Dan Wiersma
Senior Consultant
Dan’s passion for the customer experience owes to more than 36 years in a service leadership role for some of the world’s premier brands. Comfortably moving between the engineering and design, manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain disciplines, Dan has a multifaceted grasp of the customer experience.
Most recently, he championed service excellence for Sony’s Consumer Electronics division where he guided Sony’s Customer service operations in both the professional and consumer markets.
Dan believes that a best in class customer experience is accomplished through listening to the voice of the customer combined with a detailed and aggressive plan of action. As he sees it, routine measurement, continuous assessment of customer feedback, and engagement of the entire organization is essential to moving the needle. His experience combining customer feedback with employee perspectives has led to significant improvements in the level of performance of those organizations he has led.
Experienced and results-oriented, Dan is a sought-after thought leader, having presented to Arizona State’s Center for Service Leadership, AFSMI and Customer 1st.
Most memorable professional moment
I’ve experienced many moments that stick in my memory. A significant one occurred late in my career at Sony. After several years of working hard on our customer experience improvement effort, one of the teams gave me a notebook that reflected the measurement tools they had used, including samples of graphs and charts that reflected the improvements over the past four years. But the most meaningful part of that notebook was letters by all of the people in the organization expressing their appreciation of how I had engaged them personally in the improvement in our customer experience. This reinforced my belief about the relevance of customer-driven feedback but, more importantly, the importance of engaging people in making significant improvements in business. The notebook sits prominently on my office shelf.
Most treasured professional accomplishment
I’d be doing something totally different. In my life, I had three ambitions. Forty-five years ago I wanted to be a pilot and fly fighter aircraft. Fortunately, my eyesight was not all that good, and they didn’t have Lasik surgery way back when. When I went to college, I wanted to be a professor before I joined the corporate world. My plan was to get my PhD., teaching and doing research at the university level. Lastly, when I was in mid-corporate career, I was an SBU manager for a cardiology business and I thought it would be cool to be a surgeon.
Time and opportunities kept me focused on my business career and I was very successful at my profession. I loved what I did, especially the past nine years, working with wonderful people and helping improve the company’s experience with our customers. Those old career thoughts still come to the frontal lobe from time to time.
Letting my hair down…
I love my alma maters and follow their sports regularly. Although they probably won’t win any national championships, they every-once-in-a-while beat the more notables like Rochester Institute (see the 2010 Frozen Four hockey tournament). My pro team is the Cincinnati Bengals, and my adopted team here in Arizona is the Cardinals. I love golf, hiking, and occasionally sailing. I work with our community’s business club and SCORE to give back some of the things I have learned in my business life. It’s a good life, but I’m always looking for that next opportunity to improve not only what I do as a person, but what someone else might want to do in their business. I guess I am a perfectionist!
