I don’t know if it’s the late nights of working, the steady flow of trance music, or the working out, but my brain recently unlocked a vivid flashback and thought it special enough to share.

It was one of my final trips to New York with MediaMath in January 2019. It was dark, cold, and I was exhausted after a long day. My favorite place to stay was The Fredrick on the corner of Broadway & Chambers. A few blocks north was The Odeon. It’s red neon sign was a beacon from the door of my hotel and illuminated my weary soles. It was as if my brain went on autopilot for those few blocks and I quickly found myself with an exquisite array of ricotta stuffed zucchini flowers on a warm plate with a dirty martini with three plump olives. In preparation of the meal that I was about to enjoy I could feel my pupils dilate, my olfactory nerves firing, my salivary glands…salivating. The food and drink were placed in front of me, and the bartender asked…

“Do you have everything you need?”

I think about this question a lot these days. The world looks a lot different now than it did those years ago, and I’d venture to say it’ll look different two years from now. The bartender was just making sure I was all set with my meal, but I can’t shake asking myself this question about damn near every aspect of my life.

What strikes me most about this question is how eerily it relates to what I do for a living now. Being a Customer Experience Specialist at the largest provider of Accounting and Payments services for small & medium sized businesses in the world gives me the opportunity to ask this question multiple times on a daily basis. Working with customers to understand how they use our products and what feedback they have leads to the analysis & insight building that I’ve made a hallmark of each and every one of my roles in my professional career. The following steps to present, prioritize, document, collaborate, develop, QA, and deploy (I’m sure I’m missing some steps in there) have been such an incredible part of my role over the past year and a half.

I could have easily just shrugged off the question that was asked of me and moved on with my dinner, but here I am, years later writing about it and realizing that it’ll define the next few years, and potentially the rest of my career, as a CX professional. It’s incredible what can happen if you take a moment and listen.