How showing up for customers with creative solutions builds trust and keeps the relationship happy
Norakind began as a personal itch: existing productivity tools weren't built for how an ADHD brain actually works. I set out to fix that for myself, hoping others would also find value in it.
At any given time, I carried a portfolio of thirty to fifty high-value accounts, onboarding and educating users as well as reviewing work and acting as the trusted advisor for all their post-campaign activities.
At Crowd Ox, I became the technical bridge between support and engineering: someone who could just as easily calm an anxious client as diagnose a broken API integration.
Eight years at the Genius Bar taught me how to diagnose failures of hardware and software, across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, then translating the technical explanation into something a stressed, tech-worried customer could actually understand.
When a problem wasn't isolated (looking like a pattern rather than a one-off) I flagged it up the chain to Apple engineering. The customer-experience awards followed, including stretches where my NPS score hit a perfect 100.
My first systems role put me in charge of everything technical at the Brown University Bookstore: an IBM AS/400 backend, the point-of-sale systems ringing up every sale, and a mixed fleet of Mac and PC workstations that all needed to keep working.
As the Bookstore's Department Computing Coordinator, I also became the liaison to the wider university; the person who worked with other departments across the university who needed input on working with Bookstore systems which included financial aid files and student records, as well as general advice on Mac implementation in their own setups.
“Customer-Centric”: It’s a line item I see on too many job descriptions as part of a “values statement.” But it’s not that; it’s a discipline.
At Crowd Ox, I managed accounts running crowdfunding campaigns where a support failure wasn't just an inconvenience, it was thousands of backers losing confidence in a product that didn't even exist yet. This gave me insight that customer-centric work can actually be risk management disguised with a friendlier name. You're protecting trust before it breaks, because once it breaks with a backer base (or a user base), you don't get it back with an apology email.
Once trust breaks with a backer base or a user base, you don't get it back with an apology email.
The technical part also matters more than most CS orgs admit. Before I came up in support, I learned enough development to actually understand what was going wrong in the background. I can read a stack trace instead of routing it to engineering and hoping. I learned the difference between mollifying a customer and providing actual solutions at Apple; an NPS of 100 doesn't come from being nice. It comes from being useful, consistently, in ways that show as results
Customer-centric work also has to include the customers you can't see: the internal customers on your own team. A support org that only works when the most experienced person is personally handling every account isn't customer-centric, it's a bottleneck.
The last piece is honesty about limits: sometimes the most respectful thing you can tell a customer is no, or not yet. Overpromising to make someone happy in the moment is the opposite of centering them.
That's the job, as I understand it: technical enough to be genuinely useful, honest enough to be trusted, and structured well enough that it doesn't depend entirely on you.
To whom it may concern,
I'm happy to recommend John Bell.
I worked with John at Crowd Ox, where he was our Customer Support Manager. While that was his main role, John ended up taking on a lot more than just support. Like many startup environments, we needed people who could jump in, figure things out, and help wherever there was a gap. John was one of those people.
When John started with us, he did not come in with deep experience in every area he eventually helped with. What stood out was his ability to learn quickly, take ownership, and become useful without needing constant direction. He was detailed, dependable, and very good at working through messy problems until they were actually solved.
Beyond support, John worked on several internal development and technical projects on his own. He was willing to dig into systems, learn what needed to be learned, and build solutions that helped the company. He also had a strong understanding of how the technical side connected to the customer experience, which made him especially valuable. He could see both the user problem and the operational problem behind it.
John was also an important part of keeping the team together. He was steady, easy to work with, and someone people trusted. In a fast-moving company, that matters a lot. He helped create stability, followed through on what he said he would do, and was willing to take responsibility even when something was outside his formal job description.
I would gladly work with John again and believe he would be a strong addition to any team looking for someone dependable, thoughtful, and capable of growing into technical responsibility.
Sincerely,
Aaron Hansen
Single-person studio building iOS/Mac apps and bespoke web experiences for humans, including all the projects below.
A clock web page with 525,600 slots, one for every minute of the year, each claimable to add your own message. Every year, your message returns on that same minute.
A native iOS/macOS productivity app for the ADHD market, built end-to-end in Swift. Founded, designed, and shipped independently — live on the App Store.
A simple and fast envelope budgeting app for iOS. Currently in development, bringing a classic budgeting method into the modern mobile era.
In DevelopmentIn addition to my professional credentials, I have a variety of hobbies! These include reading and thinking about philosophy (specifically the areas of epistemology and metaphysics), gaming (my favorites are Final Fantasy VII, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch), consumer technology, and writing. The last is something I haven't engaged in much recently, but I hope to get back to in the near future.
I also love music! I am a huge fan of Rush, and also Eels, CHVRCHES, The Naked & Famous, Death Cab For Cutie, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Dar Williams, and countless more.
If you're in the Providence area, let's grab a coffee or a drink and chat!