Welcome To The Conversation

Welcome to the blog of Callahan Consults! We’re thrilled to have you here, and looking forward to learn how we might be able to help. The blog is meant to encourage a conversation about Customer Experience, however uncomfortable some of that conversation might be. I'm not here to sell; I'm here to talk.

Although many consider Customer Experience as a discipline to have begun as early as the 1980s and '90s, I'd pin the start of the modern Customer Experience discipline in the 2000s. Forrester's Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning began to research, and write about, cross-functional disciplines coming together to solve problems with the Customer Experience, which culminated in their  seminal book Outside In, we started our own practice at Microsoft in 2006 with the brilliant Hotmail Team (jokes aside about its reputation for spam, the leadership of Hotmail were among the most brilliant, curious and capable engineers I'd ever met).

Amazon began building out Customer Experience in 2010, and in 2011, I was hired as the first digital customer experience manager in Amazon history, and moved to Hulu as that streaming service was evolving away from its start-up roots to become a bona fide entertainment juggernaut.

I gave up on the Customer Experience community in 2013, when it became clear the philosophical underpinnings of CX were being undermined by both greed and indifference. It wasn't until I gave a somewhat radical speech at TaskUs's east coast Customer Experience conference in New York in 2018 (the presentation name? "Burning NPS To The Ground") that I felt free to return to my CX roots and speak about what I had learned and was learning.

Now, having led successful transformations at Amazon, Hulu, Bulletproof and, finally, my foray into the underground at Orbit, I feel more bold than ever, and more excited to help lead a Customer Experience revolution. Where we reflect on what it means to be "in CX", which is often to speak the quiet parts out loud. 

I hope you'll join me in this conversation - contrary opinions and disagreement wildly encouraged as long as they're shared with a sense of respect and community. After all, it was me wanting to burn NPS to the ground that got all this started.

mc