Speaker: Jasen Smith, Director of Advanced Analytics - CX, AT&T
Jasen Smith: Hello, my name is Jason Smith, I am the director of advanced analytics for customer experience within AT&T based out of Dallas Texas.
Tell us about your career journey. What was your first job? How did you end up where you are today?
Jasen Smith: Alright, so my career journey. Um It has been a interesting long journey. Um I started off with my first job was actually as a stock boy with family dollar back in North Carolina. Um Just you know, started my, started my career in retail. Um Trying to work my way up through the ranks of the retail management structure, right? Going from stock boy to backroom manager, assistant manager, all of that stuff. Um decided I wanted more um and went to school and got my degree in business administration.
Jasen Smith: Um Found my way to Kohl's and Cracker Barrel as store managers, you know, managing a couple 100 folks running those stores. Um and decided that at that point in my life I wanted to move from the retail front lines to corporations, the corporate world and making decisions that impacted you know, the business as a whole and not just the singular store that I was in. Um So at that point I made the decision to go back to school and get my master's in business administration. Um Coming out of b school, I ended up going to Lowe's as a category manager.
Jasen Smith: Um And then I moved on from that into sales operations roles. Um And then I went from a sales ops role to a pricing role.
Jasen Smith: And then while I was working in the pricing space I started getting into technology right, we started thinking about how can we evolve our pricing structure and you know, look at automating things. Um And that got me into more and more of the analytics space. Um Understanding customer perception, understanding patterns and trends and where and how we could make pricing decisions based off of a variety of different factors.
Jasen Smith: Um And so all of that past work, even the front line stuff working as a manager and interacting with people help translate into what I do today which is take deep technical work, data science model building predictive analytics um and translate it for the rest of the business, finance, marketing operations, all of those different folks. And so those previous jobs led me to where I am today which is helping the larger business understand how analytics can benefit their organizations. Um And so that's kind of where the long road of where I got to today
Tell us about your current role.
Jasen Smith: So today my current role is Director Advanced analytics for customer experience. And so what I do today is I run the team that does all of our customer experience research and analytics. Um We've got kind of three main functions within our team. One is the front end collection of data where we design and send out surveys
Jasen Smith: Um Then I have another part of my team that takes all of that data that we collect um combines it with our operational data, right? So like what products does the customer have? What's their location? Um What's their rate plan? What's their average revenue?
Jasen Smith: Um And then we analyze all of that data and look for a variety of patterns. Um And trends try to forecast out what customer behavior is gonna look like and then create segments and profiles so that we can better understand how customers are receiving our products out in the out in the marketplace and those experiences and what they look like.
Jasen Smith: Um The biggest benefit of what we do today is that we provide the business at large. A customer experience lends to everything they do. Alright. So if they want to go launch a new product or develop a new marketing campaign, our team is the team that tells them what's the experience gonna be like for our customers who's going to receive it? Well who's not? How can we adjust the product features to fit most with what our customers are looking for? How can we go about targeting the marketing campaign to get the best return and the best response rate. Our team does all of that.
What is the best piece of career advice you have received?
Jasen Smith: Um I think the best piece of career advice that I ever got was be helpful. Simple as that, right? As long as what you're doing is either helpful to a person, helpful to the business or helpful to the customer. As long as you're helping one of those groups, you will be successful at what you do. Um And you will be remembered for being helpful, right? You don't want to be a nay Sayer, you don't want to be one of those people that are always like oh I'm too busy for that, I can't help you with that. Um Even if you don't have the answer offered to help find the answer right? Whether it's oh you know what, I don't have the answer to that question, but I know bob and bob might be able to help you, Let me connect you with him sometimes. That simple act of just connecting people is enough for you to be remembered as someone that is helpful and creative to the business. Um And so that's the best career advice that I ever got was be helpful in everything that you do find opportunities to help the business help other people. Um Because at the end of the day, other people are the ones that will help you advance your career. Um And so that is the best piece of advice that I would have ever received and that I continue to pass on to other people
