In this series of posts, Influencers explain how their career paths might have changed. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #RoadNotTaken in the body of your post).

Hiking has recently become a passion of mine. The thing about hiking, especially when you first start on little known trails, is that you may not always recognize the path you are supposed to take.

I’ve been thinking about that analogy recently as I came to the conclusion that when my company, Kabam, first started, we took the wrong path when dealing with customers. I want to share (for the first time publicly) the mistake we made, and how we are fixing it.

Customers Should Be First

Kabam’s story is one of a young company in a young industry. Our mission when we started the company was creating free-to-play games on Facebook for traditional gamers. Both Facebook as a technology platform and free-to-play games were brand-new phenomenon five years ago. It was a new world of gaming, and there were no maps to follow.

A sudden and necessary shift in 2011 from Facebook games to games on mobile devices required significant changes throughout the company. We were forced to retool our entire business again in technology, infrastructure, business development, game design, international operations, user interface design, and marketing. With a lot of hard work by every employee, Kabam experienced massive growth in this phase, growing from a few dozen employees to more than 800 and dealing with all the growing pains that come with that growth.

Too often, fast-growing startups get consumed by their growth and technology to focus on key business drivers for the long term. To a degree, my company was a victim of this myopia.

We were so thrilled and focused on growing our business we neglected the most important element to any corporate success: our customers. Whether it was taking more than 24-48 hours to reply to a customer, or burdening customers with excessive procedure and requirements of proof in order to solve an issue, we did not provide customers the support and service they deserve.

That was wrong, and, as the leader of this company, I take full responsibility. In addition to establishing the vision for the company, hiring the right people, and ensuring the company is well financed, it’s my job to recognize our mistakes, and set a course to put us back on the right path.

A New Approach

To put us back on track, and to put our customers first, we recently kicked off the Kabam Customers First! initiative. This is a companywide program that involves best practices from other internet companies, the right infusion of new senior management, and direct feedback from customers themselves.

Kabam Customers First! includes:

Making customer satisfaction a top priority

Faster customer response times

Active listening and engagement with the community

We're tackling these objectives in a variety of ways, including hiring a significant number of new customer support representatives, improving our tracking tools, and proactively reaching out to key leaders in our community to monitor the effectiveness of these initiatives. We're also planning to communicate more frequently with our community base in the spirit of transparency and feedback. This is an evolving process, and we're excited to share it with our customers.

I’m confident that Kabam is now on the right path for serving our customers. With the changes we’re making, our existing and many new customers will increasingly enjoy their experience with Kabam, making this an amazing journey for everyone.

Photo: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock