Giving Good: Being Your Own Cheerleader

No one cares more about your own career than you.

It can be difficult to garner support beyond your immediate sphere of influence (e.g., going beyond yourself and first degree connections), without being able to give people a reason to be a supporter.

While I’ve built plenty of direct relationships, I’ve only been able to go so far with my first degree connections. Building out my second and third degree connections by having solid first degree recommendations has helped me tremendously, but what does it take to give people a reason to believe in you?

The following outlines my impact as a Senior Customer Experience Leader at Intuit in 2024. In addition to sharing this with my 1st, 2nd, 3rd+ networks to illustrate my own skills and experience, I’m hoping it’s useful to you as an example of how to communicate your own impact.

James has established himself as a valuable member of the CXM team by applying his subject matter expertise across multiple QuickBooks products (Payments, Banking, Accounting, Time, Workforce, Payroll) to deliver on Intuit’s mission of Powering Prosperity Around the World.

Over the last ~2 years he’s operated at a senior level through his contributions managing three Payments pillars (Activate, Invoice, Manage), mentoring teammates, identifying customer & business opportunities, showing improvement after coaching, and leading Employer/Administrator experiences in QuickBooks Time.

Prior to joining Intuit, James served enterprise clients at advertising technology companies in client services, analyst, product manager, and solution engineer roles. Applying learnings from each of these roles into his day to day has set him apart from his peers, and aligns to his character as a customer obsessed CXM professional.

Having recently joined a new team, James has proactively built relationships at leadership & IC levels with Product, Engineering, and Design teams across QB Time, Workforce Mobile, and QB Payroll. He has also utilized his genuine curiosity along with a day one mindset when evaluating customer, expert, and internal team experiences. He’s identified and taken action on increasing the visibility of workforce contacts with the IVA team, measuring contact volume by employer or employee personas with the CX Analytics team, and is currently advocating for the creation of a digital assistant in the Workforce mobile app with Digital Experiences and Product teams.

Aligning contributions to CXM craft skills, James has proven to have worked at a senior level in the following ways…

Understanding Customer Needs

Leading Follow Me Home/In Depth Interviews with customers and experts, synthesizing insights, and presenting to leadership & cross functional partners to understand issues that customers were facing and where agents needed help to better serve their customers. Outcomes included listening lab presentations with recommendations and friction briefs to help cross functional partners develop solutions to both new and long standing issues.
Authored and presented a business idea on stage for a Better Together Shark Tank held by the Money Executive Leadership Team. Through customer interviews, industry analysis, and quantitative research, James showed how people starting their journey as a business owner were lonely, lacked confidence, and didn’t trust that they were making the right choices, and how QuickBooks could position itself as a partner in their journey.

Data Backed Storytelling

James has continued to uplevel the quality of insights & delivering clear recommendations. (I included a direct link to an executive level presentation that went through several iterations with CXM leaders using data from multiple survey, feedback, and Customer Success data sources.)
Enabling Product teams to get closer to customers by holding sessions to train them on how to use Qualtrics and our CS platforms to gather KPIs and listen to support calls. (I included a video of me training Product Managers and Engineers to use CS tools to query call recordings and transcripts.)

Experience Creation & Advocacy

Educating partners in Digital Assistant and IVA to understand the specific challenges faced by Employers and Employees that used QuickBooks Time and the Workforce Mobile App. Outcomes include…
- Driving and contributing to the update of a dozen QuickBooks Time conversations in the QBO Digital Assistant
- Educating the IVA team to understand persona challenges, driving the update to recognize utterances based on persona & intent.
Driving new API integrations in the QuickBooks Online Digital Assistant to enable personalized Payments statuses (available globally)
Driving the incorporation of ML powered recommendations in the QBO Digital Assistant.

Strategic Thinking

James has established key areas for improvement, prioritizing initiatives by impact & complexity, and built durable and scalable solutions that will help QuickBooks Time as it continues to evolve. (I created a completely new project in Jira for the first time with initiatives, epics, stories, and tasks across the QuickBooks Time customer experience.)
James built an end-to-end customer outreach blueprint (value proposition, team execution, performance monitoring) to reanimate dormant QuickBooks Payments customers and recapture lost share of charge volume resulting in statistically significant success and projected $x mm annualized incremental revenue based on transaction fees. (Included supporting data and slides with full end to end details)

Operational Optimization

James has effectively navigated & partnered with numerous product, engineering, design, and marketing teams, along with CS teams to set customers up for success when using QuickBooks products. In addition to external facing initiatives, James has also elevated the quality of outreach by documenting processes used by stakeholders to better serve customers

You may be asked to share more about specific projects. Consider preparing 2-3 examples of your work using the following components…

Here’s an example of what this looked like for one of my favorite initiatives…

Title

Winning Back Dormant QuickBooks Payments Customers

Objective

SMBs have multiple payment processors that they use to accept payments from their customers. The share of charge volume for these can shift based on the fees that are charged based on the type of charge (e.g., credit cards, ACH). This program identified existing dormant customers and proactively reached out to them to learn more about why they stopped using QuickBooks Payments.

Customer Impact

We were able to have customers start processing payments with QuickBooks again after learning why they stopped in the first place, reviewing their fee structure, and reiterating the value of the service.

Employee Impact

The outbound campaign helped us re-establish a connection with some of our best customers. We selected agents that could build rapport and think creatively on what it would take to have them come back. I also created a questionnaire in Google Forms that made it easy to review reasons for dormancy and call notes at scale.

Business Impact

After multiple phases of the campaign using different outreach methods (e.g., cold call, personalized in product message), we observed a statistically significant result when comparing test and control groups, resulting in an estimated incremental revenue opportunity of $x mm. This framework continues to be iterated on to reanimate dormant QuickBooks Payments customers.

How

I led the Experience Design, Customer Targeting, Expert Training, Assisted Experience, and Data Collection across multiple phases of this CX led program. Having partnered across Assisted Care, Marketing, Analytics, Account Setup and Maintenance, and Payments teams, I designed an end to end experience to increase the chances of success to win back existing QuickBooks Payments customers that had stopped using our payments processing.

By understanding rate review requirements and limitations, I created an outbound campaign, coached experts that made outbound calls, and analyzed data after each phase to increase the likelihood of reanimation.

Work Samples

(Include direct links to supporting data, slides, videos, etc. that make it easy for the audience to connect you to the work)

References

(Throughout any project you should identify peers and leaders that would be advocates of your contribution to the initiative)

Here’s how I brought everything together to not just share more about where I’ve been and what I’ve done, but where I’m headed.

Throughout my 5 year tenure I’ve progressively been trusted with more product & team responsibilities.

From a product perspective…

Starting at Intuit, I managed CXM responsibilities for software (QBDT POSV19) and hardware (QuickBooks Card Reader) launches
Later, I defined the Care Readiness strategy and VOC collection & reporting for the first launch of the QuickBooks Money mobile app, which are still relied on today by CXM & cross functional partners
Accelerating on past experiences, I led the Personalization & Integrated Experience initiative that continues to deliver robust digital assistant conversations that provide relevant & customer specific answers to common Payments related questions such as “where’s my money?”
In FY23, I managed 3 of 5 Payments Pillars across Activate, Manage, and Invoice to drive acquisition of new Payments customers, address top friction points from existing customers, and led CXM initiatives across the multi-year global invoicing migration change management journey.

From a team perspective…

Elevating the shared knowledge of Customer Experience best practices by completing & advocating for the executive education program that is now offered by UC Santa Barbara for all Intuit employees
Coaching teammates 1:1 to develop data backed story telling, experience creation, and professional development skills
Coaching other CXM teams on how I’ve successfully partnered with my stakeholders to help them be more efficient & effective in addition to sharing templates and documentation that aided in my success
Developing strong relationships across cross-functional teams in Product, Engineering, Design, Customer Success, GTM, Research, and more by bringing my whole self to both professional and personal interactions.

Now leading CXM for QuickBooks Time, I am fully utilizing the entirety of my professional experience to better partner & equip stakeholders with what they need to prioritize scalable impacts for our customers, in addition to taking the next step in my career at Intuit.

Lastly, having organized initiatives, epics, and stories, similar to how our Product, Engineering, Design, and Customer Success stakeholders do, we are better positioned to plan, prioritize, and execute on the most important focus areas like never before. Most notably, driving the improvements to support across Digital Assistant and IVA systems that would yield durable multi-million dollar savings for millions of QuickBooks Time and Workforce users across Employer & Employees personas in web and mobile app environments.