Before Peggy Roe became Marriott International’s first Chief Customer Officer in 2023, Roe started her career in customer relations at Six Flags Over Georgia on the “I Spy Photo” team.
“I would stop people and take their picture and then tell them they could pick it up in those little key chains,” she tells Glamour. “I did that as my first job. The year after that, the company that employed me—it was a third party—asked me to run the business for them. So I hired all my friends as photographers, and we worked in the theme park. It was pretty fun. And I got to ride roller coasters after the park closed.”
Apart from being the coolest summer job ever for a teenager, this role also helped lay the foundation for Roe’s entire career. As she says, “It sort of foreshadowed hospitality. I worked at Ruby Tuesday’s, and I was a Walmart greeter. All the stuff, when you think about it now, it’s what I love to do today, but I didn’t know it at the time.”
But, what exactly does a Chief Customer Officer do? Roe oversees global consumer strategy across the more than 30 brands and nearly 9,600 properties owned by Marriott International across 143 countries. This includes leading brand strategy integration with Marriott Bonvoy, their customer loyalty program, and testing how to use data and AI innovation to improve customer experience.
“AI has sort of exposed for us that there’s so much in the industry that’s still manual; in order for our associates to deliver the experience, we have to do a lot of work,” she explains. “So we’re focused on making that simpler so that they can show up to customers in a more personal way and get to answers faster.”
After all, talking to a customer service representative who just gets it can be the difference between a five- and four-star experience. For the latest installment of Doing the Work, Roe talks about her hands-on approach to customer relations and why Marriott International is changing how and where they show up for customers.
Glamour: What is your typical morning routine? What time do you get up in the morning?
Peggy Roe: I’m going to start around 6-6:30 a.m., but my mornings are anything but routine. I traveled over a hundred nights last year. When I’m at home and when I’m traveling is quite different. If I’m at home, the first thing I do is pet my dog, wake the kids up, and make coffee. Those are my priorities. And then, very quickly, I actually wake up to many customer emails. I quickly try to sort through those and read what’s happening in the world and get that off to people who can handle the issues before I actually start my day.
How does that engagement with the customers early on allow you to show up better in your role?
I am very passionate about listening to customers in real time, and that’s why I read these emails. If you read five emails from customers every day, you have a pretty good idea of what’s happening in the world. Now that I’ve been in this job for a couple of years, I can see the trends of what’s happening throughout the year and the intensity. It allows me to be a better leader, more connected to what’s happening in the real world.
Throughout your previous jobs and different paths, how do you typically deal with rejection?
That’s a great question. I don’t deal with it very often, I guess, because I refuse to take no for an answer. There are a lot of no’s, right? Internally and externally. There are a lot of people saying, you can’t do this because of this, or for whatever reason. Usually, when they say no to me, I like to
challenge myself to turn it into a yes. I’m always trying to figure out, well, why is it? I don’t deal with no well.