Delighting the Enthusiast: Kristine Chin

Kristine Chin, VP of Customer Experience at Twilio, talks about how understanding “Enthusiast” customers empowered her to build great experiences. She discusses her education in political economy, with stories of how systems thinking helped her develop her problem-solving approach. She shares what she learned from losing her home in the Oakland Firestorm and how a semester in Slovenia helped her better understand herself and her career interests. She talks about her leadership roles at eBay, Ten-X, and Twilio.

Kristine shares her perspective on what it means to be customer obsessed and about collaborating with customers to build a strong marketplace. She shares her philosophy of being “delightfully persistent” and creating a customer-first culture. She shares key things she learned about setting up a successful customer experience program.

How do you attract customers to a new platform or marketplace? How do you set up a new customer experience program? How do you influence change in a company? How do you create back-office changes to support a strong customer experience?

Guest Bio:
Kristine joined Twilio in 2018 as Vice President, Global Customer Experience. She is responsible for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience. This includes spearheading a company-wide effort to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and raise awareness of their needs.

Kristine previously spent 3 years at Ten-X (formerly Auction.com) as SVP, Customer Experience and 12 years at eBay, where she ultimately served as general manager of the $4B eBay Motors category and ultimately lead eBay’s North American Partner Strategy & Operations. She holds a patent for features to display inventory to the right buyer – and has four additional patents pending related to matching sellers and products with interested buyers.

Kristine’s experience also includes work with enterprise, SMB and consumer customers. She began her career in strategy consulting to the telecommunications industry. She holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and a Harvard MBA.

linkedin.com/in/kchin/

Building Blocks:
A CX leader's most important role is to help other teams discover the customer. Who are they? What are their behaviors, needs, attitudes? Where are they satisfied, and where are they stuck? The only way you can deliver that consistent end-to-end experience, the one you draw up on that journey map as an ideal state - the only way you can execute it is to have teams across the company locked in on the customer, and then collaborating, to take action - to either design NEW experiences or address parts of the experience that need to be fixed.

Think about what opportunities you have in your role to collaborate better across teams to give your customers a better experience. Maybe you're a marketer looking at customer feedback on the product all day long, but you don't know that much about your company's next feature release or product roadmap, and spending more time with the product team could help out. Or maybe you're on the engineering team and you've got a backlog that seems exciting, but you think you could build even better if you knew the emotions and associations that customers have with your current product. Whatever it is, write down ONE OTHER TEAM, and the names of TWO SPECIFIC PEOPLE, whom you can reach out to in the next week to start to start to do some silo spanning, and get to better outcomes for your customer.

Helpful Links:
“ROI of Customer Experience 2020” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/roi-of-customer-experience-2020/
“Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/creating-and-sustaining-a-customer-centric-culture/
“Where Net Promoter Score Goes Wrong” by Christina Stahlkopf; Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-net-promoter-score-goes-wrong