70 - How to Build a Customer-Centric Organisation - Kia Puhm

Women in Customer Success Podcast

In this episode, I’m talking to Kia Puhm, Founder and CEO of DesiredPath, a CX solution that helps companies be customer-centric to achieve smarter, faster revenue growth.
Fun facts about Kia:

• Kia speaks 3 languages well, and 2 passively.
• She is an Extroverted Introvert
• Kia used to be an elite world-class athlete in swimming! 🏊‍♀️

Career Journey:
Kia has 28 years of experience in the software industry, has spent the last 8 years consulting and is now the founder and CEO of Desired Path - a consultancy focused on driving accelerated revenue growth through customer-centric design principles. Kia started her career in Computer Engineering and learned how to code early on. She moved her problem-solving skills over to the business and management side as she preferred to work with people and have that human interaction.
Kia’s career in software started in a small start-up in Switzerland, where she spent a lot of time building up all the different elements of the business. She became the VP of Customer Satisfaction where her job was to figure out how to make the customers successful and determine their objectives as human beings trying to achieve their career goals. If we make them successful and the companies they work at successful, there's no reason they're going to leave. After working with companies like Eloqua and Oracle, and becoming a CCO at a few companies, Kia felt it was time to share her knowledge and move into consulting.
Desired Path
Kia’s whole approach, the reason she named the company Desired Path, is that she helps companies align to the patterns of their most successful customers. They start by journey mapping and understanding holistically what their customers are doing and how they use the products and services. And then they reverse engineer what a company should be doing to support that. She also believes in a triple win – Customer, Company, and Employees and they all need to be in alignment for them all to win and succeed.
Customer-Centric Practices:
Kia firmly believes that you need to journey map and really understand your customer success. Don’t copy other best practices and tell your customer to follow this process. Find out what works for them and align your practices so that it’s meaningful.
Questions to help you understand how customer-centric are your organisation's practices:
- What is driving success for your customers?
- What outside of the product and service is meaningful so that the

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