By way of introduction, my name is Clare Muscutt and I have the pleasure of hosting and producing this new female-focused Customer Experience initiative. I had the idea that we needed a space for women when I appeared in CX Magazine’s Top 50 stars as the UK’s Top Female Influencer last year. It seemed strange to me that in a disproportionately female industry that the rest of the Top 5, were male. My newly found platform meant women started to reach out to me for help on social media and I found it surprising that they found me inspiring. I helped wherever I could, sharing my personal career story and experience of successes and ‘failures’ on the corporate road to starting my own company. I saw my mentees getting braver and felt tremendous pride at seeing them go for bigger opportunities, start their own blogs, try their hand at public speaking and some even make the jump to freelance. The theme that repeated over and over again in these conversations was the shared feeling of a lack of self-confidence to stand up and be noticed. And a lack of accessible female spaces with role models who openly share their experience of getting over similar challenges, to look up to. I found a community of awesome women through Instagram and reached out to them to get the conversation going. We started having ‘real-talk’ conversations on Zoom about our views on CX and experience of being women striving to achieve our goals. I found a collective across the globe who wanted to take part in building something ‘for the girls’ and by sharing our stories, together we found CX sisterhood. We have a dream to shine a light on more women in CX and inspire more of us to stand up and be noticed. We believe the CX world would benefit from a space dedicated to women and that a great place to start is to hear more of our stories… So, to begin with, I have handpicked a selection of the women I got to know, from around the world who have tremendous stories to tell that will be published here. Over time, I hope to get feedback on where you need more inspiration and introduce guests from other areas of interest such as health and wellbeing, business and social media skills to support the personal and professional development of women in our industry. Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to join the sisterhood, please visit www.womenincx.community to subscribe to our list and be the first to get news and updates as we grow.