Samuel Turnmire

Solution Engineer by Day, Writer by Night; Always a Storyteller

If you'd rather just see the bullet points, dates, and all the "official" stuff, feel free to skip the story and check out my LinkedIn profile below. But why miss a good story?

The beginning

My professional career began in 1997 at Intermedia.  Intermedia turned into Charter Communications, and I worked there until 2004. During my tenure there I can clearly recall our office manager taking us to the back of the office. There she shared that we were going to be launching “something called a cable modem”. She mentioned that it’s something that our customers wanted, and we were going to start beta-testing in a local community.

At that time I knew very little about the high-speed internet. I went out and soaked up all of the information I could. In 2004, I wrapped up my career at Charter Communications in our Charter Business group. This role gave me exposure to the Business-to-Business environment and taught me the importance to quickly respond to customers’ needs.

Change of venue

Relying on my technical background, I started out taking phone calls for Elavon in 2004. A little over a year later I was working on the Software Technical Support (STS) Escalation team which allowed me to tackle more difficult challenges from our customers. This afforded me the opportunity to train the frontline & new hire team members. This also gave me exposure to Elavon’s senior leaders and put me in a position to work on several cross-functional teams. I was promoted to a leadership role over the STS team after completing a management mentorship program.

Something new

After a total of 14 years in the Customer Service world, I wanted something new. I moved from what I would term a fire-fighter into a fire-prevention role. In 2011 I switched to the Customer Experience team, specifically as a Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analyst. I had the opportunity to work with a great researcher who took the time to share her knowledge with me. I was promoted to Manager under her tutelage. Working with internal stakeholders and taking the lead on several key projects. Hundreds of research projects later, after speaking to tens of thousands of customers and serving hundreds of internal customers, I felt it was time for a change. Learning about customers’ needs and then helping an organization get better was great but I was missing the personal connection that one-on-one project management and working with individual provide.

Back to my roots

As it has often occured in my life, God had something lined up for me in another facet of our orgnization. I moved to Solutions & Delivery as a Solution Engineer. In this role I’m able to work direclty with customers and developers; aiding them design their solutions. Its a much more personal interaction with the people I serve at my vocation which mirrors the type of relationships I have in the rest of my life. I enjoy the pleasure of working with large corporations and small in house dev shops, each experience is unique and comes with its own challenges and rewards.

Looking to the future

Several mentors have shared their time with me along the way. Now I seek to be a mentor to others while continually improving my craft. If you have an interest in VoC or Data Visualization (DataViz), Solution Design, Problem Solving, or anything else; then please connect with me via LinkedIn or my Contact page. I think we learn better from each other as we discuss shared challenges, resources, and wins.

God bless.