Chapter 8 Customer Experience and Success: Both Science and Art By Melinda Gonzalez Melinda spent 10 years at Salesforce, helping the company grow from 500 employees to upward of 15,000 employees when she left. Just as the other authors echoed, no academic MBA could compare to the real-life experience of being at Salesforce in the early years. As a member of the corporate customer success team in 2004, she was part of the pioneering collective that defined and established the customer success function for the industry as a whole. In her latter years, Melinda worked in the product organization, establishing and then running a customer advocacy function that embedded the voice of the customer into the product roadmap, which ultimately led to launching a companywide net promoter system that spanned product, sales, and post-sales functions. Managing this program across a company of 15,000 people, and many disparate functions that touch the customer, was a crash course in the importance of having a cohesive customer experience. Melinda makes the case for starting early in your startup journey to define your customer values, understanding your customer journey, and being ruthlessly focused on customer success metrics. To say that I am passionate about customer experience would be an understatement. My time at Salesforce in large part made me that way. Why? Because I experienced firsthand that being customer-centric doesn’t have to be just lip service. When done right, it can be a strong brand differentiator with tangible retention and revenue impacts. I now have a customer experience consulting practice dedicated to helping startups and midsize companies tackle the challenge of defining what great customer experience looks like for them.