Tabitha Dunn
Chief Customer Officer
Ericsson
Sweden
As chief customer officer for Ericsson, Tabitha Dunn is midway through a three year initiative with the Swedish telecoms giant, building a customer experience programme from the ground up.
Tabitha is one of the founding members of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and has a wealth of experience in launching and running CX programmes with other large-scale organisations including Philips, Citrix, Concur, and SAP.
With Ericsson, the objectives have been clear – build a best practice CX programme, hire a CX team to support the strategy, and align senior leaders at the organisation with the roadmap for achieving a “desired future state of CX”.
This final point was the first initiative Tabitha was tasked with. Starting with qualitative research with customers and employees, as well as external research on how other companies successfully undertook similar transformations, Tabitha and her team were able to pull together design principles that crafted a clear picture of Ericsson’s desired future state of CX and aligned it to the company’s purpose, vision, values, and story.
In the process, she was also able to hire three new CX leaders to her team, covering experience design, insights, and operations.
Currently in the second year of the three year programme, journey design has been a key principle as the CX team work towards its customer experience goals. As well as partnering with a digital transformation organisation to ensure delivery on operational and customer improvements, Tabitha and co have also begun their pilot for testing and scaling their initial CX improvements.
The impact of the programme is already being felt across the company. With customers it is being felt in the methods Ericsson now uses for customer feedback – removing focus on scores such as NPS and CSAT, and instead using feedback to identify what matters most to customers and then measuring improvements at that level. Ericsson’s feedback strategy now assures customers that every quantitative question they are asked “serves a specific purpose and gets used”, and then they ask different questions once an improvement is delivered.
Ultimately, what I love most about this role and why I continue to tackle these complex challenges is because I have the opportunity to help others, make a difference, and I am always learning and growing. Even when driving effective CX change is at it’s most frustrating, I always find joy in coaching my team, sharing lessons learned, and reminding myself that the best part of change is people - keeping the human at the heart of all that I have the opportunity to do.
