I work where customers, systems, and strategy collide: finding the signal inside complex problems, turning frontline insight into business action, and building mechanisms that make better experiences repeatable.
The best careers are not always linear. Sometimes they are built through curiosity, reinvention, and the courage to follow the signal from one room to the next.
Cape Town based customer experience and operational improvement leader. Certified Six Sigma Green Belt. Founder of the Creative Studio behind Murder Mystery 101, Engaged Teams 101 and Renovatio. Author of the Humanity At Work body of work. Builder of practical mechanisms that turn customer and frontline insight into action.
That gap is where the useful work usually begins: the process that looks fine on paper, the promise customers misunderstand, the metric that rewards the wrong behaviour, or the frontline workaround that quietly tells the truth. Across every chapter of my career, I have often played the same role: translating between what systems intend, what customers experience, and what teams need in order to close the gap.
Listen for the signal. Name the friction. Test a practical experiment. Build the mechanism. Measure what changed. Scale what proves useful. Curiosity gives the work its range; discipline gives it a spine.
That rhythm has followed me through customer escalations, tourism, entrepreneurship, product positioning, employee engagement, AI-assisted workflows, Lean Six Sigma projects, and creative work.
Useful clarity is not decorative. It helps people decide, act, improve, and build better systems without losing sight of the human being inside the process.
Lente Keyser · Working philosophyThe through-line is not a job title. It is a way of seeing: learn the system, read the human signal, build the bridge, and leave the work clearer than I found it.
Early tourism and government work taught me how large systems behave: funding routes, policy language, public-sector diplomacy, and the patience required to make a useful idea survive contact with bureaucracy.
AVIS sharpened my service instincts: reading tone, anticipating needs, recovering trust, and noticing how small details can change whether a customer feels processed or properly helped.
Tourism leadership taught me stakeholder influence, destination storytelling, local-area marketing, team retention, and the art of building momentum when resources are limited but expectations are ambitious.
Building the Creative Studio across Murder Mystery 101, Engaged Teams 101 and Renovatio taught me product creation, digital commerce, customer messaging, participatory experience design, and the discipline of listening directly to the market.
Amazon sharpened the operating muscle: root cause, mechanisms, Voice of the Customer, scalable improvement, data-informed storytelling, and the balance between empathy, policy judgement, and execution.
Across all of it, I keep returning to the same useful work: translating what organisations intend into what customers understand, employees can act on, and systems can sustain.
A selected view of the work behind the profile: customer experience mechanisms, operational improvement, product and programme development, stakeholder ecosystems, and creative business building.
Rebuilt a low-adoption recognition process into a faster, AI-assisted workflow, increasing submissions from 33 to 80 and reducing creation time by 93%.
Led cross-functional root-cause and process improvement work that reduced an out-of-spec operational defect by approximately 99%, improving customer outcomes across multiple marketplaces.
Built Be Part of the Mystery / Murder Mystery 101 from concept to market, selling more than 1,000 DIY games and delivering hundreds of hosted experiences.
Reduced staff turnover during Cape Town Tourism leadership work through mentoring, team motivation, stronger routines, and people-focused management.
Work across complex customer escalations, customer journey mapping, recurring defect signals, Voice of the Customer insight, executive-ready narratives, AI-assisted team workflows, Lean Six Sigma improvement, training at scale, and cross-functional mechanism design. This chapter sharpened a useful combination: curiosity disciplined by data, empathy shaped into mechanisms, and insight translated into action.
Built Be Part of the Mystery from a murder mystery catalogue into a broader creative studio spanning Murder Mystery 101, Engaged Teams 101 and Renovatio, with digital products, corporate experiences, team-engagement tools, customer communication, product positioning, SEO, venue partnerships, and international sales.
Led visitor service operations, local-area marketing, membership value, destination storytelling, retail strategy, responsible tourism, stakeholder forums, and distributed team leadership across a complex regional portfolio.
A practical combination of customer insight, operational improvement, leadership, programme design, product instinct, and the translator instinct that turns messy signals into useful action.
Voice of the Customer synthesis, escalation insight, customer journey mapping, trust recovery, friction analysis, and executive-ready storytelling.
Lean Six Sigma, root-cause analysis, pilots, process redesign, adoption loops, AI-assisted workflows, and scalable mechanisms.
Team leadership, programme ownership, stakeholder ecosystems, performance routines, strategic communication, and cross-functional execution.
Products, programmes, books, courses, workshops, digital tools, participatory experiences, and market-facing propositions built from real customer need.
The public work sits beside the professional work because both come from the same engine: curiosity, structure, and the desire to make complicated things usable.
Books on frontline problem solving, employee engagement, AI, measurement, judgement, de-escalation, and the future of service.
Find your Humanity At Work book ↗A frontline-focused course that turns Six Sigma thinking into detective-style problem solving for real customer service environments.
Explore the Udemy course ↗Essays, series, lone wolves, useful trouble, and live thinking about work, systems, customer truth, AI, leadership, and service.
Open Field Notes ↗Downloadable murder mystery games, hosted events, custom scripts, character logic, and participatory story design for private and corporate audiences.
Explore Murder Mystery 101 games ↗Ready-to-run digital kits that help teams recognise good work, solve problems, reflect on workload, surface friction, tell workplace stories, and experiment with AI.
Explore Engaged Teams 101 kits ↗Live, participatory team experiences that bring the Creative Lab's thinking into the room through conversation, serious play, and practical improvement.
Explore Renovatio ↗I am exploring senior opportunities where customer experience, operational improvement, programme leadership, and innovation meet. The strongest fit is work where complex customer or operational signals need to be understood, translated into strategy, and turned into scalable mechanisms, products, or programmes. I am based in Cape Town and open to South African, international, and relocation opportunities.
