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By age 10, Veronika Luxemburg’s career in customer experience was already in full swing. Her mother, an early adopter with her own Swedish tech company, expected Veronika to interact with customers at the corporate office after school.

Amazingly, the curious youngster already had years of product testing under her belt, providing feedback to her mother on emerging technologies such as CRT beta-touchscreens with 3-D capabilities since she was 6. Decades later, evolved versions of such technology are in the hands of customers worldwide.

“Customers were always the focus—actually, not just customers, but humans and human interactions,” says Veronika. After becoming a practical flight technician and student of civil engineering, Veronika switched from “the most boring thing I’ve ever done in my life” to studying pedagogics, adding degrees in economics and business management during a six-year stint as a high school math teacher.

While teaching remained a passion, Veronika left for her first corporate—and customer experience—job, a project manager position at Balfour Beatty Rail that required her to literally keep the trains running safely and on time throughout Sweden.

Quality control was critical, and she credits her foundation in teaching and the desire to help people maximize their talents with her successful career crossover into CX. As her prowess grew, so did her opportunities within the CX and quality management professions.

She soon advanced to a business manager job with core oversight of all commercially owned railways in Sweden, “I  didn’t know anything about running a business area, but … you can learn anything, so I thought, ‘Why not?,’” says      Veronika, whose “really great” results led her next to Bombarier to take on product introduction management and        production. While responsible for Delhi Metro deliverance and Green Cargo, she also found herself steadily tapped      to train others in leadership, mentoring, and more. Eventually, such consulting—along with her strong ties to quality-- became part of her personal brand.

  Discovering the intersection between Quality and CX

When ABB Robotics offered her an interim consultancy to help envision and later execute a “future business map,”despite knowing nothing about robots, Veronika agreed simply because she enjoyed management. There was plenty of that—as global customer support manager with advanced support, she had to resolve the toughest “level- three” problems to keep customers happy in 50-plus countries and in industries as diverse as automotive and technology.

No customer was “typical.” However, each had a central need for speed, efficiency, and high product performance—all of which tied back to quality management. From her macro view, Veronika noticed that, although tech engineers love their products, they needed to shift from traditional product support into more complex customer support to ensure future success.

Her resulting customer-centric initiative, Focused Customer Support, introduced new ways of working to workers put together in a room to crack open silos created by strict allegiance to processes. “There was an urgent need for a foundational definition around who the customer was,” Veronika explains. “I started with, ‘To be able to do your job well, what do you need from the person who sends you the [product] problem? What are they feeling, and what are their needs?’ You had to take it in steps [when you start talking about feelings to engineers and technicians], because that was not really the mindset you're getting” from the task-focused people sitting at computers.  

She remembers well the first time she talked about customer empathy and how that works. “It was a bit awkward, but not for me--for the audience,” she says, laughing. “But when they started to understand how it all connects, suddenly [customer empathy] wasn't nothing, and we all improved.”

Veronika continued to climb when asked to co-develop a new global resolution process by becoming a global customer excellence manager for quality and operations. She again put workers together to “change people's perception of what we were doing” via a similar but rebranded process and program she called “CQX,” or Customer Quality Experience. “At that time, CX “wasn’t ‘in’ yet, so the acronym was just being used as a buzzword on LinkedIn,” she notes. Eighteen months later, the company’s business model of 80% process and 20% culture had reversed.   

Her prediction for CX in this new decade is as expansionary as her career: “The next era is going to be CX, and there's going to be a version one, version two, three, and four, and that's going to stay forever…. It's the one thing that connects everything together in one place, under one umbrella. My ambition is to bring the quality part to connect with that, because I absolutely do not believe you can do CX without quality.”

Embracing the Community

Veronika acknowledges that her pioneering work has been lonely at times—until she discovered CXPA. Thrilled to find a community equally passionate about CX, Veronika became an active member, even earning her status as a Certified Customer Experience Professional in 2018.  

“I found myself thinking, ‘I've been doing all of these things my whole life, and there's actually a structure around it--there's other people like me!” she says.

She urges CX newbies to “join the community! … It's amazing when you find people who have the same heart and fire for what you want…. Don't go save the world. Find our community first, because there are people who have battle scars, and we want to help you.”

Veronika now spreads her ideas about CQX through her independent consultancy of the same name. She feels hopeful about the future of the profession.

“This might sound a little corny, but I do believe CX is the antidote to this craziness of money, money, money,” says Veronika. “It's the only thing that's going to truly change the world to make it become more empathetic and [sustainable.]”