Six months ago, I gave birth!!!!
Six months ago, my world split into before and after.
Before, I measured my days in meetings, escalations, and response times. After, I measure them in feeding cycles, nap windows, and the tiny expressions that cross my baby’s face. Fast, fleeting, and full of meaning.
The sleepless nights, the morning smiles, the in-between moments nobody warns you about. They have been teaching me things. Quietly, steadily, in ways I am still making sense of.
To be honest, motherhood is teaching me more about customer experience than any dashboard ever did.
When I look at my baby, I sometimes think he is my smallest customer. He doesn’t use words. He doesn’t file tickets or explain his problem. But he has expectations, very clear ones. For attention. For safety. For the simple comfort of knowing that someone is there. And when those expectations aren’t met, he doesn’t escalate. He cries. Quietly at first, then not so quietly.
In customer support, we spend so much time focused on what customers say. What they type, what they report, what they escalate. But feelings don’t always make it into tickets. Motherhood is teaching me to pay attention to what people feel, even when they can’t find the words for it.
I think about this a lot during the night wakings. The house is quiet, everyone is asleep, and it’s just me and my baby in the dark and as my baby stirs at 2 AM, I realise he doesn’t need anything elaborate from me. He just needs to know I’m there. A warm voice. A familiar touch. The reassurance that someone heard him. And I keep thinking about how true that is for customers too. They don’t always need the perfect solution right away. They just need to feel that someone is present, paying attention, and actually trying.
Motherhood also held up a mirror to me in ways I didn’t expect. I had my own expectations going in. Schedules. Rhythms. A baby who would follow the plan. And when reality looked nothing like that, I felt genuinely unsettled. Then one night it hit me. Isn’t this exactly what we do to our customers? We expect them to read the documentation, follow the onboarding flow, understand the product the way we understand it. We build for the ideal user and quietly forget about the real one.
And response time. If I take even a moment too long to respond to my baby’s cry, he doesn’t measure the delay in minutes. He measures it in uncertainty. In that unsettling feeling of not being sure someone is coming. Customers do exactly the same. A four hour wait isn’t four hours. It’s anxiety. It’s wondering if anyone cares. It’s a small piece of trust quietly leaving.
You can’t escalate a baby. You can’t rush his timeline or apply logic to a human being who is simply growing at his own pace, in his own way. And sitting with that has made me want to be a little more gentle with customers too. A little less rigid. A little more human.
Six months in, covered in milk and love and exhaustion, I have realised something simple.
Empathy isn’t a soft skill.
It’s operational intelligence.
And my smallest customer is my greatest teacher!!
CX Beyond Support 