The practice that didn’t exist yet

Accenture Song — NA Customer Service Experience Lead | Managing Director · 2023–2025

The request came from the Chief Design Officer of Accenture at the time — the co-founder of Fjord, and someone who had spent his career arguing that design needed a seat at every table. He saw a gap: one of the largest service transformation businesses in the world had no experience design voice. Customer service was being reimagined by AI, and nobody in the room was asking what that should feel like for the people on the other end of it.

Building the practice meant starting with a team of designers who had never worked in customer service and weren't sure they wanted to. Their worry was reasonable — they were designers, not call center operators. The first job was to reframe what the work actually was: not call center design, but something more fundamental. The chance to make sure that when someone was frustrated, confused, or needed help for themselves or someone they loved, the support they needed was actually there. A quick answer when that was enough. A real person when it wasn't. And behind every one of those interactions, a call center operator — one of the hidden heroes of any service organization — whose job deserved to be made easier. That was the why. The AI was how we delivered it at scale.

There was a bigger reframe underneath that one. Customer service is usually treated as what happens when things break. But every time a customer calls frustrated, or a partner can't find what they need, or a patient is trying to navigate a system that wasn't designed for them — that's one of the most honest signals an organization can receive. It tells you what's actually broken, what needs to be corrected, and often where the next product or experience should come from. The best organizations don't just respond to those signals. They build from them. Customer service isn't a cost center. It's one of the deepest sources of insight available — if someone is actually listening.

Over two years the team moved from uncertainty to being among the first across Accenture to actively design and deploy agentic AI experiences in customer service. They learned conversation design. They built tools that went to market. They worked at the intersection of experience and technology in ways the broader organization was still figuring out.

At Accenture, promotions don't come from managers — they come from account leaders who nominate and rank the people who made their engagements better. Nine promotions from a team of fifty means nine account leaders, in competitive spaces, put their name behind these designers. That's not a metric. That's a measure of what the team became.

At Accenture you can be part of a team. You can be aligned to a group. What this became was something harder to build and rarer to find — a community. That's what I'm most proud of.

• Built and led a multidisciplinary practice — from inception — working across design, strategy, technology, and operations, inside one of the world's largest professional services organizations.

• Among the earliest teams at Accenture to design and deploy agentic AI in customer service — building tools that went to market and that both frontline employees and end customers actually used

• Contributed to enterprise engagements at significant scale across technology, financial services, logistics, hospitality, and healthcare

• 9 of 50 team members promoted in 2025, nominated by account leaders across competitive client engagements