How to Be an Entrepreneur: 5 Things I Learned in 5 Months as an Entrepreneur
The life of an entrepreneur is different every day, but the one thing that remains the same is that we are always learning. These are my lessons in how to be an entrepreneur that I have learned in the last five months of my entrepreneur life. I share these top five lessons on how to be an entrepreneur today, to help fledgling and veteran entrepreneurs, and everyone who works with them as clients, partners of colleagues.
Building a Website is VERY Different from Publishing a Blog
Before I incorporated, I had written a blog for a year and a half. I also had built the web pages of the blog site, with the help of WordPress online chat support (they are very good by the way).
With all of this experience, I felt confident that I knew what I was doing. So, I assumed it would be easy and fast to build a new website from scratch. As I understood it, all I needed to do was to copy the old content and structure to the new environment and my site would be done.
That was the biggest mistake I made.
Entrepreneurs Need to Commit Real Time and Resources to Social Media and SEO
You either need to do social media well or not at all. It still amazes me how much time and energy is necessary to maintain meaningful presence online.
Maintaining consistent online presence is a daily job. And it is a real job. You cannot hand it off to someone who does not understand your field or your brand. And the people who understand both are expensive (and worth it!).
So get ready to learn all the supporting websites to do this well. We use Canva, SEMRush, and a few tags/title optimizer sites. It really does not matter what platforms you choose, as long as you do it well and consistently.
Network, Network, Network
Just when I thought I had networked enough in Grad School and as an executive at an airline, I discovered a new frontier. I literally try to meet ten new people a week. It may sound like a lot. And it is.
I run around the city all the time. I joined the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Chief, and NY City Building Congress. And I may join more organizations to meet even more people in 2020. I also tell everyone, everything. Even if conversations are only on the surface, or an event, forum, or a meeting is not perfect match on paper, I go. I collect people, business cards (they are still necessary), and listen to stories. On top of this, I also keep in touch and reignite old connections and friendships from school, previous jobs, and neighborhoods. I. Am. Everywhere.
Quickbooks is an Important Part-Time Job
Do not underestimate the importance of keeping your financials in check. Nobody says you need to reconcile to zero. But you must know roughly how much money you are spending, what your burn rate is, and how you are paying your rent for the next three months. Don’t go to four. It gets stressful! 🙂
As long as you have three months, you are good.
Branding Works
It took us three months to build our brand. At the time it felt like forever. But it gave us clarity and confidence to present ourselves to the world.
Do not try to save money on this. Find a good individual or company and do it right. It is your foundation and identity. Good branding gives you ROI many times over. It also saves you time in the future when you are busier and have less quiet time to be introspective. This is the luxury of the early stages. Take advantage of it.
The Customer Service Agent is Dead
When we outlined our CX trends for 2026, we talked about how autonomous service is replacing traditional customer service. Yes, our claim that the CSA (customer service agent) role is…
Where Should CX Sit at the Table?
Before we begin talking about where CX should sit in the organization, I want to clarify one thing. Customer Experience is not a single person.
Why Bt2B Businesses Must Think Like B2C in the Next Decade
B2B vs B2B thinking makes a real difference when it comes to customer experience. According to Gartner at least 80% of B2B buyers now expect the same buying experience as…
From Pain Points to Magical Moments: Transform the Customer Experience
Argyle Journal interviewed Liliana Petrova about emerging self service technology and meeting and exceeding customer expectations in airports. One such way, as Liliana explains, is to create magical customer experience…
How To Define Your Purpose And Have Unique Culture
If you Google the word “purpose” you get the definition “the reason for which something exists.” This is a challenge if you think about it in the context of organizational…
Keep The Customer Focus in 2018
In her latest post for JetBlue’s Into the Blue blog series on customer experience design, Liliana Petrova talks customer experience innovation. She explores how to combine innovation and human behavior…
It’s Time to Meet The Petrova Experience!
Today marks one of the big milestones in my life. This is the day I am officially choosing to live my dream. We are launching The Petrova Experience, a customer…
CX Skills Builder: How to articulate your CX Value and secure your budget
Two weeks ago we urged you to find CX problems and fix them instead of diagnosing and mapping them. That is
What is Missing in Customer Experience Today?
Customer Experience is failing. According to Forrester, US Consumer Perceptions of CX quality are at an historic low. Post-COVID the quality of customer experience eroded every year across the three…
WeWork Does Customer Experience Right with a Wow Moment
Used at the right time and place along the customer’s journey, the Wow Moment is an excellent retention technique. When a brand creates personal, relevant experience at exactly the right time, it can build a lifelong, loyal customer relationship.
The Risk No Insurer Prices: Why Customer Experience is Costing Insurance Companies Renewals
Insurers are experts in pricing physical and actuarial risk. What too few have learned to price effectively is the slow, compounding erosion that comes from fragmented customer service. What is…
Why Good CX Programs Fail
Digital technology powers employee experience on the inside to deliver seamless, intuitive experience to customers on the outside. So, when you are creating Customer Experience Programs, you must plan and…
Journey Mapping to Avoid Travel Horror Stories
Welcome to the busiest week of US summer travel. AAA predicts travel this week across airports, train stations, and roads, will reach higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time….
Employee Centric Culture – Culture is King
In 2017 we introduced our ROI series recognizing the challenges all customer experience professionals have to obtain funding for CX initiatives and to prove their positive returns. Our second ROI…
For Complex Infrastructure Projects, Teaming is All About Timing
According to a 2025 Design-Build Utilization Study, design-build is projected to represent over 47% of US construction spending by 2028, to total more than $1.1 trillion. With projects of this…
Are You Ready to Go Exclusive with Jane, Your Digital Concierge?
In 2015 JetBlue introduced bag fees. Seven years after the competition. The media exploded. Many publications were negative. They blamed the airline for “selling out.” One headline read “A New…
Customer Experience Audit: Uber Bets On Self-Driving Cars With Big Volvo Purchase
The question that remains unanswered is who will be part of the future of transportation. Uber is going for the vertical integration – the whole pie. The future industry of urban transportation will be made of players in three different categories: cars, self-driving software, and ride-sharing network. In contrast, Lyft approaches the future through partnerships.
Aviation Industry, Coronavirus Isn’t the Only Thing Killing Us
Eighteen years ago, September 11th caused a three-day halt of the US commercial airlines and resulted in a 31.6% reduction in travel in September 2001 compared to the previous year….
When Not To Invest In Self-Service Technology?
What is self-service? It is something every progressive brand aspires to have more of. Few implement it successfully. Self-service is a new tool to optimize a company’s workforce by removing…
Grateful for Customer Experience Heroes
When we launched The Petrova Experience, we did so with the words “in pursuit of customer happiness.” Pursuit of happiness is part of every interaction we have with our clients,…
Patient Experience Trends in 2021 – Telehealth is Here to Stay
Today, we continue our series about 2021 Customer Experience trends and tactics. We take a closer look at patient experience and what telehealth means for the future. Both for patients…
Beyond the Arena: Transform Local Experience for World Class Events
Let’s get honest about local experience around major events. While it is exciting for the world to show up in your hometown for a major event like the World Cup…
Autonomous Service Starts at the Top: A CEO To Do List
In a recent article, we explored the controversial news that the customer service agent role as we know it is dead. The AI service agent is taking its place. Granted,…
How Well Do You Understand AI Applications?
In the last week I spoke about AI at the Argyle Forum webinar and at the ConnectID Conference in Washington, DC. Technology is emerging
The ROI of Customer Experience
Knowing the ROI of customer experience helps to fund CX projects and make intelligent investments in customer experience. But a deeper examination into the question about CX return on investment…
Customer Experience Technology View of your Call Center
By 2022 the global cloud based contact center market is growing from USD 6.8Bn in 2017 to 20.93Bn in 2022. This makes for CAGR of 25.2%. If you do not…
What is Human-Centered Design and how to Leverage it in 2021?
At its core, design is about value creation. In the world of Customer Experience, value-driven design requires CX professionals to use empathy to imagine a future customer experience that is…
How to Build Customer-Centric Culture
Before we address how to build customer-centric culture, let’s examine the terminology: what culture is and what it is not. Culture is not executives talking about high level strategy. Equally,…
What is the Real Cost of Employee Experience?
There are two types of leaders (and organizational cultures) that stand to benefit most from improving employee experience. The first kind have 40% or higher turnover and think their frontline…
Customer Experience Audit: eBay’s Vibrant Marketplace of the Future
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. They highlight advances in artificial intelligence in retail and other technologies. See all audit stories. Two years…
How to Sell the C-Suite on Customer Experience
You finally got your big career break. You are leading a project that requires executive approval. So, now what? Intuitively, you know that this is a chance to make a…
Customer Experience Design – How Do You Want Customers To Feel?
Last week, we talked about CX Design in terms of space and function. Today, we continue our customer experience design journey to talk about the design of emotions and feelings. All…
How Seamless Customer Journeys Drive Revenue
Many travel and transportation executives identify revenue sources narrowly. Think ticket sales, ancillary fees like baggage and amenities fees or premium upgrades. Many customer experience practitioners limit their scope to…
A Lot of Data, Not Enough Insight
A month ago I saw a Forrester presentation on Customer Experience measurement that began with a great quote from the Global Bank: “We are drowning in data and starving for…
The Great Re-onboading: How to Bring Back Your Employees
Re-onboarding is the next employee experience organizations need to tackle. Since March 2020, leaders have encountered pandemic shutdowns, remote workforce transitions, and the Great Resignation. As restrictions lift and we…
CX Skills Builder: Own the Customer Experience
Often, Customer Experience professionals do not believe that they can improve customer experience by impacting the experience design for their customers. Why? What causes this disconnect? I once got a…
4 Career Tips to obtain a Customer Experience Role
In honor of the 4th of July, we are rounding up 4 career tips for CX professionals. Set aside some time during the break from work to take stock in your CX career and evaluate the steps you need to get to the next level.
Customer Experience Audit: Starbucks Bets On The Physical Experience
Starbucks is opting in for the physical experience in order to become a lifestyle brand while other brands are investing in omni-channel experience.
How to Get Enough Funding for CX Initiatives
Delivering impactful customer experience programming starts with making the business case for customer experience to executive leadership. This is a straightforward objective. However, it requires strategy, clarity, education, and communication…
3 Cost Conscious Mistakes in Hospitality Implementation that Lose Money
Hospitality is a cornerstone of customer experience in travel, healthcare, and across industries. There is no question that hospitality is essential for creating world class, seamless experiences and driving customer…
Is Covid19 What We Needed to Build Seamless End-to-End Travel Experience?
On January 10th, we published an article called The Future of Travel We Deserve. In it, we laid out the foundation necessary to implement innovation at scale. Four months later,…
What is Customer Experience Transformation?
To meet the needs of the empowered 21st Century consumer, most companies, especially larger enterprises, need to embark on a customer experience transformation. Imagine a car manufacturer that does not…
Customer Loyalty Begins In-House
Ten years ago, creating customer loyalty meant assigning a membership number customers fed back to brands at the time of purchase. Customers went through the trouble of keeping track of loyalty numbers, hoping to collect enough points along the
The Wholehearted Traveler and Other 2024 Travel Trends
Back in 2020, we predicted the rise of the Revenge Traveler and the impact it would have on travel and hospitality experience providers. As we approach 2024, we are spotting…
No Pass During Construction: Why Airports Must Rethink Customer Experience in the Era of Capital Programs
Throughout the US, airports are entering one of the most consequential decades of infrastructure development in the history of modern aviation. According to Airports Council International–North America (ACI‑NA), US airports…
Customer Experience, Self Service, and the Gift of Time
Time is the most precious gift in life. If you think about it, time is the one thing we all want more of. As we get older and busier, time gets even more valuable to us.
The Biggest AI Mistake Most companies are Making
Much of AI news focuses on the importance of regulation, data risks, and intellectual property debates. And of course there is the rally cry “AI is coming for our jobs.”…
How to Prepare for AI: Dispatches from CR Summit, Charleston
On the eve of the #CRSummit in Charleston, customer experience leaders from various industries held the first AI Committee meeting. AI is a challenging topic to cover because it has…
Customer Experience for Vertical Takeoff
VTOLs (vertical take-off and landing vehicles) are projected to hit mature industry status in 2035 (Aviation International News). In just over ten years, the entire aviation ecosystem will be radically…
Customer Experience Best Practices for 2018?
The JetBlue blog features Liliana Petrova in a new four-part series. The series is on Customer Experience and Customer Experience Innovation. 2017 Lessons Liliana gathers insight from 2017 customer experience…
Can One Email Build Loyalty? #MYWESTELM
This is exemplary management of the post-purchase journey touch-point. For years, this level of management has been non-existent. At best, it tends to come in the form of an email confirmation that purchased items have been delivered.
Beyond Customer Satisfaction: 3 Unexpected Ways CX Drives Value
It is time to debunk the nice-to-have myth about customer experience. It is true the discipline operates in the space of perception, feelings, and emotion. What is equally true, but…
JetBlue Leading Customer Experience
Since I used to lead the JetBlue customer experience, people often ask what is behind the JetBlue experience magic. Or, as one of our clients refers to it, the “JetBlue…
How Hospitality Can Save Tourism
Travel experience experts need to remember why people travel. For most tourists, it is all about the destination. The destination is why you leave home. Before you make the decision…
Diversity is more than difference of color
Yesterday I had the privilege to join a panel on how to develop diversity and inclusion on your teams at Developer Week in Brooklyn. I was really excited to learn…
Paperless Customer Journey – JetBlue Deviceless Boarding
JetBlue Biometrics – Innovation and Disruption This year, JetBlue entered the ranks of the innovators who disrupt industries by applying customer experience technology. They not only imagine the future. They…
3 Ways to Create a Better Employee Experience Strategy
Guest Post by Gabe Smith, CCXP for The Petrova Experience The relationship between employee experience strategy and customer experience has long been discussed. Without engaged employees, we’re told, it’s difficult…
Trust Is the Treatment: How to Achieve ROI on Patient Experience through CX Strategy
Patient experience is not a soft metric. It is an engine for financial performance, improved clinical outcomes, and sustained patient loyalty. For hospital executives and family medical practitioners alike, investing…
Fan Experience: CX Lessons for Hosting Major Events
With the World Cup coming to New Jersey and the greater New York area in 2026, the time is now to create positive fan experience moments. The 2026 Soccer World…
The One CX Goal You Need to Set for 2019
For 2019, I urge you to make only one CX goal – bring about business success with your customer experience work. Don’t just do work in the general sense. Rather, set a CX goal that has a real impact on your customers and their experiences with your brand.
Customer Experience Audit: New York Times Beats Google
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. In this series we walk you through customer experience examples across industries. We feature brands that made…
Coronavirus Travel: What Does Hospitality Mean Now?
I want to tell you about my recent passenger experience. Earlier this week, I traveled to New Orleans from JFK Terminal 5 in New York. I had planned an airport…
CX Skills Builders: You May Have a CX Job and Not Know It
Last week we talked about the identity crisis of CX professionals and we urged you to fix any small problem or seam on the customer journey in order to build internal brand equity and buy in.
Customer Understanding for Airport Customer Experience: Theory vs Practice
One of the (many!) interesting things about working in airport customer experience for as long as our team has, is watching how the language around customer experience changes as ideas…
Leadership During the Pandemic: Guest Post by Rachel Dreyfus
This is a guest post by Rachel Dreyfus, President, Dreyfus Advisors, who researched leadership and organizational culture during the pandemic. How has Covid19 influenced leadership over the past three months?…
Liliana Petrova Talks Patient Experience in Healthcare Podcast
Recently, we recorded a podcast on patient experience in healthcare with Stacey Richter. Today, we are excited to share it with you. On the episode, we discuss travel and healthcare…
How to Solve the 2025 Customer Retention Problem
It’s 2025, and businesses across sectors have a customer retention problem. U.S. companies alone lose an estimated $168 billion annually due to customer attrition, as revealed in a CallMiner whitepaper….
Why I Don’t Love Chatbots
Today, we tackle the value proposition that chatbots are more valuable to companies than customers. I reject this. The ROI simply is not there, especially since better customer experience is…
Contactless and Self-Service are Here to Stay
Our 5th 2021 customer experience trend highlights contactless and self-service experiences across industries. Before we dive into this topic, let’s take a moment to define what contactless and self-service mean…
How a Personal Interaction builds Repeat Customers
A customer-centric methodology is key to the successful outcome of my interaction with Hello Spud. It is the reason this story appears here, and not among the CX Big Fails! The company did not send an automated response. It did not deliver a message stating “sorry we couldn’t help you, would you like something else.” Instead, the company co-founder reached out to me personally across multiple channels (a handwritten note, followed by personal emails).
Create Your Tribe: How Great CX Makes a Lifestyle Brand
Newcomers to the market realize that their business is only as strong as the growth of their customer base. With that in mind, senior leaders work hard to shorten the distance between them and the customer.
How Southwest Can Own Customer Experience Again
The collapse of the Southwest passenger experience this holiday season is an unlikely jumping off point for a conversation on how to own customer experience transformation. Unfortunately, it is not…
The in-person work office design that will bring your employees back
According to PwC 95% of company executives still believe employees need to be in the office to maintain strong company culture. Like we have said before, the return to office…
Lessons Learned at the Forrester Conference: “Data is the New Sexy”
Once a year I look for an event to attend where I can learn something new and get better at what I do. This year, I attended an event hosted…
#CXTHUS Exchange Insights – winners and losers?
Attending a customer experience conference is a significant investment of time and money. Even if you are speaker at the conference, like I was last week, the time away from…
How a Failed Bus Experience becomes a Rally Cry for Passengers
A single experience can shed light on major vulnerabilities in transportation experience. A bus trip we took from Atlantic City reveals the danger of breaking promises to customers, the importance…
How to Be an Entrepreneur: 5 Things I Learned in 5 Months as an Entrepreneur
The life of an entrepreneur is different every day, but the one thing that remains the same is that we are always learning. These are my lessons in how to…
Guest Experience: Fusion of Hospitality and Brand Connection through Design
For a customer experience consultant who designs guest experience, and a lover of the customer experience discipline, visiting a new-to-me hotel can go one of two ways. Sometimes, I am…
How @T4 makes real customer experience impact
Today we share our impressions from visiting our welcoming host Chad at JFK Terminal 4 in NYC. We also celebrate Chad as an effective Customer Experience professional/practitioner. His work is…
How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture for Highly Effective Teams
When we look at how to build a customer-centric culture, we must look inside the organization first. True customer centricity happens when an organization masters group dynamics to harnesses the…
5 Ways Customer Experience Consultants Keep Customer Promises
Customer experience is the follow-through on brand promises across every interaction. Some organizations assume the importance of customer experience is limited to commercial brands. This is far from true. In…
How to Scale a High Trust Health Service Without Breaking Patient Confidence
When a healthcare technology company begins to scale, the pressure can feel punishing. The patient can get lost in the momentum of growth. And quickly, profit projections can stumble into…