Liliana Petrova: Visionary Leader Helping Brands Improve their Customer Experience

Businesses lose more than US$62 billion a year due to bad customer service. 51% of customers will never do business with a company after one bad experience. The Petrova Experience, helps companies recoup these losses and deliver on their brand promises.

The Petrova Experience is a customer experience consulting firm with a mission to pursue customer happiness. The company collaborates with brands and evaluates how they are connecting with customers and where they are missing on opportunities. Using technology, experience design, and hospitality training, the Petrova Experience helps brands turn their customers into loyal advocates. The company values both on cost and the revenue side, bringing efficiencies to business operations and incremental revenues generated by net new customers.

On an average, the Petrova Experience's client engagements last between four and seven months. The process starts with discovery, where the company learns about its client's culture and its customers' feedback. This helps to determine the client's real problems and customer pain points. From this jumping-off point, The Petrova team designs service guidelines and procedures, trains employees on hospitality culture, and implements technology to create seamless experiences in the digital and physical space.

An Empowered Leader Propelling Business

Liliana Petrova is the Founder of the Petrova Experience. Her first mentor told her the way to build an ideal career was to write what she wanted to see on her gravestone and live her life to tell that story. Liliana really connected with that advice, although it sounded a bit morbid. That was the day she became the director of her life.

Liliana's story includes being on Wall Street during the liquidity crisis and managing  Royal Bank of Canada's balance sheet. It includes getting an MBA from one of the most iconic schools in New York and building an impactful career in the aviation world through diverse experiences in JetBlue Airways.

During her eight years in the aviation industry, Liliana  negotiated with flight attendants and Latin American Tourism Boards. She  led the redesign of Terminal 5 at the JFK International Airport in New York and launched a facial recognition boarding experience in Boston. When it comes to a plane, there is nothing that Liliana hasn't done. She has pushed a plane, cleaned a plane, done security checks on a plane and flown a plane simulator.

Liliana founded The Petrova Experience a year and a half ago. Her team is made of an eclectic group of professionals who really CARE about people and constantly ask "how can things be better."  Some people call them disruptors, but Liliana calls them thinkers and explorers. The company believes that nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been done yet, and seeks to serve and empower leaders who want to be at the forefront of their industries and build the experiences of the future.

Building Organisational Success

Liliana does not think of herself as a woman leader. Rather, as a leader who happens to be a woman. Everything that she has done in life has been about some sort of disruption.

Leaving Bulgaria to make her way in America against the odds was the first step. Liliana came by herself, with a loan of two thousand dollars for the airplane ticket. This experience helped her develop confidence in her ability to make smart, strategic decisions, no matter how challenging the circumstances are.  This confidence and commitment to success for herself and others guides every business decision that Liliana makes. It gives her the strength to lead teams and deliver value around the world.

Liliana's background and professional journey has only strengthened her resilience- a necessary skill for all leaders today. Many people are neither confident, nor comfortable pushing high level executives to think creatively and take on risk to achieve more for their businesses. Liliana does not have this problem, and has always challenged her leadership strategically. At the time facial recognition boarding was not one of her corporate goals, she pushed her leadership to let her run with it and make facial recognition a reality in the company's operation. Liliana believed that biometrics was the next frontier and if JetBlue wanted to be an innovator in the space, it needed to go there. The company listened, and made it to all the prime-time news in America!

Liliana would be remiss if she didn't talk more about the redesign of the JetBlue Airways lobby at JFK Airport. Her leaders in JetBlue Airways taught her what it meant to be an authentic servant leader. They gave Liliana the autonomy to innovate and nurtured her through her mistakes. She learned the most from them and grew as a customer experience leader during the redesign of the JFK Airport's JetBlue Lobby in New York. The team had many challenges and the way the JetBlue leaders handled them showed Liliana in practice what servant leadership meant.

To give an idea what life was like then, during this phase of her career, Liliana was managing more than 15 peers laterally, and helmed a cross-functional delivery team of more than 40 people, along with 5 business partner relationships, and 2 executive committees.

Facing Challenges for Constructive Growth

Liliana grew up in communism and lived through the "change of the regime" in Eastern Europe. One of her first vivid memories was sitting on her father's shoulders in the square at the center of Sofia, in an ocean of people, singing "45 years is enough. Democracy now!"

Ever since then, justice has been a driving force in Liliana's life. Early on, in corporate America, it was a challenge to level off her passion and use it constructively. She  saw things as black and white. She used to react before thinking, which was the source of many conversations explaining herself afterwards. Another challenge, that took Liliana the better part of 10 years to overcome, was the cultural assimilation to the American ways. She shares, "It takes time and a lot of desire to redefine oneself in a new culture. I still do not watch baseball and believe there is ONLY one sport called football (and when I say, football, I mean soccer)! However, when my colleagues were laughing about Seinfeld at my first job, I did get cable (even though it was above my budget) and watched most seasons." It takes intentional desire to NOT be always different in order to be accepted as part of a team and Liliana believes that belonging to the culture of the place one wants to succeed in is part of the journey to the top.

All the jobs that Liliana has had, needed to happen in order to create the company that she has created, and to be where that she is now, but at that time, she did not know that. Liliana struggled to be happy in the moment because she was constantly pushing for the next thing. Ambition was keeping her from happiness. Liliana is learning that she needed to be more present in the moment and enjoy what she does.

Encompassing Transformational Leader Attributes

Liliana considers bravery  an essential attribute of a transformational leader, and it is a scarce resource. Leading people through change is a layered and difficult endeavour. She shares, "You never have all the information you need to be 100% certain of the outcome. So, you need bravery to compensate for that missing data. You need bravery to think differently, to innovate, and to motivate."

Self-esteem is just as important, and not nearly as celebrated. Servant leadership inspires people to follow a leader. But no leader can be in the service of his/her people if he/she needs constant validation and reassurance. She adds that, "There is a third vital attribute of a transformational leader- Empathy. We talk about empathy a lot in the customer experience technology space. Successful transformational leaders have to put themselves in the shoes of the individuals and teams they lead. Empathy allows us to understand the anxieties and fears that teams feel in order to behave appropriately as a guide on the journey of change."

Developing Innovative Technologies

The Petrova Experience innovates by constantly listening to and speaking with its customers. The company is based on the ethos that innovation is the result of reiteration based on feedback, not from internal processes that keep the voice of the customer out of the design phase.

Human-centered design is key to the Petrova Experience's innovation. A well-designed, innovative technology feels human, and the company gets there through cross-functional conversations that bring diverse opinions and expertise to the table.

Speaking on disruptive technologies, Liliana says that these technologies propel innovation to new frontiers that only the bravest can fathom. She adds, "They are changing the way one live, and how we perceive time."

Liliana views that the role of a leader has changed tremendously in the last ten years to one of constant learning and discomfort. She continues, "We now have to lead with less knowledge and deep understanding than before. As a result, we have an even deeper need for bravery, and strong relationships built on trust. See, back in the day there was not as much information out there that we needed to absorb. Now, there is so much coming at us so fast."

It has become impossible for an individual leader to know everything about technology. Liliana observes that the current role of a leader, more than ever, is to put together the right teams and foster a great culture and spirit so the members of the team can feel inspired to work together.

Towards a Promising Future Ahead

Liliana sees The Petrova Experience as a boutique consulting firm that gets noticed by the powerful thinkers. And, when that happens, the company would work together to safeguard the human experiences of the future in a way that keeps the pursuit of happiness front and center in the design and execution process.

She thinks that customer experience will only grow as a field in the coming years, and human-centred design will guide future technology development and implementation.

Values for the Emerging Women Leaders

Liliana advises emerging women leaders to find their own path and live their truth. She explains, "My path is the path of the disruptor. I live my life that way. I even made a company that helps others disrupt their spaces. This is my journey. Find yours. And be authentic to it. Follow your calling. Do not let others tell you what your path is. And, do not let short-term financial gains lead your choices, especially early in your career. You may be delaying the right journey when you follow the money."

She further guides that when emerging women leaders find and follow their right path, their passion will naturally accelerate their career and fuel success.