Customer Experience Engineers and the Quest for Higher Value Products

With technological innovations and innovations in data processing, CXEs are helping employees and clients live their best digital life

To remain competitive, many companies are leveraging the latest technologies to improve their internal business processes and enhance client experiences. At Charles River we are implementing the use of these technologies to develop digital platforms that simplify internal processes, enhance our customer's experience, and reimagine the way we work together, all in an effort to save time and get life-saving therapies to market faster.

These efforts fit into a larger Agile concept that many companies have adopted, where big projects are sliced into manageable parts to achieve a swifter outcome. Finding ways of analyzing the customer experience in a productive way is becoming increasingly important.

The yardstick for customer experience needs to be significantly more personalized at an individual customer level, harmonized across a wider variety of available channels and made highly responsive based on customer engagements.

Enter Customer Experience Engineers (CXEs), a relatively new discipline that we created to bring together the critical capabilities of customer experience and engineering. CXE integrates elements of process modeling, business activity measurement, value stream mapping, and user-centered design to create a reliable and proactive approach for planning customer experience, and ultimately, customer success.

CXE Patty O’Callaghan, a full-stack engineer at Charles River, is

a tech lead of Charles River’s public-facing website. This includes providing online services to Charles River clients that help them learn about, engage with and ultimately be the place where they begin their journey with Charles River. “My day usually consists of coordinating and understanding the goals and requirements around criver.com, providing technical guidance to my team, and of course writing code.”

CXEs John Allen and Thomas Nall focus on different aspects of the company. Thomas is a Tech Lead for a customer-facing product team, and John Allen is the Associate Tech Lead for a group that provides services which are common between Applications teams in CXE, such as Login and Authentication.

Eureka connected with Patty, John, and Thomas earlier this month to learn more about the life of a CXE and a few other things. ?

What got you interested in this field?

Patty: Ever since I was a child, I have been passionate about computers, coding and technology and I haven't stopped since!

John: Programming was something I started early when I tried tocreate World of Warcraft addons. Most didn’t work but when I got the first working, I was hooked.

Thomas: I was born a nerd. Software engineering was a natural fit.

How does what you do fit into Charles River’s bigger picture of Creating Healthier Lives? (In other words, how does what you do help our scientists and support staff function better?)

Patty: The work that we do ensures that the company's web presence is aligned with its overall goal of creating healthier lives, while promoting its products and services.

John: Having Common Services allows application teams to

concentrate on application specific features without spending time and energy recreating basic functions. I see our team's work as reducing the time it takes for application teams to ship code that customers want and need.

Thomas: Our team’s product provides insight to our customers as they work with us to develop their life-saving therapies.

You have to deal with customers about a topic they might find intimidating. What is your secret?

Patty: My secret would be to approach the conversation with empathy and understanding, and to break down complex information into simple, easy-to-understand terms.

John: Common services 'customers’ are mostly software developers and product owners. While they often have competing requests our fantastic product owner, Alissa, somehow keeps everyone happy. The secret is a great PO and TL to manage expectations.

Thomas: Be calm and never show frustration, even if you are.

Are you for or against semi-colons in Javascript?

Patty: I use semi-colons because I also work with other programming languages where they are mandatory, so I’m very used to them.

John: Against. I am a minimalist by nature and anything that bloats my code is an annoyance to me. There is Automatic Semicolon Injection (ASI) going on in the background at some stage anyway.

Thomas: Very much against. They serve no purpose, only to steal the beauty of the code.

What action figure best suits your personality (be honest!)?

Patty: Elastigirl from The Incredibles - she has strength, durability, and agility because of her elasticity powers. Her weakness is the cold air and that is my weakness as well, because I live in Scotland, and I miss the sun and the Caribbean climate of my hometown!

John: Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I am very relaxed and like to have the craic as we Irish say.

Thomas: Martian Manhunter a shapeshifter who tries to be the voice of reason

What is making you laugh lately?

Patty: My husband's "dad jokes" - although for some weird reason my kids don't laugh at them.

John: My little dog Frank cracks me up daily. Frequently photobombs me during meetings.

Thomas: Gym fails

If your life was a hashtag what would it be?

Patty: #LetsDoThis

John: #ItWorksOnMyMachine

Thomas: #whynot