Everyone Was a Customer. We Just Didn't Know It Yet.

This story starts early. Before I ever led a CX team, before I had a real framework for any of this, when I was still figuring out what I was even good at.

I was tasked alongside a colleague with overhauling field service operations for a large national brand. We were rolling out Salesforce and a combination of other tools to coordinate everything: manufacturing, shipping, receiving, procurement, dispatching, installation, repair. The goal was to get hundreds of field technicians using software so we could actually track what was happening, find the inefficiencies, and get customers taken care of faster.

It was a massive project. Lots of stakeholders. Lots of opinions.

Sales leadership had thoughts. Department managers had thoughts. Senior leadership had very loud thoughts. Everyone had a vested interest in how the system worked and everyone wanted their priorities reflected in how it was built.

I was young. I thought my job was to listen to everyone and incorporate all of it. So that's what I did.

We built a system that made a lot of important people feel heard. And when we rolled it out to the actual field technicians, it landed with a thud.

The Mistake I Didn't Know I Was Making

We had spent months gathering input from managers and leadership, people who had opinions about how the work should happen but weren't actually doing it. The people who would be out in the field with a phone in their hand, trying to log information quickly between jobs, barely got a seat at the table.

The system we built reflected the mental model of people in conference rooms, not people doing the actual work. And the field guys knew it immediately.

They weren't wrong. We had built something that collected the information leadership wanted without nearly enough thought about whether collecting it was even realistic given how those technicians actually worked. The UX was an afterthought. The workflow didn't match reality. Adoption was a disaster.

The Lesson That Changed How I Think About Everything

What we eventually figured out, after going back and doing the work we should have done first, was pretty simple: anyone who uses the product is the customer.

Not just the end customer. Not just the person paying the invoice. The internal user, the technician, the employee who has to open the app a hundred times a day, they are your customer too. And if you don't treat them that way you will get exactly the adoption rates you deserve.

The systems that people actually use are the ones that make their job easier, not harder. The information you want to capture only gets captured if entering it benefits the person entering it. That seems obvious in hindsight (It was not obvious to me at 22).

We eventually rebuilt with the field team at the center of every decision. Simpler flows, fewer required fields, a UX that reflected how work actually happened. Adoption went up. Data quality went up. The whole thing started working the way it was supposed to.

Why I Still Think About This

That project is why I care so much about the internal user experience when I'm building CS operations. Every time I implement a new tool or process I ask who actually has to use this and what does their day look like. Not just what does leadership want to track (although that is important too).

It's also what pulled me toward customer experience as a discipline in the first place. The psychology of why people use or don't use a given tool, why they adopt or resist, why the best designed system in the world fails if the person holding it doesn't trust it, that stuff became genuinely fascinating to me.

The field technicians who ignored version one of that project were not lazy or resistant to change. They were telling us something we weren't ready to hear yet.

Eventually we listened. That's the part I try to do faster now.