into teams and processes. Her “Delta CX” book and training teach companies how to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk, and increase ROI by investing in great customer experiences. Outside of CX work, and sometimes during CX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave.