The fastest way to understand client experience is to picture two jobs at once: you’re the customer’s voice and you’re the investigator who refuses to stop until the root cause is clear. 

That’s why we brought on Shelley Shiling, a speech-language pathologist who transitioned from clinic life into health tech and now leads Customer Experience  (CX) at Prompt. We get specific about what CX teams actually do day to day, how support queues really work, and why “customer effort” can matter more than a perfectly worded reply when it comes to churn risk and long-term retention. 

Shelley walks through her clinician transition step by step, including the unglamorous but powerful middle phase: taking a part-time role, wearing every hat at a small startup, and building the kind of real projects that make interviews easy later. We also dig into practical ways clinicians can create transferable experience before they ever get an offer, like owning process fixes, documenting workflows, and doing proactive analyses that show business impact. If you’re comparing client success manager roles with client experience roles, we break down the differences in meeting volume, troubleshooting intensity, and the kind of personality that thrives in the queue. 

We also go beyond career moves into leadership and growth. Shelley shares what great leadership looks like in CX, why trust beats micromanagement, and how career ladders can include senior individual contributor paths and subject matter expert tracks, not just management. Finally, we discuss the hardest part of support work.

If you’re exploring non-clinical healthcare jobs, subscribe for more clinician-to-tech stories, share this with a friend who’s feeling stuck, and leave a (nice!) review so more clinicians can find the show.

Resources

• Elevate CX
• Shelley Shiling Linkedin
• Dunning-Kruger Effect

Find the Clinician Transition (TCT) Here:

• TheClinicianTransition.com
• The Clinician Transition Linkedin Group
• The Clinician Transition Slack Community

Other Relevant Resources

• Beyond These Clinic Walls
• Collective Coaching

Connect with the hosts here:

• Emma Brady, PT, DPT
• Emily Kelly, PT, DPT