Tangoe’s SVP of Customer Experience, Mark Smith, explains why the best solutions are those that are designed to consistently create a frictionless customer experience.
For those that haven’t already met you, can you tell us a little about yourself?
I joined Tangoe in April 2021 as the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience, and have since led and supported our service excellence, customer success, issue resolution, deployment and implementation, and consulting teams. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about the customer experience, and I’ve spent nearly a decade helping companies rethink the way they engage, support, and delight their customers across the entire B2B lifecycle. My professional journey spans the full gamut of business functions, including senior roles in finance, business development, operations, consulting, customer success, and customer experience at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), General Electric Capital, and Trimble.
I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota and have six children—three boys and three girls; two are still at home. I enjoy camping, boating, woodworking, and beekeeping.
How do Tangoe’s products influence the employee experience?
Tangoe’s solutions empower our customers’ employees to work from anywhere and be productive—on the road, on vacation, at home, or in the office. They allow our customers to focus on their core business and benefit from the solutions and savings that we provide. We combine technology, expertise, and services to build solutions that make it easy for our customers to better meet the needs of their employees and customers.
This year, we’ve focused on our mobile user experience to make it even easier for our customer’s employees to obtain and use the tools that they need to be productive, whether that’s a cell phone, tablet, hotspot, or any other connected device. Our new user interface is designed to be intuitive and simple. It makes it easy for our customers—and their employees— to see the status of their mobile devices, understand what needs to be done, order or upgrade their device, access the information they need relative to the device, and get help they need, the moment they need it. All these improvements, in turn, allow our customers employees to focus on what they do best: Empower their own customers.
“Our new user interface is designed to be intuitive and simple. It makes easy both our customers and their employees to see the status of their mobile devices, understand what needs to be done, order or upgrade their device, access the information they need relative to the device, and get help when they need it.“
Mark Smith, SVP of Customer Experience at Tangoe
Give us a peek behind the customer experience curtain. What has your team focused on recently?
For the past few months, we have focused on defining the experience we want to provide to our customers. We’ve established user groups for all our products as well as a Customer Advisory Board. These groups are helping us zero in on what’s working, what’s not, and give us an opportunity to share what we’re doing from a roadmap perspective… we can validate our priorities with a panel of customer experts allows to ensure our strategy and solutions address our their current and future needs.
We have also been focused on making it easier for our employees to serve our customers. This means developing tools, dashboards, and processes that enable them to see what is happening and where we need to proactively take action or address issues. We aren’t done yet, but we have made a lot of progress. We are working collaboratively across all our functions to identify areas where we can improve the customer experience.
What is your mission going into 2022?
Create an elevated, consistent experience for all Tangoe customers. My role has been to help define what the customer experience should be and then make it happen! We are measuring and understanding how we’re performing against that standard across all our functions and making the changes we need to make to bring those two things into alignment. We’ve already made some great progress, and we plan to accomplish even more next year.