The Atlas team is proud to introduce everyone to Staci Satterwhite, our new Chief Customer Officer! I couldn't be more excited to have a leader like Staci joining our ranks, and I hope everyone enjoys this quick interview with her.
Please join me in welcoming @StaciS to Atlas, say hello, and leave a comment with any questions you have for her below!
The interview was conducted over zoom on Wednesday, May 27th. The video has been edited for time and clarity.
Transcription
Hi! I’m Staci Satterwhite, the new Chief Customer Officer here at Khoros. Very excited to be speaking with you here today.
What is the first thing you would like our customers to know about you?
I would actually like to say the first thing I want customers to know is that it's not lost on me that I've just become the chief customer officer for an organization whose tagline is “create customers for life” so that's something that we will need to embody and make sure we are actually doing for our customers.
I will do a lot of listening to figure out what customers think we're doing well, and not well, and then create the initiatives we need as an organization to mobilize around so that we can say that we are indeed an organization that creates customers for life just like we are helping our customers.
How do you plan to bolster Khoros thought leadership?
So I'm not coming to this role thinking that I'm anywhere near a thought leader in this space, because I'm not, personally. Again, I do come from a background in security in this space, so that will always be near and dear to my heart, that whatever digital transformation our customers go through we need to make sure we’re helping them do that securely. And that’s just my most recent background so again near dear to my heart. But for visionary, we have several product owners, we have several GM's across the company that are visionaries in their respected product lines. My role will be to try and get priorities from customers to make sure we can deliver on those.
Do you plan on being an outgoing leader? What will be your approach?
This is for sure the first time I've taken a job in a pandemic so I won't do what I would normally do which is immediately kind of get on a roadshow to go face-to-face meet customers to really listen to what they think we're doing well and not well. I will need to do that virtually this time, obviously. I’d like to think I’m outgoing from a standpoint of making sure that we are in front of customers as much as I think we should be but also listening, that's a really huge important aspect to me, my job predominantly is to listen to what our employees, customers, and shareholders all think we need and then to mobilize the organization around those things.
As a person early in my career, I look to my leaders for inspiration: Did you have a leader who inspired you?
Oh wow, great question. Yeah absolutely, for sure there have been people I’ve worked for that have been inspirational as well as that I learned a lot from at various times in my career. I will tell you somebody I worked with at Microsoft, years ago, was not my direct boss but years ago I worked with somebody at Microsoft who imparted something upon me that I still used today.
She said to me your job needs to do three things for you, those three things are:
- Use your existing skillset to their fullest potential
- Build on those skill sets and create new ones
- Get you out of bed
And so I try to use these three things when working with my team to make sure I understand those things about them so that we can have a great journey together. So that's one thing I learned from somebody that I worked for a few years ago.
Now I’ll also complement that by saying I’ve worked for some bosses that I didn't think were that great either so like all of us who you learn from the circumstances that are good and you also learn from the circumstances that might not be exactly what you were hoping for at that moment.
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Thanks, everyone for your time I'm super excited to be the new Chief customer officer at Khoros. again I'm Staci Satterwhite look forward to meeting you and speaking with you soon.
