From Connectivity to Connection: My journey into User and Customer Experience

Introduction

It happened during my customer center visit during the early 2010s somewhere in the APAC region while working for a Fortune 15 Telecom company. I realized the shortcomings of our approach to user experience. Despite pride in delivering rapid automated services/systems I witnessed (a) decades of neglect in integrating user experience (b) users navigation fragmented systems for simple tasks and ( c) misplaced reliance on low-cost regions to sustain growth. Customers suffered from delays, service issues and dissatisfied support staff burdened by subpar tools.

Little did I know that it was just the beginning of my journey into the world of user-experience! A seemingly simple problem that would draw snarky remarks from peers saying ‘I will ask my wife to pick the wall colors!’.

My lessons from Telecom

The U.S. telecom industry is one of the most fiercely competitive landscapes, where success is dictated by speed to market, reliability, and exceptional customer service. In a world driven by hyperconnectivity, customers demand near-perfect uptime of 99.999%, translating to a mere 5.26 minutes of allowable downtime per year. Moments of peak traffic, such as Mother’s Day, stress-test networks, requiring flawless handling of massive user volumes without service degradation.

To meet these ever-increasing expectations, telecom providers must adopt a holistic approach that ensures:

(a) Effortless, intuitive customer interactions – Simplified self-service options and seamless digital experiences that empower users while reducing friction in service requests.

(b) Intelligent automation and exception handling – AI-driven and rule-based automation to preemptively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues swiftly, minimizing human intervention and improving response times.

(c) Seamlessly integrated, user-centric design – Thoughtfully crafted service delivery platforms that unify backend operations, eliminate silos, and create a frictionless experience for both customers and service teams, leading to faster problem resolution and higher satisfaction.

In an industry where milliseconds matter, delivering on these pillars is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity for survival and long-term growth.

Why user experience matters more than ever

I discovered fragmented user experience approaches causing delays and customer frustration. Realizing the problem’s scale, I assembled a team to devise solutions, studying innovative companies like PayPal, Airbnb, and Apple. They succeeded by prioritizing customer and user experience, unlike us, where UX design was siloed, leading to inefficiency, slow change, and costly onboarding. We also studied how Domino’s integrated ordering experience to track all the way to the delivery of a pizza to the customer’s doorstep. A unified UX practice was sorely needed to transform our approach.

Merging Technology with Empathy

My experience in service delivery and automation gave me unique insights into aligning customer needs with workforce capabilities. The design thinking approach gave me the opportunity to design the softwares with end-users’ perspective. While creative thinking and iterative design are crucial to achieve optimal user experience, the tools like AI-based sentiment analysis that help understanding how customers feel about products or services and clickstream analytics help with optimization of user-experience and various AI tools that can rapidly translate a UI design into deployable code.

As I write this in 2025, though AI is all pervasive, I firmly believe a human connection enhanced by AI is the future of experience design.

Lessons Learned and Actionable Insights

I have seen how a UX designed by code-developer can deteriorate the experience with cognitive overload and how a half-hearted effort create sub-optimal user experience; I also overcame the situation where the UI delivery framework can alienate the development teams and result into disengagement that can bring the initiatives to a grinding halt.

Here are some key takeaways from transforming user and customer experience:

Establish a UX Practice: A dedicated, autonomous team to understand end-users and design cohesive experiences.
Secure Management Buy-In: Iterative design needs leadership support to succeed.
Adopt a Scalable Framework: Enable distributed delivery with centralized control.

Finally, a mobile-first strategy remains critical as technology evolves.

Conclusion

Early in my career, my manager introduced me to John Guaspari’s I Know It When I See It, emphasizing that quality is defined by the customer, not the producer. This became central to my approach to user experience.

Businesses today must go beyond products and services to offer seamless, meaningful interactions. By embracing this shift, loyalty transforms into advocacy, and satisfaction drives growth. Let’s craft exceptional experiences that set your business apart.