Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Episode 238: In what appears to be a paradox, Verizon is accelerating its responsible AI journey through a measured, deliberate approach—ensuring its technology is primed to enhance customer experiences when they matter most.

Verizon isn't rushing to put AI in front of customers. Instead, they're deliberately building trust, refining data quality, and rigorously testing their AI tools internally. This methodical strategy might seem slow, but is accelerating their progress toward a future where AI can take on a bigger, more direct, customer-serving role.

In this episode, Brian Higgins, chief customer experience officer at Verizon, explains how their thoughtful AI tool development empowers and supports employees today while laying the groundwork for handling more customer interactions tomorrow. Tools like the Personal Research Assistant are being refined internally, allowing Verizon employees to build confidence in AI's capabilities before these technologies ever touch a customer.

According to Brian, Verizon has focused on "bringing humans and AI together to drive more yield." By ensuring employees are comfortable and proficient with AI tools, Verizon is building a strong AI foundation. His team embraces a deliberate learning approach vs. rushing to deploy technology for its own sake.

Learn more about Verizon's AI strategy and how building trustworthy internal tools enables smarter, faster, and more personalized customer experiences at scale.

Guest: Brian Higgins, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Verizon

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped List of Topics Covered:

• [02:15] How Verizon uses AI to empower employees and streamline operations
• [07:05] The strategy behind building AI tools like Verizon's Personal Research Assistant
• [12:45] Employee co-development and involvement in AI-driven transformations
• [19:30] Balancing short-term wins with long-term AI-driven business goals
• [25:50] Leadership commitment and the role of AI in transforming customer experience

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

• [02:45] "Customers don't only go into a store. They don't only go to verizon.com. They go all over the place and do all kinds of things with us all the time. You have to pull all that together into one view."
• [03:46]  "If the employees aren't happy with their overall experience, it's virtually impossible for them to make the customers happy."
• [05:30] "This is another tool in the toolbox, and the employees see [AI's value] right away."
• [11:15] "We had to reorganize everything ... but you can't simply go back to what you were doing before. You [have] to layer in something new."
• [22:45] "Our primary focus was on areas of pain for both employees and customers."
• [27:21] "This is about bringing humans and AI together to drive more yield. If we were a declining business, it might have a different model. But we're not a declining business. We're a growing business. We need to get more out of the current employees we have."
• [32:25] "Personalization is the material unlock—for us and our customers."
• [38:32] "We had some challenging times for a few years at Verizon. There was a recognition that we needed to reorganize how the whole company was structured. And we did that."

How does democratizing intelligence enhance productivity and drive smarter decision-making?

Murli Buluswar, Citigroup's Head of Analytics for the US Personal Bank, joins host Rob Markey to explore Citi's strategies for democratizing intelligence. Murli emphasizes building a conversational intelligence platform that enables proactive and reactive insights to reduce friction between curiosity, insight, and decision-making. This approach enhances organizational efficiency, boosts productivity, and sparks more complex problem-solving.

Taking a scientific approach, Citi treats customer experience as a key growth strategy. Murli shares how small improvements in customer experience can boost long-term retention and how investing in marketing to existing customers offers quick returns.

Citi's in-house Journey Analytics engine integrates financial transactions, customer information, external data, and internal algorithms to identify opportunities that enhance the customer experience. This innovative approach to decision-making—a mere dream five years ago—is now a reality, delivering significant customer value and better business results.

Guest: Murli Buluswar, Head of Analytics, US Personal Banking, Citigroup 

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback:

We'd love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: https://www.robmarkey.com/contact-rob

Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• (1:07) High-level business overview for context
• (1:53) The democratization of intelligence
• (4:49) Clarifying Murli's role vs. that of a chief data and analytics officer
• (6:25) The transformation and aggregation of disaggregated teams within Citi—and the need for a global solution
• (11:42) Customer health index
• (19:59) Framework to examine actions, forecast outcomes, and bring more intentionality to decision-making
• (32:30) Automated aberration detection
• (37:25) Career reflections and parting thoughts

Time-stamped list of notable quotes

• (4:21) "We are building a conversational intelligence platform that allows people to interact with data. There's both the proactive identification of things we might not have conceptualized. And there's the—dare I say—reactive component of, 'I have a question and I want to ask the engine.'"
• (6:00) "That's why this notion of democratization of intelligence is important to me. If I can enable the organization to whet its curiosity and its appetite independently, and then rely on my team as we get to the third and fourth layer of sophistication, then I've improved productivity and have freed up time and energy to focus on higher-order problem-solving."
• (7:19) "Perhaps about 80% of the team was focused on followership, 20% on partnership, and maybe essentially next to 0% on leadership."
• (10:30) "We ended up building a software tool that essentially democratized decision-making across finance, product marketing, and my team."

How does a global medical technology company maintain customer focus while managing operational challenges during a pandemic?

In this episode, Tony Ezell, executive vice president of North America and chief marketing officer for Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), explores how integrating customer feedback into your business strategy can maintain—and even enhance—customer loyalty by helping shape business strategies that are both robust and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Tony outlines how customer loyalty and adaptability are essential strategic tools in healthcare innovation. Together, we explore how BD leveraged a customer-centric approach to skillfully navigate operational continuity and customer satisfaction.

We also take a short trip down memory lane to connect the dots from our chat with Tony a decade ago, exploring the ongoing impact of customer experience and Net Promoter Systems on Tony's evolving career trajectory and leadership style.

Guest: Tony Ezell, executive vice president of North America and chief marketing officer, Becton, Dickinson and Company

Give Us Feedback:

We'd love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Send a note to host Rob Markey: https://www.robmarkey.com/contact-rob

Episode Highlights

• Introduction and Tony Ezell's background [01:59]
• The balance of operational responsibilities and customer-centricity [04:53]
• Covid-19's impact on customer loyalty at BD [05:50]
• Implementing customer feedback into business strategy [09:09]
• BD's challenges and opportunities [12:09]
• Tony's NPS work [15:07]
• Customer feedback scores [20:07]
• Partnerships [21:30]
• Connecting the dots between 2014 and today [26:22]
• Driving loyalty [27:46]

Quotable Quotes:

• "We have customers who were starting to decide whether they want to go away from us, who are now calling us to engage, to help them solve their problems again." [01:19]
• "I always think about what drives loyalty, and do we know what drives loyalty? And are we actually delivering on the things that matter most to our customers, that drive loyalty? And that's what we're operating on now." [04:33]
• "Our customers see us as one company, not as seven or nine different businesses. And now that we've done that, we're starting to make improvements." [12:38]

Additional Resources:

• Hear Tony's 2014 podcast with Rob Markey: "Breaking Down the 'Invisible Fence'"

Host: Rob Markey

USAA, which primarily serves members of the US military and their families, has some of the most loyal customers in business. How does the company do it?

USAA has organized itself around customer episodes—all the steps required to meet a customer's need—instead of products and services. The company has gone beyond identifying and tracking these crucial moments to assigning leaders to manage and enhance them, using Agile methods to speed change.

Rob Markey recently spoke with Julio Estevez-Breton, USAA's vice president of member and market insights, about the benefits the company is seeing from this radical approach and what it took to get there. 

Rob Markey talks to Charlie Chase, president and CEO of FirstService Brands, which provides property services such as painting, remodeling and storage design through its franchise network. Charlie started as a painting franchise owner in 1982 and went on to start CertaPro Painters, one of the company's brands. 

FirstService uses the Net Promoter System to collect feedback from not only customers, but also prospects who didn't choose his company's services. This allows FirstService's leaders to identify and address weak service experiences.  

Rob Markey welcomes back Fernando Cadena, director of associate engagement at Elwood Staffing Services, which places 25,000 temporary employees at companies across the country. Fernando has been leading the firm's Net Promoter efforts, which began six years ago when he first sought feedback from the company's associates. He has since expanded the company's feedback efforts to its customers. Net Promoter feedback has helped Elwood Staffing improve its customer experience, increase employee retention and build better relationships with the companies it serves. 

Year Up has helped thousands of young adults leave minimum wage jobs and forge meaningful careers. Its one-year program has served almost 20,000 people since 2000, and the vast majority end up in roles at major companies or in college.  

Delivering such strong results requires Year Up to balance the needs of its students, donors and the companies that provide critical support and internships. The organization has been using the Net Promoter System to gauge those relationships to ensure that everyone's needs are met. 

Garrett Warfield, senior director of research and evaluation, and Research and Evaluation Manager Jess Britt say that feedback is simply part of Year Up's culture. In this episode, Rob Markey talks to Garrett and Jess about Net Promoter's role in achieving the organization's mission.  

What do successful leaders have in common? It often comes down to two key traits: passion and perseverance. In other words, they have grit. 

In this episode, Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shares insights from her New York Times best-selling book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She's also the founder of Character Lab, a nonprofit that works to advance the science of character development.

When companies set out to dramatically improve their customer experience, they have many decisions to make—where to invest, which markets to go after, which touchpoints to enhance. And there are usually many opinions to consider for each choice. 

In this episode, Rob Markey talks to Bain Partner Jason Barro about how companies can use a roadmap to leadership to set priorities and find clarity as they work toward customer centricity. 

Rob Markey talks to Jackson Jeyanayagam, chief marketing officer at Boxed, an online grocery startup that's taking on traditional wholesalers by offering personalized service and convenient delivery. Jackson joined the company in 2016 after overseeing digital marketing at Chipotle Mexican Grill.