Her Story
About Jean Mork
Jean Bredeson serves as President and Founder of Service 800, the company she launched in 1989 after working at Xerox Corporation where she developed an interest in applying quality metrics to service delivery. Her background in industrial engineering, including a master's degree earned in 1979, has informed her approach to combining people performance with metric performance in service quality measurement. Over more than four decades in the field, she built tools to collect customer feedback within minutes or hours of service events, creating a data system that now operates in 30 languages globally. Service 800 focuses on making customer feedback collection inexpensive and instantaneous to drive day-by-day service improvements. Bredeson holds a certification in executive-level AI and received recognition from CompTIA (now known as GTIA) for her global influence on service quality standards. She attributes her success to her engineering foundation and the committed, passionate team she has assembled, which has fostered long-term client relationships spanning 20 years or more.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jean Mork
01What do you attribute your success to?
My background in industrial engineering has been very helpful in combining people performance and metric performance. Our greatest asset has been the team we’ve assembled over the years - individuals who are committed, interested, passionate, but still want to have fun and have a life while doing it. This has created an organization that keeps clients and customers for 20 years and more.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice came from one of my first managers who, when I was pregnant with my first child, congratulated me for enlightening my career. “Parents make the best managers. Parents understand the childlike behaviors in the people around them and understand how individuals need to be communicated with, motivated, and reinforced.” This insight has helped me put together a team that works together well.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Early in my career, I often heard “you can’t have it all“. I found that to be very discouraging and limiting.
Instead, I’ve found that if I focus on what parts of “all” I really want or need, I can set objectives and accomplish what is important.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The world typically thinks that surveys and periodic studies are hugely expensive and take a lot of time. One of our biggest challenges has been to show managers that customer feedback can be inexpensive and almost instantaneous. It can drive improvements in service delivery on a minute by minute basis, not just by a quarterly or monthly or annual basis.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Commitment. Fairness. Honesty.
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