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Episode 268: Companies have spent years designing websites, apps, stores, call centers, and all the other ways for customers to interact with them directly. What happens when the customer starts somewhere else entirely?

Mark Hammond, Senior Vice President for Core AI at Qualtrics, argues that AI agents could become a new front door to your business.

Consider car shopping. Today, you might ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI to compare models and narrow your choices. But there is no reason for the interaction to stop there. The AI could use the manufacturer's own configurator to help you choose options, calculate a price, and eventually take other actions, all without forcing you to leave the conversation and start over on the manufacturer's website.

A conversational interface is only part of the story. Mark makes an important distinction about what "agentic AI" actually means. The real change comes when an AI can use tools: search data, run an analysis, configure a product, execute a transaction, or call another specialized capability on your behalf.

That creates a second problem. The AI may be extraordinarily capable and still know surprisingly little about how your company really works.

"The generic foundation models know everything about everything except the specifics about your business," Mark says.

Your employees know your customers, products, terminology, policies, exceptions, and all the accumulated detail that comes from operating the business. Much of that knowledge is not sitting on the public Internet. And an AI cannot make full use of your tools and data if it does not understand that context.

That leads to a counterintuitive possibility. AI may not make every company more alike. As powerful general-purpose models become widely available, the knowledge unique to your organization could become more valuable, not less.

In this episode, Mark and Rob talk about what agentic AI actually means, how it may change the way customers interact with companies, how AI can uncover signals traditional customer-feedback methods miss, and why teaching AI how your business really works could become an important source of competitive advantage.

Guest: Mark Hammond, Senior Vice President for Core AI, Qualtrics

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

05:14 – Shifting from what an AI tool can do to the value a customer really needs

08:22 – Why AI-guided conversations could change traditional surveys

11:31 – What agentic AI is actually defined as

15:16 – How AI agents could become a new front door for customers

20:48 – What customer experience leaders should prepare for over the next few years

22:26 – Why general AI models still don't understand the specifics of your business

27:11 – Teaching AI how your business works

Notable Quotes

03:00: "What do you see a lot of in the data? Sometimes the things that you really want to focus on aren't popping because they're common. They're popping because, wait, that's not what we would expect to see."

16:00: "If I'm coming in and … I'm shopping for a car, how am I going to do my research for shopping for a car? It used to be that you would go to a review site, go to the individual manufacturer's websites, and you'd start to dig in and do your research. And nowadays you'll go to an agent, and you'll ask it questions, and it will do some of that browsing for you."

21:00: "How do I avail myself of your product or your service? How do I do it in a research fashion? How do I do it in an ordering fashion? Increasingly, I'm going to want to do that not just through your app, or your website, or on the phone, or in person at a kiosk. I might actually just want to do that because I'm talking to one of these natural language agents."

24:00: "The generic foundation models know everything about everything except the specifics about your business."

28:00: "Once you've taught the models how your business works, using your agents and your tools that you have made available, is way more useful than just querying something generically. And so then you get this rich tapestry where everybody's agents can talk to everybody else's agents and life gets better. But that also is very different from the apocalypse that everyone is envisioning, that all of the things that we do will be subsumed by AI. No. Actually, AI is dependent on the things that you do to deliver the value we all want."

Episode 267: API Heat Transfer was responding to requests for quotation when, according to research in one of its priority segments, buyers had already decided who they trusted. The manufacturer of heat exchangers had strong products and deep engineering expertise. It understood much less about how customers chose a supplier for a particular order.

It would have been easy to miss the gap in understanding. API's revenue grew with healthy margins. Some customers had been buying for decades. But familiarity didn't necessarily give customers enough reason to defend API when a competitor offered a lower price or faster delivery.

Daniel Herrmann, API's Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy, joins Rob Markey to explore how the company is changing its approach. Historically, a customer provided a specification, API built and shipped the product, and the relationship largely paused until the next order or service problem. Their research revealed how much happened while API wasn't in the conversation.

 "We realized we were leaving value on the table," by not maintaining the relationship after the sale, but before another RFQ had been requested, Daniel explains. "More importantly, we were not there for our customers when [it] mattered."

Getting involved earlier required more than scheduling meetings. Account managers agreed that talking with customers was a good idea. But without an order or technical question to discuss, they weren't sure how to make those conversations useful. API introduced regular reviews with larger customers. They developed a global sales development program to help the API team discuss customers' priorities, alternatives, and business plans. As Daniel puts it, "Investing in the relationship is selling."

API also began broadening whose feedback it sought. Procurement's satisfaction with a shipment could reveal little about the maintenance team's experience after a year of operating the equipment. A new relationship survey reaches across decision makers to help API understand what transaction scores alone could miss. Daniel shares with Rob that his focus now is creating what he calls a "central nervous system" for understanding customers and turning stronger relationships into a repeatable way of doing business. 

The work is still underway. Rob and Daniel examine the test ahead: whether these changes will lead customers to buy more, give API a greater share of their spending, and generate more profitable business.

Guest: Daniel Herrmann, Vice President, Corporate Development & Strategy, API Heat Transfer

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

02:01 – The "invisible infrastructure" behind data centers, power systems, and everyday life

09:19 – API's traditional product-first, transaction-focused model

11:00 – The difference between genuine loyalty and customer inertia

13:33 – Why some customers were leaving 

21:38 – How aftermarket service can strengthen loyalty and customer lifetime value

26:16 – Building customer relationships when there is no order on the table

27:18 – Why "investing in the relationship is selling"

30:03 – Moving beyond transactional NPS to measure overall relationship health

Notable Quotes

11:00: "We weren't asking whether this growth was based on inertia or genuine loyalty. And by inertia, I mean the way we had always done things and customers always engaging in a certain way. We never dug into that because everything felt good."

13:50: "We had a very consistent finding that the real purchase decision happens before the RFQ, and we were in this RFQ stage. And we didn't really understand the buying stages because we never had to previously. But when the purchase decision happens, we're not actually in the room, and so vendor selection is effectively determined before any procurement process begins."

22:02: "And there's a real parallel to API's business. Historically, we were not holding these service contracts, and we were not maintaining continuity. So every time a customer needed something after our initial sale, we were starting from scratch. And that really limits how much loyalty you can build, and it limits your share of lifetime value that the customer represents."

27:18: "Investing in the relationship is selling. That's part of the process, and that's how you evolve out of a transactional mindset. It's: you're not an order taker, you're a partner, you're a consultative partner."

37:12: "Frankly, what drew me to API was this gap that I recognized immediately where we have 150 years of history, over 120 engineers, more than a million installations, and one of the most comprehensive portfolios. But we hadn't really built the centralized commercial infrastructure to match that, and, you know, I always look at that as a central nervous system to understanding your customers."

Episode 266: In Bain's early 2026 Consumer Banking Benchmark, provided by NPS Prism, Chime had the highest NPS among the companies we measured. That raised a basic question: How does a financial technology company serving people who live paycheck to paycheck earn greater loyalty than institutions built around customers with much higher balances?

Sam Krause is the Senior Vice President of Operations and Member Experience at Chime. As she explains, Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. "We are a FinTech. We partner with bank partners behind the scenes who hold all our deposits."

Most Chime members already had bank accounts. The important distinction is between having access to an account and having a product designed around the way you actually live. Chime operates without branches, giving it lower fixed costs than traditional banks. Members who qualify can receive their paychecks up to two days early or use a free feature called SpotMe for up to $200 in fee-free overdrafts.

Those benefits cost money and expose Chime to risks many traditional banks avoid. But about two-thirds of members use Chime as their primary account. Most of the company's revenue comes from interchange on daily card use. Helping members get access to their money sooner can increase usage, strengthening the economics that make those benefits possible.

Sam also explains how Chime tries to turn "member obsession" into an operating discipline. NPS is one of the company's three highest-level goals. For example, competitive benchmarking exposed a gap in funding and transfers that internal data alone had not made urgent enough. Chime then combined the NPS Prism benchmark data with direct member feedback to identify the specific problems and change its priorities.

The consequences can be intensely personal. Sam describes a member named Carmen who used SpotMe to put gas in her car so she could reach chemotherapy appointments scheduled shortly before her payday. Her story illustrates why a short-term liquidity problem that might look minor to a product team can matter enormously to the person experiencing it.

In this episode, learn how Chime preserves member obsession as it grows and leverages better outcomes for members into greater usage, loyalty, and growth.

Guest: Sam Krause, Senior Vice President, Operations & Member Experience

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

00:52 – Cutting insurance claim resolution from weeks to minutes shapes Sam's approach to customer experience

01:28 – Aligning the business model with what is best for customers

02:51 – Designing financial products for the two-thirds of Americans living paycheck to paycheck

03:25 – Giving members paychecks up to two days early and up to $200 in fee-free overdraft

05:40 – Using primary account relationships and interchange to make the economics work

08:03 – Taking risks traditional banks avoid to give members faster access to their money

09:04 – Distinguishing access to banking from helping customers gain financial control

12:13 – Designing simpler money-management tools for the 80% who are not natural planners

14:14 – Finding the two customer segments where the products have the strongest fit

18:38 – Seeing simplicity and ease of use emerge as the biggest drivers of promoters

19:41 – Helping members increase credit scores by 30 points on average over eight months

22:17 – Scaling customer obsession through employee bootcamps and direct customer listening

24:00 – Making NPS one of three company-level goals

30:30 – Using competitive benchmarks to prioritize funding and transfer problems

32:57 – Building trust in a digital model with 24/7 access to human support

39:30 – Hiring "hungry, humble, and smart" employees as the company scales

41:30 – Embedding company values into employee evaluation and coaching

Notable Quotes

08:03 "We're willing to take that risk on behalf of our members."

09:04 "There's a difference between having access and having something that is actually helping you gain control of your finances and reach your financial goals and make financial progress."

15:52 "We figured it out. And it turns out when you can crack that, you gain a very large and very loyal member base."

26:31 "You shouldn't be surprised that senior executives lose interest in something like this if you are not doing the work to prepare it."

28:36 "At the end of the day, it's about the member perception and the member view."

32:36 "We have to do more than a traditional bank would because that's what our members need."

Additional Resources about Chime:

How Chime is Leading the Way in Customer Loyalty: https://www.bain.com/insights/how-chime-is-leading-the-way-in-customer-loyalty-snap-chart/

What it Takes to Build the AI-Native Modern Bank: https://www.bain.com/insights/what-it-takes-to-build-the-ai-native-modern-bank/

How Analytics Can Deepen Banks' Customer Relationships: https://www.bain.com/insights/how-analytics-can-deepen-banks-customer-relationships/ 

Episode 265: Ryan Fuller started questioning online reviews after two terrible stays at highly-rated vacation rentals. Both had 4.9-star ratings. After Ryan posted negative reviews, the people behind each listing independently offered him £200 to change his review to five stars. 

"It was disappointing," he said, "that clearly many people took them up on this offer." On the flip side, the experience explained something that had been bothering him for a while: Places with thousands of positive reviews could still turn out to be terrible.

So Ryan, founder of Larrocos Labs and a serial entrepreneur, decided to investigate. 

He built an AI system that has now analyzed hundreds of thousands of reviews covering roughly 22,000 restaurants. One example of what he found: In a focused analysis of 4,000 restaurants, about 70% showed at least one unusual review pattern. Some had sudden bursts of five-star reviews. He found one case in which roughly 100 reviews had been submitted within a two-minute period. Others featured suspiciously similar language, unusual concentrations of reviews mentioning particular employees, or reviewers whose histories raised questions about their credibility.

None of that proves a review is fake. As Ryan explains, the goal is not to establish absolute truth, but to determine how much confidence we should place in what we are seeing.

Ryan discusses what this means for consumers, platforms, and anyone relying on AI-generated information. He also explores an alternative: systems that show their work, identify potential sources of distortion, and tell us how confident they are rather than presenting uncertain conclusions as facts.

He sums it up well: "I think we're living in a world where understanding what is real or what is true is going to become one of the most difficult problems for humans to deal with."

Guest: Ryan Fuller, Founder, Larracos Labs 

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

00:39 – How two 4.9-star vacation rentals led Ryan to question online reviews

03:11 – Why hours spent researching restaurants became a problem worth solving

04:49 – Using AI to automate the process of assessing restaurant reviews

05:26 – Building a database of 22,000 restaurants in six months with 300 lines of code

06:15 – Finding unusual review patterns across 70% of a 4,000-restaurant dataset

07:20 – Identifying sudden clusters of ~100 reviews for one restaurant

08:10 – Treating suspicious review activity as a question of confidence

08:40 – Using repeated staff names and customer incentives as review signals

09:12 – Detecting reviews that describe offers of money for positive ratings

11:05 – Assessing reviewer credibility through history, photos, and detail

12:11 – Building an AI product that checks authenticity and extracts review data

13:01 – Evaluating restaurant experiences across 36 distinct dimensions

Notable Quotes

18:00 "I think with AI, it's like rocket fuel, where things can be done at incredible scale and with high degrees of believability in ways that were never true before. I think we're living in a world where understanding what is real or what is true will become one of the most difficult problems for humans to deal with on even just everyday stuff like picking a restaurant."

26:00 "Platforms that start to be more transparent about sources and degree of confidence and potential risks for any information they're providing will become more popular."

28:00 "It's almost just like an arms race. There's no sudden advance in tech or approach that's gonna solve the problem. I'm just pontificating here; I don't have good answers, but I do think this is maybe the problem of our time."

33:00 "The devious thing about AI is that it sounds so credible; we're going through a transitional phase where we're not as well attuned to what the tells are when confidence isn't there."

37:00 "I always try to show the work. One thing we do is we have a letter grade that we assign each restaurant for overall quality. So, it can be an A, a B-plus, whatever. And the very first thing underneath the score, the overall letter, is why it got a B-plus."

Additional Resources

• Read Ryan Fuller's analysis of unusual patterns and manipulation in London restaurant reviews: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryantfuller_london-ai-share-7399118135099973633-Iquu/
• See Ryan Fuller's restaurant data visualizations and discussion of how platform algorithms shape restaurant visibility: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryantfuller_datavisualization-londonlife-urbananalytics-ugcPost-7404913381431844864-cM7l/
• Here's the article referenced about how a man created his own top-rated Dulwich restaurant: I Made My Shed the Top Restaurant on TripAdvisor: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor/

Episode 264: BARK maintains more than 800 subscription price points because it has promised customers that their price will not increase as long as they remain subscribers. CEO Matt Meeker explains why honoring that commitment matters, even when tariffs, public-market expectations, and pressure on margins make it costly.

Matt started BarkBox in 2011 after struggling to find breed-appropriate toys for his large Great Dane, Hugo, in New York City pet stores. The original idea was simple: Send dog owners a monthly box of toys and treats selected for their dog's size. The first shipment consisted of 78 boxes. With no paid marketing, the business grew through word of mouth. 

Customers soon wanted to buy more of the products their dogs loved. That led BARK into individual product sales and, after Target approached the company in 2017, nationwide retail. BARK now sells through more than 50,000 retail doors globally. But expansion came with a cost: Retail gave BARK far less information about who bought its products and why.

BARK became a public company in June of 2021. Matt describes how investor expectations shifted his team's attention toward quarterly financial measures that could conflict with investments in long-term customer value. 

That conflict became urgent when Matt returned after 16 months away from the CEO role. The company had lost $58 million in the prior years and burned through nearly $200 million in cash. After a three-year effort, BARK reached $5 million in positive EBITDA, only to confront a potential $145 million tariff headwind.

BARK looked for other ways to absorb those costs while honoring the price and value it had promised to subscribers. That commitment creates real complexity: The company's engineers must maintain more than 800 legacy prices, including one early subscriber who still pays just $16 a month.

Matt explains why he accepts that burden. BARK asks customers to commit to the company, so he believes the company should match that commitment. More broadly, BARK's experience shows why companies often benefit when they protect customer value, even when conventional financial measures cannot capture the full return.

Guest: Matt Meeker, CEO, founder, and executive chairman, BARK

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics 

01:44 – What BARK does, from BarkBox the subscription to BARK Air the travel service

04:51 – How Matt's Great Dane, Hugo, sparked the idea for BarkBox

06:25 – How their first 78 boxes grew through word of mouth

11:04 – Expanding beyond subscriptions and entering Target stores

18:31 – Why BARK went public in 2021 and the importance of financial independence

26:32 – Balancing investor expectations with long-term customer value

35:32 – Responding to tariffs while protecting longtime subscribers

Notable Quotes

[06:00] "Frankly, we didn't expect anything. We thought maybe there might be a hundred customers out there who subscribed to this thing, we'll learn how a commerce business works, and won't that be fun? That was our ambition: to build something fun and make some people and their dogs happy."

 [7:00] "When we started, there were about 38 million households in the US with dogs. Today, that's about 66 million. So that grew really fast."

[11:00] "When people said, 'My dog loved this [toy],' it often was followed with, 'Where do I get more of this?' And so that was just an easy leap of us saying, 'OK, here's where you can get more: right here at our shop.'"

[15:00] "We went to the lengths of hiring, basically, spies, photographers, and people on the ground to go in. Mystery shoppers, essentially. Watch the aisles, interview customers, and talk about: Why are you buying that thing? What brought you in here? Why is this appealing to you? Because we were just so hungry for information about what's going on in that environment. And that, to me, is still the most difficult part of the retail experience."

Additional Resources

• We discuss another subscription service, Birchbox, on Customer Confidential episode #34: https://baincompany.libsyn.com/ep-43-how-birchbox-unwraps-customer-data-to-open-up-delight | Learn more about Birchbox here: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/insights/birchbox-unboxing-a-fantastic-customer-experience-nps-podcast/ 
• Read about when BARK became public here: https://www.gunder.com/en/news-insights/client-news/barkbox-announces-it-will-become-a-public-company-through-merger-with-northern-star-acquisition-corporation 
• Read the email BARK sent to subscribers about tariffs impacting their business: https://bark.co/blogs/bark-post/tariffs-barkbox?srsltid=AfmBOor9u9SYva-tQuvmQGao4IbUBs89Hc_t1vvGEvfzASQiIAL4S1dS

Episode 263: What does it feel like to go into space? To rocket past the Kármán line, float in perfect silence, and return to Earth—all in 11 minutes? Blue Origin's astronauts experience an expensive thrill ride: part theme park roller coaster, part life-altering pilgrimage. In this episode, Allie Kuehner, a Blue Origin astronaut from the New Shepard flight NS-33, relives the intense pause before liftoff, the three-G climb that somehow feels slow, and the instant gravity disappears. Joining her is Sarah Phelps, Blue Origin's former managing director of astronaut and customer experience, who reveals how her team turns that fleeting flight into a story people cherish for life.

We take a behind-the-scenes look at Blue Origin's astronaut training program. It's curated, detail-oriented, and built to guide participants through an emotionally charged moment of awe. We unpack how a month-long window after Allie first decided to go into space narrows down to an intentionally designed two-day training sprint—one that forges six strangers into a crew that is forever changed upon their return to Earth.

We explore, through Sarah's lens, what makes the experience meaningful via her design choices, such as why hearing that audible launch countdown is a moment you never forget. And how the first flight-suit try-on became an unexpected, emotionally charged moment of emphasis for astronauts and their loved ones. Sarah made many experience tweaks, as she explains:

"We were going into the debrief, and I said, 'But I didn't hear the "go" poll.' … The answer was, 'Well, the astronauts don't need to hear that; that's not part of it. They can just hear the countdown.' I said, 'But I want to hear, "INCO go. Capsule go. Booster go. CAPCOM go. Crewmen go." I want to hear the flight director, "New Shepard is go for launch." … And just because that's never been done before and astronauts on previous vehicles didn't need to hear it, my astronauts … need to feel that reverberation in their whole being that we are go for launch."

Allie and Sarah also share lessons any brand can use to choreograph peak emotion without sacrificing operational precision. And they cover what the future of space tourism looks like, such as why going to the space station just for a weekend may become a reality within our lifetimes.

Guest: Allie Kuehner, Blue Origin Astronaut, New Shepard flight NS-33, conservationist, and board member of Nature is Nonpartisan

Guest: Sarah Phelps, VP, Games Hospitality, United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, formerly Blue Origin's Managing Director of Customer Experience

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

[00:06] Seven-second rumble before motion and the surprise of a slow ascent
[00:09] Capsule-booster separation and sudden silence
[00:12] First look at Earth from above
[00:14] The astronaut experience inspiration and reimagining astronaut training for modern civilians
[00:16] Design brief and making 11 minutes meaningful without formal astronaut prep
[00:18] Managing human variables like pausing the launch for final phone calls to family
[00:19] Adding the audible "go" poll for emotional impact
[00:22] Flight-suit reveals and custom bomber jackets as milestone markers
[00:23] Humanizing an engineering culture and lessons CX leaders can mirror
[00:25] Looking ahead to Sarah's vision of weekend trips to orbit

Notable Quotes

[00:00:02] "You're going faster than a speeding bullet. You go through three Gs, but you don't even feel the three Gs, because there's so much else going on. You're looking out the window, it's so loud, and then all of a sudden the rocket and the capsule dislodge from one another. And it goes to perfect silence."
[00:00:48] "We're giving people an opportunity to go 62 miles above the earth, and you know that somehow, some way, that experience is going to change you, and it's going to change how you see the world moving forward. For me, it's how do we build an experience around that?"
[00:05:34] "One of the most surprising things to me was the ascent—how beautifully slow it felt."
[00:06:57] "The first time you get to look out these windows down at Earth, you just see this delicate, finite, beautiful planet. And in that moment, you just realize how connected we all are."
[00:09:41] "This thing is an 11-minute flight. It's basically a half-million-dollar roller coaster ride."

Additional Resources

Watch a full replay of Allie's Blue Origin New Shepherd Mission NS-33 flight here: https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-shepard-ns-33-mission

Episode 262: What happens when a cold-pressed juice passion with humble beginnings in your own kitchen counter suddenly meets nationwide demand? Complications arise that demand fast decision making.

Meet Crunchy Hydration CEO and founder Megan Riggs, whose company scaled at lightning speed, sending her into problem-solving mode. (The memorable company name, she says, is because her early carrot juices were too pulpy/crunchy for people's liking.)

There was one key problem with scaling their product for a broad consumer audience. "With cold-pressed juices, you cannot wholesale unless you high-pressure pasteurize or heat pasteurize. I had a ton of stores reaching out to carry it, but I couldn't sell it to them," Megan said. So, Crunchy Hydration made a series of smart choices. They swapped fragile glass bottles for shelf-stable cans and kept pivoting in lockstep with consumer feedback. They unlocked national distribution after moving from perishable juice to functional sparkling water.

Next, they saw velocities spike to 150 units per store per week—nearly 20 times the buyer's benchmark.

They weighed pay-to-play math like $5,000 per SKU per store slotting fees or free-filling 12,000 cases across 4,000 outlets. They learned distributors wouldn't merchandise for you and that maintaining relationships was imperative. To succeed, they needed to choose a leaner path.

Today, they're a coast-to-coast operation with just 12 employees. They juggle DTC subscriptions, retail velocities, and cash-flow gaps that can stretch four months. The result? A community-driven beverage that competes on flavor, cultural relevance, function, and customer devotion, all in one.

Guest: Megan Riggs, CEO and Founder, Crunchy Hydration

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Timestamped Topics

[00:00] Early juicing company origins and the product's shelf-life problem

[00:03] Switching to shelf-stable functional cans

[00:07] Pricing trust at $2.50 a can: too expensive?

[00:12] Their first big grocery win and stock-out lessons

[00:20] Slotting fees vs. free-fill economics

[00:25] How their lean, 12-person team managed national reach

[00:29] Picking partners and saying no to bad money

[00:31] The new vision for 2026 and the evolution of the ongoing direct-to-consumer push

Notable Quotes

[00:01] "I wanted to create something on another level, from the flavor portfolio to the smoothness that you're tasting. People were spending hundreds of dollars a month on their juices because it truly was different."

[6:00] "I'm grateful that I have access to clean water, and I take a sip. And even just those five seconds of mindfulness, it's going to change the trajectory of your day, plus all of the benefits that are actually in this water. You really will feel different."

[00:16]  "Our net promoter scores of 10 are the people really diving into being the brand ambassadors that are then talking about how Crunchy is part of their identity."

[00:38]  "I did everything from the start with Crunchy, from driving the forklift, being the delivery person, learning how to build websites, doing socials, creating graphics. I learned all of that, but I also know what I created was not what was going to help us get to the next level."

[00:40] "We're big believers in time-blocking and knowing what metrics define success before you even start."

Episode 261: What if you could use AI-generated customer twins to test value propositions, pricing, and demand before you go to market?

That is the idea my Bain colleague Andy Pierce is exploring. Synthetic customers can help teams move faster, pressure test offers, and simulate trade-offs much faster and at far lower cost than traditional research alone. Says Andy, "You can do things at half the time and a third the cost. You can be a hero internally by helping your business functions get to success better, faster, cheaper."

But synthetic customers can also mislead you if you treat them like magic. Left ungrounded, large language models tend to be overly positive, can drift over time, and may reflect bad data rather than real human behavior. 

To put theory into practice, we'll explore a 24-month telco case study that ran in parallel with a synthetic panel and hit ~85% overlap with human survey responses after confronting both bias and brown-nosing behavior.

Guest: Andy Pierce, Partner, Bain & Company
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast here: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Time-Stamped Topics:

00:00 — Value proposition basics and the design target question
00:05 — Pricing as the most natural lever and why finance often doubts research
00:09 — Early LLM experiments
00:10 — Telco case study
00:12 — Over-positivity and tuning to an ~85% survey overlap
00:14 — Quarter-by-quarter improvement
00:35 — Rational vs. experiential vs. emotional 

Time-Stamped Quotes:

[32:00] "We've already started to see a world where I can train an LLM on a new idea, develop a new value proposition—or an extension to an existing value proposition—and instead of trying to predict the research outcome, I'm trying to predict actual sales in the marketplace."
[37:00] "It's not good enough to just create the persona … you still have to test against real humans."
[38:00] "Synthetic customers are here to stay. It's not a fad. And clients are already using them to build a competitive advantage."

Resources Referenced on Today's Show:

• Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People — https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109
• Simulating Human Behavior with AI Agents — https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai-policy-brief-simulating-human-behavior-with-ai-agents.pdf
• How Synthetic Customers Bring Companies Closer to the Real Ones — https://www.bain.com/insights/how-synthetic-customers-bring-companies-closer-to-the-real-ones/
• UXAgent: A System for Simulating Usability Testing of Web Design with LLM Agents — https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09407v2
• The Rise of Synthetic Respondents in Market Research — https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/education/2024/the-rise-of-synthetic-respondents
• Synthetic Users: If, When, and How to Use AI-Generated "Research" — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/synthetic-users/
• A Tale of Two Identities: An Ethical Audit of Human and AI-Crafted Personas — https://arxiv.org/html/2505.07850v1
• Luxury in Transition: Securing Future Growth — https://www.bain.com/insights/luxury-in-transition-securing-future-growth/

Episode 260: When customers must re-explain the same problem, reopen old tickets, and chase for follow-ups, a shiny new tool won't help unless it's connected to support or sales history. How can leaders act on real signals to build shared memory and fix the root cause?

Jeannie Walters, founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, and John Abraham, a customer experience consultant, believe that most customer frustration isn't about a single moment. It's about when someone becomes worn down by repeated fixes, handoffs, and follow-ups. When organizations chase shiny tools without a clear execution plan, it's harder to agree on what "great" customer experience actually means.

Learn how AI-assisted listening (for things like tone, behavior, and patterns) surfaces exhaustion signals that surveys miss, why sentiment analysis becomes a dead end without action, and how to replace tool-chasing with cross-functional fixes that stick. We'll also cover the danger of becoming a "company with no memory," and the simple prompt leaders can use to ask, "What can we learn … without a survey?"

The goal? When you stop celebrating case-by-case resolutions, you eliminate those frustrating repetitions that drain trust.

Guests: Jeannie Walters, CEO, Experience Investigators, and John Abraham, Customer Experience Consultant

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Timestamped Topics

[00:00] Shiny tools derail real outcomes

[00:02] Learn without a survey mindset

[00:04] The company with no memory

[00:07] AI listening, beyond survey bubbles

[00:12] Repetition, not incidents, drives exhaustion

[00:14] Trade-offs beat vague promises

[00:18] Redefine success beyond scores

Notable Quotes

[00:02] Jeannie: "The siloed nature of organizations is still here, and that's just the nature of how big organizations work. What I am more excited about is that it's not just about that holistic idea, but really helping individuals understand where they fit."

[00:07] John: "The big debate [used to be] around driver questions and how long should the survey be. Now, the debate is much more, 'What can I learn without a survey?'"

[00:08] John: "It's one thing to take a large data set and say,  'Okay, anybody can log in and play around with it.' It's very different when you see data, and you work in a frontline team or at a location."

[00:15] Jeannie: "We have to say, 'This is who we are, and this is the promise we're making to you.' If we say we're gonna be all things to all people, we're saying we're nothing to no one."

Additional Resources

- Jeannie reveals how any leader can win with her proven method to drive performance, retention, and revenue by making customer experience their greatest competitive advantage in her upcoming book, Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations.

Episode 259: How do you prevent first-trip hassles such as a room not being ready at check-in, Wi-Fi outages, or service delays from discouraging first-time customers from returning?

Today's guest, Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation at Kobie Marketing, says that after a slightly negative first trip, customers are 80% less likely to return. Kobie—a technology platform that builds and runs rewards and loyalty programs—is solving this. They use a "journey atlas" to read social signals, spot subtle first-trip frictions, and then trigger targeted offers or fixes. They model lift and rewards liability so that investment can follow behavior change. Journey maps freeze a tense customer moment. A live atlas shows where small failures block the next purchase and coordinates fixes across channels.

Inside the business, spending becomes about precision. Simulators forecast lift, break-even, and profit impact by segment and moment, so finance are able to see trade-offs before money moves. The payoff? Practical programs that grow trips, expand categories, and raise lifetime value.

Guest: Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation, Kobie Marketing

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback. Help us improve the podcast here: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Time-Stamped Topics:

• [00:03] First-trip friction that kills repeat purchases, with examples and fixes
• [00:10] Personalization that simplifies the customer experience
• [00:12] Emotional Loyalty Scoring, habit, status, and reciprocity
• [00:21] Coordinating recovery across store, app, and site for the same customer
• [00:23] Using precision to avoid incentivizing the wrong customer base
• [00:27] Designing redemptions to expand baskets, categories, and trip frequency
• [00:31] Accounting for redemption cost and liability without derailing good decisions
• [00:34] Using simulators to forecast lift and break-even before spending a dollar
• [00:36] The moment modeling convinces finance to reallocate the budget

Time-Stamped Quotes:

• 00:05 — "What we're trying to do at scale is identify those moments that matter and those micro-moments that then lead to a negative or positive experience. Because we want to amplify the positives and we want to make sure that we intercept the negative ones."
• 00:07 — "I think there's been a broader inclination to say, 'Hey, if it's below a certain amount, people don't care.' And this is where personalization becomes really important. If I get delayed checking into my hotel room and I have to go to the next meeting and I don't have time to put my stuff down, ten minutes matters."
• 00:08 —  "Data-wise, we're always trying to break down customers' interactions [and] rewards into a series of metadata, into a series of features, so that we can make them more explainable at scale."
• 00:13 — "If personalization is done well, the experience from a customer perspective should be very simple. It should be guided. It should be deliberate."

Episode 258: How did two new leaders turn angry customer calls into executive promises to earn customer trust and advocacy? 

Charlon McIntosh, Chief Customer Operations Officer, and Melissa Pint, Chief Digital Information Officer, both joined Frontier Communications on the same day in 2021. 

At the time, Frontier faced both bankruptcy and a reputation crisis: Millions of customer complaint calls were pouring in, with only one way to reach the company. Charlon and Melissa inherited a brand that customers didn't trust. To fix it, they built a system where complaints trigger commitments, leaders face weekly scrutiny, and new product and feature launches aren't approved until they are absolutely ready.

"Our CEO, Nick Jeffery, outlined a very simple four-point strategy for us," says Charlon. "Build fiber, sell fiber, improve the customer experience, and improve our operational efficiency." In alignment with these goals, Frontier treated millions of monthly calls as a focus group, and started by redesigning its messy billing process. They used data on call reasons and complaint volumes to guide a weekly, two-hour "earning customer loyalty" meeting across departments. One Friday at a time, owners identified fixes, rather than providing chest-beating updates. 

Charlon and Melissa's collaborative relationship is an enviable example of cross-functional teamwork. They finish each other's sentences and share a single scorecard. "There is no IT strategy," Melissa says. "There is only the business strategy."

"And customers tell us if it worked," adds Charlon.

A digital-first agenda became the default. Customers now use chatbots for routine tasks, with a one-tap handoff to a person. Progress runs on shared operations and IT metrics, with the CEO actively observing from the customers' viewpoint, even using customer tools himself, to identify adjustments they could implement in real time. 

"We were able to shift adoption from nearly a hundred percent of our transactions being handled in a call center to today, where less than 20% of our interactions are assisted between chat and phone calls," Charlon says. "The point isn't deflection. It's a faster, better answer."

Guests: Charlon McIntosh, Chief Customer Operations Officer, Frontier Communications, and Melissa Pint, Chief Digital Information Officer, Frontier Communications

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Topics

• [00:02:00] Frontier's turnaround mandate and four-point strategy
• [00:05:00] How experience assurance sets standards and shapes launches
• [00:07:00] How call volume helps spot customer experience opportunities
• [00:09:00] How a weekly  "earning customer loyalty" forum drives executive action 
• [00:10:00] Frontier's prioritization of billing and communications cleanup
• [00:18:00] How digital channels rapidly shift interactions
• [00:23:00] How their chatbot resolves most chats by understanding intent
• [00:27:00] Diving into results experienced thus far and record-low churn
• [00:39:00] Issuing a no-go on a marquee launch to prioritize quality
• [00:45:00] Looking ahead to the future of data and AI 

Notable Quotes

• [00:08] "The interactions with our customers every day in our contact channels, those are like mini focus groups. They're telling us what's confusing, what's broken, what we've done wrong, where they need help, and where they need additional support. We used the reasons customers were calling as our initial guide to say what's happening."
• [10:00]  "As a care leader, I have the data. I can tell my partners across the organization where we are making poor decisions and where we have low quality. It's the ability to get them to listen to me. That's what makes the difference in my team's success and our ability to improve the customer experience."
• [15:00]  "As a turnaround company, since we did need to turn around pretty quickly, we did not have the luxury of completely changing core legacy backend systems. … Our strategy was to create a layer on top of them that would bring systems together."
•  [18:00] "A digital-first strategy means things are going to start being automated, and you put things in your customer's hands; you're giving more power to your users to have automated tasks. That drives different traffic in your backend systems—different traffic patterns—that backend systems need to accommodate."

Episode 257: How do you earn the next banking customer's loyalty, one moment at a time? Focus on what customers choose, and why.

According to John Finley, head of marketing, technology, and innovation at BMO, a bank operating across North America, customer loyalty shifts with context. His team takes signals—what customers say—and wires them back into the very next touch. They then test whether the micro-fix actually changes the next behavior. The goal is to earn the next choice—and the corresponding interaction.

To make this happen, BMO runs targeted interventions wherever friction points show up. For example, "Customers who don't know who their banker is are much more likely to be a detractor," explains John. To address this, BMO will reintroduce the customer to their banker and then track whether that specific change moves the next response.

It's a practical and simple playbook: close rapport gaps, personalize the next contact, and measure whether advocacy—not just willingness to recommend alone—drives ongoing loyalty.

Guest: John Finley, Managing Director, Head of Marketing, Technology, & Innovation, BMO

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Topics

• [00:03:00] Feeding survey input back into the next interaction
• [00:03:00] Use case on reintroducing the banker to close detractor risk
• [00:04:00] Causation vs. correlation: designing tests that read the next response
• [00:05:00] Post-acquisition noise: how integration affects signals
• [00:06:00] A multi-bank reality of how loyalty shifts according to the situation
• [00:07:00] Loyalty (the emotional) compared to retention (the behavioral)
• [00:09:00] Advocacy and "willing to recommend"; why formal referrals fall short
• [00:10:00] Don't chase more surveys; mine behavioral data to reap value

Notable Quotes

• [05:00] "Customers who don't know who their banker is are much more likely to be a detractor."
• [06:00] "We're very much in test mode. … We're going to be able to measure how the interaction [customers] had influences the next time they provide us feedback."
• [08:00] "If somebody's willing to recommend, that's one thing. But if somebody's advocating strongly, it's that next step of loyalty."

Episode 256: What turns CX skeptics into advocates? A listening engine that makes caring for those you serve the gold standard.

At IMG Academy, a private sports academy and boarding school in Florida, Chief Operating Officer Mike Milliron led the launch of a centralized experience team. "Not interested," said everyone from athletics, academics, athletic development, and student life. Why? IMG Academy's culture initially prized local control. "Owners of experience," says Mike, is how teams saw themselves.

Mike and his team persisted. They built a real-time listening program with trusted access and immediate visibility so coaches, teachers, and staff could act on feedback. The centralized team partnered across athletics, academics, athletic and personal development, and student life to align fixes and remove friction for frontline work. 

Results followed: NPS rose for parents and students. Re-enrollment increased. Earned growth forecasts climbed.

"It made their jobs easier," explains Mike.  "But also, it helped them get to the end result they want: delivering an unrivaled experience for students."

Guest: Mike Milliron, Chief Operating Officer, IMG Academy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast here: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Time-Stamped Topics:

• 00:01 — Who owns experience on a campus built on silos
• 00:04 — Non-negotiables like culture change and real listening access
• 00:05 — Mission UCX prioritizes caring for those they serve
• 00:06 — Early financial signals drove re-enrollment to tick up
• 00:07 — Standing up CX and a listening program spanning multiple verticals
• 00:08 — Value lands when CX makes people's jobs easier
• 00:09 — New games unlocked by data and insight loops
• 00:11 — Rapid-fire takes on popular CX buzzwords 

Time-Stamped Quotes:

• [09:00] "The most difficult part was trying to figure out how it was actually going to work. Once we got it up and got it moving and realized the value right away, it became one of the smartest decisions, and it made people's jobs easier."
• [9:00] "We introduced a listening program. We introduced a dedicated team to work across verticals. [It was about] just the cultural component of A) getting that team in place, and then B) trying to figure out how do we actually best navigate what's been in place for the previous 35 years—and some muscles that have been built—in a trustworthy way and in a way that people wanted to engage."
• [06:00] "We're starting to see customer experience and NPS go up across parents, students, and essentially all of our experiences in our product lines. We're also seeing employee experience go up, which is super important—that's helped with retention and workplace satisfaction."
• [10:00] "We have different opportunities to actually understand how to drive value and impact. And we're just like, 'Oh my gosh, we never would've thought that we're able to do this.' And how it then ties back to a retention strategy or to a new product or new experience that we want to launch. So, it's fun to actually see those things come to life."

Resources 

"A New Playbook" (Episode 230 with former IMG Academy president, Tim Pernetti)

Episode 255: One of healthcare's biggest blind spots? When patients turn 18. It's the moment they age out of pediatrics and fall headfirst into a system designed to prioritize older, sicker adults. Physicians, stretched thin, reserve energy for complex cases, giving young adults shorter visits and less attention. That means early signs of medical trouble, like anxiety or preventive needs, go missed.

Jason Guardino and Karen San, care experience experts at The Permanente Medical Group, are addressing this massive and often invisible problem head-on. The Permanente Medical Group found that younger patients in their twenties and thirties consistently gave lower satisfaction scores than both pediatric and senior patients. 

"They didn't feel listened to and they felt dismissed," Jason says. "They felt like there was a lack of compassion during that [medical] visit." That sentiment, combined with rising anxiety, digital misinformation from things like social media, and a national shortage of mental health professionals, creates a high-stakes problem few health systems are equipped to solve.

When doctors unintentionally triage young adults as low risk, this puts younger patients' health at risk, "If you don't slow down and focus on providing a great experience, you can miss something that could be potentially very dangerous for this patient," Jason explains.

Fixing this gap means rethinking how we treat both patients and providers, from doctors to nurses to clinicians. To drive change, The Permanente Medical Group is listening—literally. Through live feedback tools and real-time digital prompts, they're surfacing patient pain points. That data is changing how care teams engage with young adults and helping leaders understand the double bind facing providers: everyone needs high quality care, despite limited time and resources.

Guests: Jason Guardino, Chief Experience Officer and Gastroenterologist, The Permanente Medical Group, and Karen San, Senior Director of Care Experience, The Permanente Medical Group

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Quotes

• 00:01:00 – Why young adults often feel overlooked in adult care
• 00:02:30 – The Net Promoter Score drop for post-pediatric, 18-year-old patients
• 00:04:00 – Pediatric expectations compared to the reality of adult care
• 00:06:00 – How provider triage creates blind spots
• 00:08:00 – Understanding complaints from young patients
• 00:09:30 – Social media and how people's anxiety levels impact care
• 00:10:30 – The mental health burden on primary care
• 00:12:00 – Listening at scale, with real-time feedback
• 00:13:30 – What patient ratings can reveal, data-wise
• 00:15:00 – Why compassion still beats automation

Notable Quotes

• 00:00:05 "We don't set [children up] well for when they make a transition into adult medicine. There's an opportunity to strengthen our care delivery model to meet those expectations and the ever-changing patient expectations."
• 00:00:07 "If you don't slow down and focus on providing a great experience, you can miss something that could be potentially very dangerous for this patient. Even if they're in the minority, I always say, if something happens a few percent of the time, somebody has to be in that small percentage of time—that [means] an injury can happen."
• 00:00:08 "The system stressors disproportionately affect our younger members because the providers are using this as a kind of survival tactic. They're saving their energy for the more complex patients with more comorbidities. And so it's not affecting our older population the same way it is our younger."
• 00:00:09 "We have found that the younger population [does] have heightened anxiety. And that's fueled by a number of things. Covid-19 affected their perception of health. Social media is affecting how they define what good looks like. And so they're looking to primary care providers, who may not be experts in mental healthcare, to provide that mental healthcare. And that also creates a friction point that we need to solve for."
• 00:00:11 "We did a pilot of 5 of our 21 medical centers for several months. And then, in December of 2023, we launched it throughout the entire medical group—so, 21 medical centers and all of our patients. So we're about a year and four months into this, and right now, we're sitting at about 2.5 million results. We have about 1.5 million—what we call 'caring moments'—[where] patients write about their clinicians and the staff. And as we say, it's an expression of gratitude, appreciation, and love—like something we've never had before."

Resources

Check out Episode 197 of Customer Confidential, where we interviewed Jason Guardino back in 2022 on the importance of compassion in healthcare: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/insights/compassion-in-healthcare-podcast/

Episode 254: What if the future of AI in customer experience is built not by giant platforms but by small, reusable, open source AI agents?

Gurdeep Pall, President of AI Strategy at Qualtrics, believes open, modular AI agents will outmaneuver big tech's locked-down systems. In this conversation from the X4 Summit, Gurdeep argues that "experience agents"—task-specific bots that can plug into any stack—will give companies more control, better performance, and real freedom.

Closed AI platforms promise convenience, but they trap businesses in rigid walled gardens. Gurdeep argues that modular architectures unlock something better: flexibility, reuse, and evolution. "Break down the agents to very specific functionality," he says. "And those agents can be invoked by many different agents for different types of tasks."

This isn't just a tech choice. It's a business and philosophical stance. Qualtrics is partnering with LangChain and releasing open connectors to build an ecosystem of interoperable agents. The goal? Let companies mix, match, and scale customer-facing systems without depending on any one vendor.

"This is one semantic level up," he says, comparing today's agentic architectures to the launch of the web and mobile eras. "What agents are going to do for user experience—taking our digital game to the next level—is very exciting."

Guest: Gurdeep Pall, President of AI Strategy, Qualtrics

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback

Time-Stamped Topics:

• (00:01) Why Qualtrics is going all-in on open agentic AI
• (00:04) An overview of the Qualtrics and LangChain partnership
• (00:06) The modular architecture of "experience agents"
• (00:08) Why one task might require seven agents
• (00:09) How specialization allows reuse and scale
• (00:10) Rejecting the walled garden model
• (00:11) Making open systems friction-free
• (00:12) A real-time use case from the X4 stage
• (00:14) Plug and play simplicity for complex integrations
• (00:15) Why this is a new digital paradigm

Time-Stamped Quotes:

• [7:00]  "It's about how you break up the task. Like, when you call the human, the human didn't sit there and not do anything and the password got reset. The human went to a piece of software and they went and worked on it. So, what we are talking about here is the combination of software and the human, now organized most efficiently."
• [8:00] " If you're able to break down the agents to very specific functionality, then those agents can be invoked by many different agents for different types of tasks." 
• [10:00] " There is one example of a very small, open system called the Internet, which somehow, through open standards, became one of the most incredible innovations of human beings ever. So what we are trying to do is to take a stand and say, 'We believe in open systems and we want to let our customers know that this is a choice.'"

Episode 253: Desjardins thought its cooperative roots made it member-first by default. Then members started leaving.

Desjardins is a 125-year-old financial co-op based in Quebec. It has deep community ties and a proud history. But that pride masked a painful truth: Members no longer saw it as customer-centric. The organization believed its cooperative structure guaranteed loyalty—until low NPS scores and rising member churn showed otherwise.

Mathieu Staniulis and Séverine Clairet recount how Desjardins confronted its own mythology, restructured governance, and began treating feedback as a system, not a score.

Desjardins' wake-up call came in the early 2010s. Despite its co-op status, members said the experience felt disjointed. Branches operated as near-independent entities. "It was really difficult to see the full scope of our company because we were presenting ourselves as different companies," says Mathieu. CEO Guy Cormier led a bold move: unifying the 17 siloed organizations within Desjardins under a single governance structure.

But structure alone wasn't enough. Internally, CX, risk, and profit still pulled in different directions.

As Mathieu puts it,  "People in charge of customer experience only talk about customer experience and NPS. People in P&L ownership talk about their performance—their bottom line. How can they improve their performance, especially on the financial metrics? And then you have the risk people trying to manage risk and deal with regulators always bringing new regulations, especially in the financial industry. And I believe we have to find a way to work together to balance customer experience, efficiency or financial metrics, and risk management."

The challenge became about integrating those forces to make balanced, member-first decisions—without sacrificing performance.

Now Desjardins faces a new frontier: recreating intimacy in a digital world. Transactions moved online. But financial advice—the core of trust and loyalty—remains unsolved. The question, Mathieu says, is urgent and unanswered: "How do we bring advice into a digital world?"

Guests: Mathieu Staniulis, Vice President, Products, Solutions & Digital, and Chief Transformation Officer | Séverine Clairet, Vice President Customer Experience & Marketing Strategy, Desjardins

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Topics

00:01 – A logout button reveals blind spots in member experience

00:04 – Desjardins' founding story: community aid in a kitchen

00:06 – "Member-owned" in theory vs. practice across 17 silos

00:08 – How Guy Cormier unified Desjardins under one governance model

00:09 – Why NPS lagged despite a strong co-op identity

00:12 – "The S means system": transforming how feedback drives action

00:15 – Balancing CX, P&L, and risk without silos

00:18 – The call center debate: cost now vs. loyalty later

00:20 – Journey teams as a model for cross-functional accountability

00:21 – Digital did the easy part, so what comes next?

00:22 – Can "digital" be intimate? The next frontier for co-ops

Notable Quotes

• [15:00] ​​ "It was really difficult to see the full scope of our company because we were presenting ourselves as different companies. … We had to pivot from working together, but in silos." 
• [16:00] "We believe we're member-focused, but we were lagging in NPS. We were also losing membership, so we had to pivot and change all of that, changing the way we look internally at our performance, raising NPS as the top KPI for our company."
• [16:00] "That's the equation of NPS. Buying more, referring more, and staying longer mean more profitability. For P&L, it means better risk management, because there's a tendency to lower your risk when you have loyal customers with you. So you have to bring that all together."
• [17:00]  "We were very proud of Desjardins, especially in the Quebec market. In some lines of products, we have almost 40% market share. You will see a branch of Desjardins in every town. It's deep in our roots."

Additional Resources

• Read Bain's case study, From Laggard to Leader: Desjardins Evolves Member Centricity for the Digital Age: https://www.bain.com/client-results/from-laggard-to-leader-desjardins-evolves-member-centricity-for-the-digital-age/

Episode 252: Most CX maturity assessments ask how you think you're doing. This one demands proof.

Erin Wallace, director of client engagement at MyCX from Bain & Company, is helping to lead a fundamental shift in how companies measure CX maturity. Most tools rely on perception-based self-assessments that reward self-promotion over progress. The Customer Experience Roadmap and Accreditation (CXRA) demands verifiable proof—evidence against 55 global, industry-backed standards. It's not always comfortable, but it's often the turning point.

Bain's CXRA challenges the internal echo chamber. Erin explains how most assessments rely on surveys sent to a handful of CX insiders, producing a distorted view of reality. The CXRA demands documentation of policies, processes, behaviors, and measurable outcomes such as customer experience metrics, operational KPIs, or business results. It uses outside-in validation to confront that distortion.

This isn't academic. It's where things get real. Leaders often push back. Some insist, "We're better than this." Others admit, "We're not as good as we might think." That tension is the point. Because CXRA doesn't just assess quality—it measures how consistently CX practices are applied across the business. That's how it exposes the "pockets of brilliance" that never scale, leaving most customers with a fragmented, uneven experience and leadership teams with a false sense of progress.

For many leaders, conducting the CXRA offers clarity they've never achieved: a shared fact base, benchmarks of world-class practice, and a clear path forward. It doesn't just reveal what's missing, it builds the conviction to fix it.

Guest: Erin Wallace, Director of Client Engagement, Bain & Company

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast (feedback link)

Key Topics Covered

• 01:00 – Why perception-based CX tools fall short
• 02:20 – What defines a successful evidence-based assessment
• 03:10 – The challenge with identifying "pockets of brilliance"
• 04:15 – How companies respond to uncomfortable truths
• 05:40 – Aligning leaders around what "good" really looks like
• 06:55 – Using 55 global standards to benchmark performance
• 08:10 – What Bain's CX Roadmap and Accreditation assesses
• 09:30 – What Erin learned at the X4 2025 Conference in Salt Lake City

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes

• [5:00] "MyCX℠ is  a tool anyone in the industry can use, whether you're a strategic advisor, a technology implementer, or a CX practitioner. These should be things we agree on in terms of the standard of excellence for culture, capabilities, and execution."
• [6:00]  "Most maturity assessments—tools to understand where you are and how you're doing with CX—are survey-based. They're perception-based. We send [them] out to a couple hundred people in the company, see what they think, and how they think they're doing with CX. You usually get back a pretty inactionable result. What's different about MyCX Roadmap and Accreditation, which is based on these global standards, is that it's an evidence-based, outside-in assessment."
• [7:00] "It's an opportunity to dig in and have a conversation. And to evaluate the perception with the policy against results."
• [8:00] "We look at quality, coverage, and consistency of application across the business. There could very well be a spotlight—like pockets of excellence—that are not applied across the organization in a meaningful way."
• "[9:00] "What does good look like, and is that really what we aspire to accomplish? And then what will it take to get there? Because oftentimes, everyone has a different opinion of what is 'good.' And do we really want to get there? This helps [organizations] break through and get that bigger investment unlock that's required to lead."

Learn more about Bain & Company's CX Roadmap and Accreditation process: https://www.bain.com/consulting-services/customer-strategy-and-marketing/customer-experience-transformation/mycx/

Learn more about the Global CX Standards: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/resources/cx-standards/

Episode 251: In 2018, Dell set out to do something big: turn customer feedback into a system that could not only provide insights, but help set priorities and run the business.

They had the data. They had the intent. But they made a compromise that many organizations settle on: Rather than enforce one unified approach to customer feedback, they allowed each team to build its own. While this helped with initial adoption and change management, it also led to fragmentation—multiple tools, different methods, no shared truth. And it got worse over time. Real progress ultimately would require centralizing what had become scattered.

When Dell's Marc Stein appeared on this podcast in 2018 (episode 129), the company had just completed its EMC merger and launched a chief customer office. The ambition: one integrated Net Promoter System to tie sentiment to economics and put the customer at the center of every decision. But good intentions ran into a harsh reality: Every function was listening to customers, but no one was hearing the same thing. 

In this episode, Mike Valanzola, Dell's Senior Director of Voice of Customer and NPS Operations, picks up the story. He explains how misaligned tools, siloed ownership, and governance gaps made customer feedback hard to act on. His team didn't want to tear down what existed. Instead, they brought it together. Through consolidation, centralization, shared standards, and stronger governance, they transformed scattered signals into an enterprise-wide system of action.

The turning point came with the Customer Experience Roadmap and Accreditation.
The CXRA gave Dell a framework to drive internal accountability and rebuild trust in the system. As Mike describes, cross-functional teams now meet weekly to act on shared signals. Tomorrow's goal? Make every employee a promoter and make every signal actionable.

Guest: Mike Valanzola, Senior Director, Voice of Customer and NPS Operations, Dell Technologies

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Time-Stamped Topics

00:01 - Marc Stein's 2018 ambition: a unified CX system
03:50 - Why integration faltered: fragmentation, politics, data overload
06:20 - Mike's mission: centralize tools, enforce governance
10:00 - Transforming custom systems to create shared accountability
13:30 - Early delivery surprises and sentiment gaps
17:10 - Predictive models and operational fixes
21:00 - How Dell built trust in the new NPS engine
27:45 - Weekly action meetings: turning listening into doing
35:30 - Why CXRA certification mattered, internally and externally
40:00 - Reflections on past company decisions

Notable Quotes

• " We have a robust  partner community that allows us to  expand our scale in terms of the customers that we can  touch. Each and every one of those folks has some things that are important for us to hear." [8:00]
•  "We do—and did—as a company, listen regularly, but we didn't always hear. The reason for that came down to every function across the company, ultimately doing their own listening programs, using their own application, governing how they listened, controlling what they got back, and not sharing it." [18:00]
•  "We had been really in a run-the-business function, really focused on  NPS management, really focused on owning  that measurement for the company. And now, I was proposing a large-scale, end-to-end corporate transformation that was going to require my own team  to think about how we operate, and effectively operate differently." [28:00]

Additional Resources

• Hear our 2018 podcast with Marc Stein on Dell's original CX ambition, Bringing Net Promoter to Scale
• Learn more about Bain's MyCX Roadmap & Accreditation

Episode 250: Comcast solved the age-old problem of how to make employee suggestions a powerful, reliable source of value-driving improvements at scale.  

Sean McEntire, Comcast's Vice President of Customer Strategy and Operations, explains how the Outer Loop channels every employee elevation—no matter how small—through a disciplined screen, assigns a named owner, and tracks progress in public view. Ninety thousand teammates now feed a single pipeline that forces scattered ideas into accountable hands and verified fixes, solving 7,000 customer pain points so far.

A frontline agent's push for an easy‑to‑use, large‑button remote shows the system at work: The idea passed triage in hours, landed on the product team's desk, and shipped nationwide within months—evidence that voices on the floor can reshape the hardware in customers' hands.

Once an elevation clears triage, technology, operations, or product leads must respond within set deadlines—accept, reject, or ask for data. Every decision and follow‑up lives on the same dashboard employees use to log ideas, so trust grows with each visible step. As McEntire puts it, "CX is all about transparency. If you're going to be transparent with your customer, you need to be transparent with your teammates."

The result? Faster fixes, rising JD Power and NPS Prism rankings, and a workforce that, 10 years into the transformation, keeps feeding the Outer Loop because they've seen their suggestions become reality.

Guest: Sean McEntire, Vice President, Customer Strategy and Operations, Comcast

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-Stamped Topics

• (00:01) Comcast's early days of the Outer Loop
• (03:00) Why NPS never drifts when the Outer Loop is active
• (06:00) What it takes to operationalize trust with 90,000 employees
• (08:30) Large-button remotes and other frontline-sourced Outer Loop ideas
• (11:00) Inside the elevation system: votes, comments, and Outer Loop visibility
• (13:00) Why rejecting ideas can build more trust than accepting them
• (16:00) An industry-wide trust gap and the Outer Loop's role in closing it
• (18:00) Moving beyond scores to what drives CX progress
• (20:00) Synthetic feedback, benchmarking, and the new Outer Loop data stack

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes

•  [3:00] "This is our ten-year anniversary of operationalizing NPS within the organization. And we consistently, to this day, listen to both our customers and teammates. We learn from that feedback. […] We act on putting new solutions into the business that improve the lives of our customers and our teammates."
• [5:00] "We are approaching our 7,000th resolved NPS elevation. So that's 7,000 net new experiences for both our consumers and teammates. And that's true progress."
• [12:00]  "CX is all about transparency. So, if you're going to be transparent with your customer, you need to be transparent with your teammate."
• [16:00] "CX never sleeps."
• [23:00] " It's not the score, it's the system. And if people focus on the score, you spend more time trying to explain a few basis points of score change and trying to correlate what may have caused that when it may have nothing to do with that. So it's, the score will be your north star on, 'Are you making progress?'"

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the NPS® Outer Loop by Bain & Company: https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/bain-outerloop/
• Listen to our two-part 2018 podcast on the origin of Comcast's NPS journey with Charlie Herrin, Comcast's chief customer experience officer: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/insights/inside-a-cable-giants-net-promoter-turnaround-nps-podcast/ 

Episode 249: When "revenge travel" brought guests roaring back to Four Seasons Hotels, they capped occupancy, turning away guests and revenue.

Scott Taber, senior vice president of global hospitality, describes the Four Seasons philosophy: No points, no perks. Just great properties, individual recognition, personal service, and an emphasis on making sure the first five minutes after check-in are spectacular.

That belief was put to the test when the world started traveling again and labor gaps persisted at the end of the pandemic. The company had a choice: chase revenue or protect intimacy. It chose intimacy.

To avoid overextending staff and diluting the experience, Four Seasons capped occupancy. The organization focused on preserving what Scott calls the "first five": those opening minutes that define a guest's stay. "People want to see your eyes and your teeth," he says. They want to be recognized, not processed.

That doesn't mean resisting tech. Four Seasons embraced tools that support connection: a CRM "golden record" surfaces each guest's preferences so staff can deliver personal touches at scale. They also rolled out a proprietary 11-platform chat tool that helps staff resolve 80% of requests within 90 seconds. Last year, they set an NPS record. 

Culture provides the foundation for the organization's enduring success. Recruiting favors empathy, veterans mentor newcomers, and managers celebrate tiny moments of recognition as fiercely as revenue. With management contracts that stretch a whopping 80 years, Four Seasons plays the long game: culture first. For Four Seasons, the strongest currency isn't points, but people.

Guest: Scott Taber, Senior Vice President for Global Hospitality, Four Seasons Hotels

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Topics Covered:

• 00:04 How occupancy caps protect service under pressure
• 00:12 No points program means loyalty through recognition
• 00:20 Salesforce "golden record" and how it personalizes at scale
• 00:30 The benefits of their chat platform that responds instantly to guests
• 00:35 Getting culture right, like hiring empathetic staff and having veterans mentor newcomers
• 00:41 How their 80-year contracts reinforce a culture-first strategy
  

Notable Quotes:

• 00:02 "It's the service excellence that we want to have in our properties every single day, and making sure that we have the right tools, training, support, structure, to truly bring that to life. And all while creating great jobs and helping to have amazing leaders and supporting them to create great memories and experiences for our guests."
• 00:03 "We had a record year last year with our guest experience score, Net Promoter Score."
• 00:11 "Our typical management agreement is 80 years. We want to be with this hotel, we want to be with this project, for the long term. It's the vision of Mr. Sharp [Four Seasons' founder] committing himself to the property and us being committed to the property for that period of time. I think there are some pretty good foundational elements to keep us going for a long time to come."
• 00:12 " [Customers] want to be remembered and appreciated for their business. Four Seasons doesn't have a loyalty program. We're a small brand: 133 hotels. So, how do we do that in a way that is thoughtful and that helps our employees to be able to remember our guests in the right way?"
• 00:25 "We want to hire for attitude and teach the skills. So you are looking for someone who wants to connect with that guest and be in sync with what that guest needs at that moment. And that comes with how we teach and how we coach that behavioral side to engage with the guests—what's important for them in the moment."

Additional Resources:

• Connect the dots between the present and the past with our Customer Confidential podcast from 2016, Inside the Four Seasons Approach to Five-Star Service
• Learn more about how Four Seasons was impacted by Covid-19 in our brief: The Power to Change

Episode 248: At Dominion Energy, keeping the lights on isn't just a priority—it's the single biggest driver of customer experience.

But as customer expectations continue to evolve, the bar keeps rising. Customers don't just want to know when their power will be back, they want to know why it is out. And they expect that experience to be as seamless, informed, and intuitive as downloading and using their favorite mobile apps. Meeting those expectations requires transparency, empathy, and a companywide commitment to service.

In this episode, Utibe Bassey, vice president of customer experience, shares how Dominion Energy's mission-driven culture empowers this commitment, and how the company is harnessing tools like NPS Prism to better understand what customers need and how they perceive the service they receive—especially during critical moments like outages. That feedback helps teams act faster, communicate better, and focus on what really matters to customers.

And it is, truly, a team sport. From operations and audit to communications and compliance, delivering a great experience takes cross-functional alignment and a shared sense of purpose. It's a culture where colleagues often rotate into different areas to build a greater understanding of the customer experience.

Through data-driven decision making, a customer-centric mission, and an "all in" commitment to serve, Dominion is proving that customer-centricity can be a utility's greatest source of power.

 Key Topics Covered:

• Communicating clearly about service disruptions
• Aligning teams around the customer journey
• Bridging the gap between customer perception and reality
• NPS Prism as a tool to inspire and inform improvements
• Meeting rising customer expectations in a utility context
• The value of empathy and transparency in customer communications
• Cross-functional teamwork and shared CX goals
• Strengthening a customer-centric culture

Guest: Utibe Bassey, Vice President of Customer Experience, Dominion Energy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast.

Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey.

Notable Quotes:

[6:00] "We have a term that we say, 'all in service,' because we're all in service of the customer. We want people, whether they're front line facing or they're in audit, supply chain, or ethics, to connect the dots between … even if it's three or four steps removed, it impacts how customers see our company."

[13:00] "The main thing our team tries to keep front and center for all of our stakeholders is that we need a shared outcome."

[32:00] "When you have an organization whose colleagues think about the customer in a way that connects themselves to the customer, even personally, this stuff is like wildfire."

Additional Resources:

Read Bain & Company's Case Study with Dominion Energy: How a National Leader Turned CX Ideas into Action with NPS Prism

Episode 247: What if customers achieve real results—but don't know it?

Most vendors sell functionality. Mari Cross wants customers to see impact—in their own numbers, in real time.

Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor, is dismantling a common illusion: that delivering software features equals delivering value. Infor sells enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, but Mari's focus is on proving business outcomes. She built a system where customers define the results that matter, track them through the product itself, and act on them with confidence. Her team isn't there to rescue implementations. They're there to make value obvious—and to ensure it keeps showing up.

Most ERP systems operate like black boxes. Even when customers get results, they can't always prove it. Mari attacks that gap. 

Infor's value mapping begins before the deal closes. Once the system is live, telemetry and process mining show what's working and where clients are drifting off course. This isn't a side program—it's baked into the product and reflected back to users in dashboards, metrics, and business KPIs.

The shift isn't just operational. It's cultural. Mari rebuilt Infor's customer success team to be proactive, industry-specific, and integrated from day one. That means fewer rescue missions, fewer slide decks, and more conversations grounded in actual product usage and outcome data. And it means the customer success journey starts well before go-live—and runs all the way through renewal.

"A good value conversation is if you have some measures in place that are more repeatable than having a value engineer fly in from left field," Mari says.

Learn how Infor's CareFor Success program gives customer success teams the tools, visibility, and data to show what's working and where to go next. And learn how and why value delivered is value clients understand.

Guest: Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast (feedback link)

Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey.

Key Topics Covered:

• (01:00) The value void: what clients miss—and what it costs
• (03:30) Why Infor embeds value mapping into the sales process
• (06:10) Telemetry, process mining, and outcome tracking
• (11:45) The difference industry specificity makes
• (14:50) Mari's CareFor Success program explained
• (17:30) Getting sales, success, and product aligned
• (22:15) Making value visible across the customer lifecycle
• (25:00) How to track value realization in real time
• (36:00) Culture change and customer empathy

Notable Quotes:

• [05:00] "If someone wanted to stick completely to standard, they could flip the switch on Day 1 and use our product. That's very different than the approach, I think, some other vendors take."
• [10:00] "In the vision of, 'We succeed when our customers succeed,' the [chief customer officer] role [at Infor] was really pivoted to make sure to focus on ongoing value realization and optimization after the go-live date. That is probably a very unique orientation for Infor."
•  [12:00] "We are very focused on this idea of value engagement. We launched CareFor Success, which is our success program, last year. But it's completing this value-based customer journey all the way through where we are on a regular basis, across all teams, and repeatedly driving value with our customers by helping them look at the data, optimize, and then that visibility into value delivered within the product."
• [29:00] "We want to be in sync with our strategy when we talk about success motions, because that alone is an incredible power. We can become proactive."

Episode 246: The AI future of customer service is already here—and it's better than most people think. In this episode, Deon Nicholas, President and Executive Chairman of Forethought, joins host Rob Markey to show us how some companies are already using AI to resolve customer issues end-to-end in ways we could barely imagine just a couple of years ago.

Deon introduces us to agentic AI: an emerging class of intelligent agents that take real action, integrate across enterprise systems, and adapt to each customer's needs. Drawing on his experience building Forethought's platform, Deon reveals how these systems are resolving issues, improving customer satisfaction, and going live in as little as 1 to 30 days. This isn't a future promise. It's happening now.

The episode explores the architecture behind agentic AI, including Forethought's use of multi-agent systems, plain-language Autoflows, and a Discover model that learns company policies from historical tickets and call logs. Rob and Deon dig into risk, hallucination, and data privacy concerns—and how to address them without six-month implementation timelines.

A surprising insight? Forethought sometimes adds a delay to its lightning-fast responses. Why? To build trust through operational transparency. Deon explains how even loading dots can reassure customers that the system is working on their behalf.

Guest: Deon Nicholas, Founder, President, and Executive Chairman, Forethought

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast (feedback link)

Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey.

Key Topics Covered

• [1:00] Agentic AI vs. traditional chatbots
• [2:00] Why chatbots fail regarding decision trees and limitations
• [4:00] Real-time AI issue resolution and automation
• [7:00] AI integration with enterprise systems
• [12:00] Fast deployment and autoflow policy learning
• [15:00] Multi-agent AI systems and scalability
• [18:00] AI adoption challenges and business integration
• [22:00] Balancing AI automation and human agent handoffs
• [27:00] Cost comparison of AI vs. business process outsourcing
• [30:00] Rapid AI deployment and testing strategies

Time-stamped Notable Quotes

• [4:00]  "With an agentic AI, you have something that has learned from your business policies. It's read through hundreds of thousands of past conversations, knows the vernacular, knows how to respond, and knows the business policy. So, instead of getting a menu of items, you just have a conversation."
• [13:00]  "You probably already have hundreds of thousands of conversations, whether they're sitting in transcripts, support tickets, [or] call recordings. It turns out that is a wealth of data that can train an AI in such a way that you don't need to manually create all these rules and decision trees and workflows."
• [ 16:00] "When we first launched our LLM-native AI two years ago, there were some hallucinations. But we've been able to go through, evaluate the model, fine-tune the model, and now we're at the point where it rarely happens. What we typically say to everyone is: 'Test it. Test it before you launch it, run a 14-day free trial, proof of value, run us against anyone else in the market.'"
• [21:00]  "What's beautiful about all of this is now you get to the point where AI can become embedded into the ecosystem—and, ironically, make all of these human experiences better."
• [21:00] "AI is making it so that when it's time to actually hand off to a human agent, you're far less frustrated, or far less likely to be frustrated. And then the humans will now be resolving issues that require more judgment and more empathy."

Episode 245: What happens when digital transformation becomes table stakes—and customer relationships become the real differentiator?

Eduardo Roma, Global Head of Customer Experience Transformation at Bain, believes companies that spent years optimizing transactions and digitizing every interaction are now unprepared for what matters most: becoming more humanized. The human element is now critical, and efficiency can't be mistaken for real connection.

Eduardo outlines three forces reshaping customer experience: Digital is now table stakes, customer power has surged to new heights, and predictive, data-driven relationships are setting brands apart. 

Too many organizations still equate digitization with progress while missing what actually builds loyalty: emotional relevance, early engagement, and personalized support that evolves alongside customer needs.

Learn how leading firms are using data to build trust, earn loyalty, and deliver meaningful value—especially in the earliest moments of the customer relationship. And discover how to make customer engagement a true driver of growth.

Guest: Eduardo Roma, Partner, Bain & Company, Global Head of Customer Experience Transformation

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Topics Covered:
00:30 – Why customer experience is at an inflection point
01:00 – Digital experiences are now table stakes
02:00 – Generative AI and the shift in customer power
03:10 – Moving from reactive to proactive experience management
05:00 – The limits of digitization when every app feels the same
07:00 – Personalization that creates value, not just sells more
08:30 – The problem with local optimization in product teams
11:15 – Digital capture vs. earning engagement
14:00 – Humanizing experiences with data and behavioral science
17:00 – Creating customer value creation plans
20:00 – How new challengers are forcing incumbents to rethink CX
21:30 – Predictive, proactive engagement and relationship signals
24:00 – Why CX professionals must speak the language of value

Notable Quotes:

• "Now that [companies] have digitized experiences, they really need to humanize those experiences through data. And what I mean by that is how to make interactions with customers much more meaningful, much more relevant, [and] much more personalized in a way that those interactions build enduring relationships with customers."
• "There are way too many degrees of separation of people who understand the customers and where some of the decisions are being made. It is important for organizations to be aware of those blind spots and to close those gaps."
• "The whole idea of just focusing on the experience, we need to move people beyond that. Move to relationships, to stop and think where we are on this experience pointing in time. We need a more holistic view."
•  "Now, customers are much more in control. That is [a] transformation of organizations, when they think about the reach and relevance of the relationship they have with customers."

Additional Resources:

• Transforming Customer Experience with AI: A Guide to Sustainable Growth (A webinar by Eduardo Roma, Rob Markey, and Phil Sager)
• Eduardo Roma on Three Changes on Customer Engagement (Video located on Eduardo's profile page)

Episode 244: What defines a differentiated customer experience? It starts with a clear framework for measuring intangible value and making calculated trade-offs.

In this special tribute show, we revisit our 2016 conversation with Eric Almquist, a former partner at Bain & Company, on the Elements of Value. This framework transforms how businesses understand loyalty, brand equity, and growth. Inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Eric made value practical, categorizing 30 elements into functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact levels.

His research connected the dots between delivering on multiple elements and revenue growth. Learn how successful industry leaders deliberately layer value over time and how even in B2B, solutions that ease complexity can offer emotional benefits, such as hope.

Eric was a pioneer in customer analytics and segmentation, his mantra being: What do customers truly value? His valuable insights continue to shape business thinking. Today we celebrate his legacy in customer experience and brand strategy.

Guest: Eric Almquist, former partner, Strategy & Marketing practice, Bain & Company

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.

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

Topics Covered:

• [00:01:00] Eric Almquist discusses the Elements of Value and why they were created to help managers better understand demand
• [00:02:00] Eric's contributions to customer analytics, segmentation, and experimental design
• [00:03:00] How the Elements of Value were first developed, inspired by questions about what customers truly value
• [00:04:00] The connection between the Elements of Value and Maslow's hierarchy of needs and why Maslow's model is hard to apply in business
• [00:05:00] The four levels of the Elements of Value: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact
• [00:06:00] The impact of delivering multiple elements of value on revenue growth and customer advocacy
• [00:07:00] The 2016 Harvard Business Review article and how the framework connects to Net Promoter Score℠
• [00:08:00] Unexpected insights from the research, including how B2B solutions can provide emotional value, such as hope
• [00:09:00] The evolution of the framework, from 16 to 36 elements over time
• [00:10:00] How value can persist across generations, such as in heirlooms and wealth preservation
• [00:11:00] The role of brand strategy and the caution against over-promising value in marketing
• [00:12:00] Closing remarks from Rob Markey, reflecting on Eric Almquist's impact and legacy

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

• [00:01:00] "There's a fundamental asymmetry within management that it's easier to manage the cost side than it is the demand side, because the cost, you can see, you can quantify. It's much harder to know how to increase demand, and how to increase revenue. That asymmetry is what's motivated me to develop the elements of value."
• [00:04:00] "Maslow's hierarchy of needs was developed in the mid-20th century. So as we're drawing on something very old, when I talk to audiences, I'll ask them if they know Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all the hands go up, and then I ask them how many of you have used it to, say, improve a product or think of a new product, and the hands tend to go down. The reason is that it's pretty academic."
• [00:05:00] "We began to think about functional elements of value, emotional elements of value that could be life-changing. Following Maslow's hierarchy, the top of the pyramid, the highest level of motivation, was around altruism or charitable giving. We call that social impact."
• [00:07:00] "If you are delivering on zero elements of value by our threshold definition, revenue growth tends to be around negative 2%. If you're delivering on four or more elements of value, the average is 13%. Eight of the original 47 companies that we looked at were delivering on zero elements of value at our threshold. The truth is if you're delivering on zero elements of value for very long, you're probably going to be crushed by a competitor or be acquired, would be my guess."
• [00:09:00] "[The elements of value] really began as a thought experiment. I began thinking about all the work that I had done over all the decades, thinking about what I've heard in focus groups and interviews and observations and surveys. I began to realize value is not infinitely complex nor mysterious. There are actually things that you can point to that are appealing or not appealing."

Additional information on what was discussed in today's episode:

• HBR article, The Elements of Value, by Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas Bloch: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value 
• Eric's perspective on the elements of value: https://www.bain.com/insights/eric-almquist-managing-the-elements-of-value-video/
• Episode 117 of Customer Confidential with Eric, What Do B2B Customers Want?: https://baincompany.libsyn.com/ep-117-eric-almquist-what-do-b2b-customers-want 
• Explore the B2C elements of value in more detail here: https://www.bain.com/insights/elements-of-value-interactive 

Episode 243: At Emory University, 99% of donations come from just 8% of donors. It's a small alumni minority funding almost the majority of the university. This raises a big question: How do you cultivate loyalty among everyone else?

In this episode, Emory's Chief Experience Officer, Cutler Andrews, describes how they're dismantling silos—by merging alumni relations, donor relations, and events—to offer a cohesive experience. They're seeing success. Within five years, Emory's engagement nearly doubled from 28,000 to 54,000 participating alumni.

Learn how Emory's four engagement metrics (philanthropy, attendance, communications, and volunteering) feed a carefully designed funnel, turning casual alumni into potential major donors. We also explore how tracking personal preferences and tailoring interactions drives lasting impact.

It's about balancing short-term fundraising with authentic relationships. How do you nurture entrepreneurs—those overlooked until "cash out"—and future big givers, without neglecting current donors? Learn how thoughtful engagement fosters trust, broadens participation, and reduces reliance on a few generous supporters.

Guest: Cutler Andrews, Chief Experience Officer & Senior Associate Vice President, Emory University

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.

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

Time-stamped List of Topics Covered:

- [00:02:19 - 00:03:00] Merging engagement, communications, and marketing: Cutler describes the creation of a unified team to orchestrate all donor-facing activities under one umbrella.

- [00:03:39 - 00:04:26] Overcoming siloed teams: How sending separate letters, emails, and event invites—without coordination—diminishes the overall constituent experience.

- [00:07:51 - 00:09:00] Engagement vs. fundraising: Cutler explains why alumni relations are often viewed as more feel-good, whereas fundraising may often be seen as purely transactional.

- [00:14:36 - 00:16:00] Emory's four engagement buckets: How Emory measures engagement via philanthropy, attendance, communications, and volunteering—and why each bucket matters.

- [00:27:00 - 00:29:00] The risk of relying on a tiny donor base: Cutler points out that roughly 99% of their funding comes from around 8% of donors, underscoring the need to reach that remaining 92%.

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

[00:00:27] "Ninety-nine percent of our money comes from seven or eight percent of our donors. That's scary, because if that keeps getting smaller, it's a ton of risk."

[00:01:03] "We have all of these KPIs and goals, and the only question people ask is, 'How much money [have you] raised?' That's part of the story, but that is the output of a greater story."

[00:06:22] "Yes, large gifts help, but alumni engagement has to serve that mission, too. It can't just be, 'Make our alumni community feel good and give them programs.' We have to ask the questions, 'To what end? To what value?'"

[00:27:10] "All of a sudden there's an exit and there's an influx of cash, and then everybody's jumping on. It's like, 'You haven't talked to this person at all—why do you think they'll want to engage now?' It shouldn't always be because, 'I know in ten years, they might make a gift.'"

[00:33:10] "We've seen engagement go from 28,000 alumni to 54,000 alumni in five years because of that intentionality, that creativity, and thinking through that if somebody does a great event over here, but if we can't market it over here, it's not going to do any good."

Episode 242: Wells Fargo has established a clear position on artificial intelligence: If you can't explain how an AI model works, you shouldn't deploy it. This stance challenges the common assumption that black box algorithms are acceptable costs of advanced AI capabilities.

In this episode, Kunal Madhok, Head of Data, Analytics, and AI for Wells Fargo's consumer business, reveals how the bank has operationalized this philosophy to enhance customer experiences while maintaining rigorous standards for model explainability and ethical deployment.

The stakes for financial institutions are substantial. As banking becomes increasingly digitized, organizations must balance sophisticated personalization with transparency and trust. Wells Fargo's approach demonstrates that explainability isn't merely about regulatory compliance—it's a fundamental driver of business value and customer trust.

Through rigorous review processes and a commitment to "plain English" explanations of algorithmic decisions, Wells Fargo ensures its models remain logical, aligned with business objectives, and comprehensible to stakeholders at all levels. This transparency serves multiple purposes: avoiding unintended consequences, maintaining human oversight of automated systems, and ensuring data-driven decisions actually drive business value.

Discover how Wells Fargo's insistence on explainable AI is reshaping everything from product recommendations to customer service, while setting new standards for responsible innovation in financial services.

Guest: Kunal Madhok, EVP, Head of Data, Analytics and AI, Wells Fargo

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped List of Topics Covered:

• [00:04:13] Integrating data science into business decisions and ensuring data-driven insights
• [00:07:29] Kunal's vision for personalization and delivering relevant, value-based products
• [00:09:22] Wells Fargo's ability to leverage life events and transactional data to better serve customers
• [00:11:05] Democratizing financial advice and offering tailored advice based on customer needs
• [00:16:53] Using live experimentation and AI models to tailor product offers and marketing
• [00:19:17] Strategic investment decisions for new product launches and capacity reservations using simulations
• [00:22:45] Explainability, and what this looks like in action
• [00:37:22] Strategies around servicing interactions and the key challenges around this work that demand solving

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

• [00:00:27] "When a customer walks into a bank, they're expecting you to know them."
• [00:04:19] "Part of my role is to make sure we use data science in every business decision we make as an organization. And what that means is not just the quality and the fidelity of data, but also that decisions are made not based on intuition, but on real data outcomes."
• 00:07:29] "Good personalization is: We'll give you the right product based on your interests and your needs, and we'll deliver it in a way that you want. Which is the right channel, the right offers."
• [00:12:17] "If we can add value to our customers, they expect it. I'm sure when you turn on [a streaming service] today, it gives you a whole bunch of movies, shows to watch, curated just for you, based on your past history. And if they do it well, you actually like that, because you know the next five things to watch. And while that's in entertainment—and financial products are a very different space—that's the bar our customers are expecting us to meet."
• [00:22:45] "As we train our talent, we've put a high bar on explainability of the work they do."

Episode 241: When is mastering the basics a differentiator? In an industry where complexity is the norm, Prudential Group Insurance has made a counterintuitive strategic choice. While many companies chase innovation through digital transformation and enhanced features, Prudential has discovered that operational excellence—the "absence of noise"—can be a more powerful differentiator.

Abhii Parakh and Mike Estep reveal why group insurance demands a fundamentally different approach to customer experience than high-touch industries like hospitality or travel. For Prudential, success depends not on bells and whistles, but on excelling at the foundational elements: reliable execution, friction-free processes, and consistent delivery.

"The absence of noise is a tremendous win," Mike emphasizes. "That's not the long-term goal for us. But if you don't get those things right, you won't get the chance to get to the nirvana state where you are separating yourself from the competition because of the experiences you created."

Learn how Prudential delivers seamless experiences across its ecosystem of brokers, employers, and employees by prioritizing simplicity and operational excellence. Discover why, in complex B2B2C environments, flawless execution of core processes can be a more powerful differentiator than feature innovation.

Guests: Abhii Parakh, Head of Customer Experience, Prudential Financial, and Mike Estep, President, Group Insurance, Prudential Financial

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped List of Topics Covered:

• [00:01:16] Overview of group insurance products
• [00:03:21] The broker, employer, and employee experience
• [00:06:46] Employees' challenges with insurance products
• [00:10:21] Eliminating friction to enable differentiation
• [00:19:02] Customer experience as a growth driver
• [00:35:48] Overcoming challenges in survey feedback

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

• [00:05:24] "Modern life is exhausting. The last thing you want to deal with is friction with your group insurance carrier—about reports, getting your commission check, or that we're screwing up the bill and you're getting heat from that client. It doesn't need to be rocket science. There's beauty in simplicity and intuitive experiences that are void of friction."
• [00:08:31] "The absence of noise is a tremendous win. That's not the long-term goal for us. But if you don't get those things right, you won't get the chance to get to the nirvana state where you are separating yourself from the competition because of the experiences you created."
• [14:01] "Feedback—while painful to hear—is something you can use as a tool to help get other people in the organization to respond and make improvements that will help you, personally, be successful because they're resolving problems of your customers."

Episode 240: How has the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) role evolved over time? Traditionally focused on tracking metrics, CCOs now play a proactive and forward-facing role in driving business innovation.

In this episode, Caroline Lombardi, Global Head of the Hospitality & Leisure Practice at Egon Zehnder, explores the CCO role's dramatic evolution.

Customer experience—no longer just about tracking satisfaction or retention—has become a valuable springboard for boosting revenue and gaining a competitive edge. Successful CCOs are skilled in holistic customer experiences, from call centers to broader operations.

Caroline outlines three emerging CCO models: the Operational Leader who drives change, the Innovator who turns data into growth, and the CEO Successor who integrates customer experience into business strategies.

Discover how CCOs are shaping customer interactions and guiding the strategic direction of organizations. And learn why they must adopt a growth mindset to succeed, taking on revenue-generating roles and building strong, cross-functional alliances.

Guest: Caroline Lombardi, Global Head of Hospitality & Leisure, Egon Zehnder

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped List of Topics Covered:

• [01:10] How the CCO role is shifting from being a scorekeeper to focusing on growth and influencing innovation within companies
• [06:43] The toolkit successful CX leaders need, including operational accountability and having access to frontline teams
• [07:24] How transformational call center roles have become part of CX leadership, and the benefits of aligning call centers with the broader business strategy
• [15:36] What kinds of difficulties CX leaders face, such as building the right allies and driving change within organizations that may resist transformation
• [19:22] Why, from a recruitment lens, some people tend to downplay their job qualifications
• [23:39] The importance of getting customer experience into the boardroom to drive business results

Time-stamped Notable Quotes:

• [11:56] "Move from scorekeeper to growth mindset and make sure the C-suite understands you can stretch your roles in more ways to add bigger enterprise value."
• [12:11] "The best-case customer officer roles are really CEO successor-type of roles."
• [15:21] "I can't emphasize enough: If you have the chance to run the contact center, don't think twice."
• [16:03] "CX leaders by nature want to drive change. The score is never good enough. You're never done improving. You're never done innovating."
• [19:06] "If you are interviewing for a position and you're not getting access to who you think the right stakeholders are, you should ask for it. And if you don't get access, that's a sign. They're hiding it."

Episode 239: What hidden insights can customer behavior data analysis reveal about how successful one food delivery app may be over another?

Discover how analysis of externally sourced customer behavior data can fuel dramatic improvements in revenue forecasts and strategic decisions. See how competitor data analysis can help identify strengths and weaknesses that are otherwise hidden.

In this episode of Customer Confidential, we're joined by Dan McCarthy, director and co-founder of Theta and Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Dan shares findings from Theta and Bain & Company's jointly published consumer purchase data study, "Customer Lifetime Value across Food Delivery Competitors."

Together, Dan and Rob explore how they used a proprietary database of credit card transaction data from Pyxis to track customer behavior for subscription services over five years. They describe how accounting for corresponding economic factors like seasonality and the Covid-19 pandemic helped improve forecasts of transaction velocity, spending, and retention. Learn which food delivery app had the best customer loyalty, the most customers, and highest per-customer spending.

Guest: Dan McCarthy, Director and Co-Founder of Theta, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland, College Park

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-Stamped List of Topics Covered:

• [02:00] Introduction to customer behavior analysis and business forecasting
• [05:15] How companies can use historical data to predict customer lifetime value
• [10:00] Insights from customer data and the role of subscription services
• [15:30] The impact of external factors like economic shifts and market changes on consumer behavior
• [20:00] How businesses can improve acquisition and retention strategies using data
• [25:00] Using customer lifetime value to forecast future revenue and business growth

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes:

• [02:45] "The notion of having a consistent data set with multiple companies in it so you can compare … all these different food delivery companies [means] you can explicitly see them and you can see the same consumers buying across them."
• [05:37] "It's primarily taking these different vintages of customers—where a vintage is defined by, 'When did that customer make their very first purchase with your firm?'—and then within that vintage, what we want to explain is what these individual customers are going to do in the future."
• [07:42] "[The data] is what allows us to say things like, is this company acquiring customers well? Are they retaining customers well? How frequently are they buying? And how does that compare across different companies?"

Additional Resources:

• Customer Lifetime Value across Food Delivery Competitors
• Pyxis by Bain & Company

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

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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."

Episode 236: When telecom rivals offered lower rates and bigger networks, Macquarie bet big on customer loyalty—and won.

David Tudehope, Macquarie Technology Group's CEO, joins Rob Markey to discuss Macquarie's competitive differentiator: a bold, customer-centric approach.

David co-founded Macquarie to prioritize exceptional customer experience over price and network quality competition. Joining David is Joseph Michelli, author of Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way, who shares a key moment about how a product launch was postponed and short-term profits were sacrificed due to customer need misalignment.

"We weren't living our purpose if we proceeded. We had to take our medicine and accept stakeholder disappointment," David recalls.

That leadership decision reinforced Macquarie's culture. Transparency and real-time feedback improved employer-customer interactions, workforce engagement, and Net Promoter Scores. Sharing real, exceptional service examples inspired employees to excel when creating memorable customer experiences.

Impressive results include exceptional shareholder returns and consistently having Australian telecom's lowest per-customer complaint volume.

Guests: David Tudehope, CEO of Macquarie Technology Group, and Joseph Michelli, Ph.D., author of Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

(00:00:13 - 00:01:12) Identifying market opportunities by recognizing underserved and overcharged segments in telecom

(00:01:12 - 00:03:09) Initial business strategy to develop a better billing system and the importance of customer experience

(00:03:03 - 00:04:54) Customer experience as a core value and how making tough decisions helps prioritize customer satisfaction

(00:04:54 - 00:06:33) Navigating industry competition and differentiating through customer service in a price-focused market

(00:06:28 - 00:12:06) Empowering employees with transparency, real-time feedback, and engagement strategies

(00:12:18 - 00:18:19) Overcoming challenges like billing complaints and learning from feedback

(00:18:19 - 00:26:28) Cultural reinforcement and how storytelling can inspire employees

(00:26:19 - 00:28:12) Continuous improvement in NPS through cultural shifts

(00:28:15 - 00:31:32) Self-propelled learning and institutional growth and how to develop a sustainable model for continuous improvement

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

(00:05:55) "The customer experience is the compass from which we make hard decisions."

(00:05:43) "Our purpose is making a difference for customers that are underserved and overcharged."

(00:8:09) "Macquarie has between zero and two complaints a year."

(00:17:03) "Our real-time feedback of customer experience scores to staff has been very powerful."

(00:17:38) "When we took our hands off the big levers, we actually got significant change."

(00:34:42) "We found that when we educated the person on their bill, they became an advocate for us."

(00:30:21) "Storytelling has been transformational for our business."

(00:35:55) "Our model is self-learning and self-propelled, and it has been that way for 10 years."

Additional Resources:

Read Joseph Michelli's book: Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way

Episode 235: In 2012, T-Mobile lost nearly two million customers. Its revenue fell precipitously. Its situation seemed hopeless. Then came a new CEO with an audacious plan and a penchant for F-bombs.

Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile's US Consumer Group, joins host Rob Markey to share his firsthand account of the remarkable corporate turnaround. Jon describes the "Un-carrier" strategy, from its risky beginnings to its industry-reshaping impact. He shares how T-Mobile broke the mold, challenged conventions, and ultimately won over customers by putting their needs first.

According to Jon, "The whole premise of the Un-carrier movement was about fixing a stupid, broken, arrogant industry."

Under the leadership of new CEO John Legere, T-Mobile used data-driven insights to uncover the "bad profits" that dominated the mobile telecom industry in the US at the time. Determined to not only turn the company around but to change the industry, T-Mobile made a huge bet on customer value and what we at Bain now call Earned Growth: the idea that forgoing bad profits to deliver more value to customers would not only reduce churn but ultimately attract new customers through word of mouth.

Jon shares some of T-Mobile's biggest game-changing innovations. He lays out bets on dramatic changes to handset pricing and contract renewal terms, a daring move from high-priced "buckets" of limited data to unlimited plans, repricing international roaming, and the innovative T-Mobile Tuesdays rewards program. He also highlights the impact of the "Team of Experts" customer service model.

The results have been eye-popping. T-Mobile reestablished customer growth, received the highest ranking in the telecommunications & media Internet sector regarding NPS rankings (as measured by Bain's NPS Prism telecom benchmarking), and has outperformed the stock market by many multiples.

Guest: Jon Freier, President, T-Mobile US Consumer Group

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Additional resources:

T-Mobile's CEO on Winning Market Share by Trash-Talking Rivals

Reinventing Customer Service: How T-Mobile achieved record levels of quality and productivity

Un-carrier History

Learn about Bain's NPS Prism

Time-stamped list of topics covered:

[2:29] The dire state of T-Mobile in 2012

[6:00] John Legere's arrival and the birth of the "Un-carrier" strategy

[10:36] Breaking down the old telecom model: from contracts to transparency

[16:28] Early signs of success and the importance of leading indicators

[19:17] Overcoming internal skepticism and building organizational buy-in

[21:51] T-Mobile's unique approach to customer service and the "Team of Experts"

[24:27] Using data to anticipate customer needs and personalize experiences

[28:14] Frontline Connect: Immersing leaders in the customer experience

[30:12] T-Mobile's winning loyalty plays: unlimited data, T-Mobile Tuesdays, and Simple Global

[33:27] Lessons learned and the future of customer loyalty in telecom

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

[3:14] "We were losing two million customers a year … Revenues were going down, costs were going up, and earnings were plummeting."

[3:40] "Hopeless, that would be the word I would use in 2012. We're just stuck."

[5:59] "In walks a new CEO named John Legere ... dropping F-bombs in a very large all-employee meeting, and you're like, 'Did he just say what I thought he just said?'"

[12:21] "If you treat customers great and you treat them better than your competitors, guess what? They'll stay."

[14:31] "The biggest risk is doing exactly the same [thing]. Where our business was, it needed a bold shakeup."

[15:28] "You might not have to be perfect right out of the gate, but you have to be absolutely committed to steering decisions … That's where the visibility of metrics and the overall management system is critical to be able to steer to the outcomes you're looking for."

[16:07] "We just decided to have customers win first. Our employees win second, and then our shareholders ultimately winning after that."

[29:19] "I have the saying, at T-Mobile, that there's two types of people. One, those who serve customers. And two, those who serve those who serve customers. And you're in one of those two buckets. And if you don't buy into the culture, you'll never find the time to do it."

Why do some retailers excel at creating a welcoming environment for a diverse customer base while others fall short?

Bain & Company's Naiara De León and Madison Dyal Anderson discuss their research on how companies that excel in customer advocacy and inclusion consistently outperform their peers by a staggering 10 percentage points annually.

Beyond quantifying inclusion's sizable revenue impact, they also share data from their survey of over 7,700 US consumers on the lasting negative psychological toll exclusion has on retail customers—and why one bad experience can turn someone off a brand forever.

We analyze the root of the issue: What causes consumer exclusion in the first place? We also share examples of companies' winning inclusive strategies, from the importance of eye contact to plentiful product assortment to purposefully designed campaigns.

Guest: Naiara De León, Partner, Bain & Company

Guest: Madison Dyal Anderson, Partner, Bain & Company

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

[3:30] Research study overview and key findings

[6:33] Research findings on how inclusion is universally important

[8:02] Personal experiences of feeling welcomed or excluded in different stores

[10:13] Balancing inclusivity with a retail brand's target market

[12:16] How the feeling of belonging or being welcomed affects customer advocacy

[13:04] Types of negative retail experiences that lead to customer detractors

[15:00] The subtleties of interaction that affect customer perceptions of inclusion

[20:14] Examples of companies that have created welcoming and inclusive atmospheres

[22:10] How product assortments and staff training contribute to inclusivity

[26:32] How retailers can assess and improve their levels of inclusivity for good

[30:54] The greater impact of inclusive practices on strategy and market position

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

[00:32] "There is this line between welcomed and belonging. The core customer needs to feel like they belong."

[2:24] "Universally, customers across all demographics desire to feel invited and welcomed."

[6:33] "Inclusion matters to everyone. It's actually pretty universal."

[10:34] "The core customer needs to feel like they belong. That's where you are tuning in to those behaviors and those customer segment needs and wants. Make people feel heard and seen."

[14:45] "[In terms of survey findings, there were] verbatims that talked about, 'The store associate never made eye contact with me. I have hearing loss and that made [communication] very hard. English is not my first language and I need that eye contact to carry all the way through [a conversation]."

[31:13] "It is quite profitable to [prioritize inclusivity] because it helps you grow. It helps you lead, versus your peers. It's also the right thing to do."

Additional Resources:

• Read Madison and Naiara's Bain research, In Retail, Inclusive Customer Journeys Lead to Growth

What if the key to creating truly innovative products and solutions lies at least as much in uncovering the deep emotional and attitudinal needs of your customers as in mastering technology?

Eckhart Boehme, founder and managing director of Unipro Solutions, shares his approach to putting Clayton Christensen's Jobs to Be Done framework into practical use. Eckhart demonstrates how in-depth interviews with customers and their families can reveal the underlying personal experiences, emotions, and desires that truly motivate people to seek out and purchase products or services. With these insights in hand, companies often uncover fundamentally different needs than they first anticipated, sometimes even opening up new markets or uses for their products.

We also discuss Eckhart's Wheel of Progress model, which he designed to reveal the hidden layers of reasoning behind customer decisions. It provides a systematic way to deconstruct customer narratives and identify the jobs that are most likely to drive customer decisions along their cyclical journeys. Learn how this model segments the customer journey into phases of motivation, decision-making, and action. He brings this all to life with a compelling case study about finding a senior living place for an elderly loved one, revealing a hidden but critical job to be done: giving the elderly parent a sense of purpose.

Our conversation also lays bare some common pitfalls when applying the Jobs to Be Done framework, such as focusing too narrowly on functional jobs while missing the bigger picture of the customer's overarching goals and emotional needs.

Guest: Eckhart Boehme, Founder and Managing Director, Unipro Solutions

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered

[1:19] How Jobs to Be Done goes deeper than traditional customer needs analysis

[3:02] Clarifying what Jobs to Be Done entails and why it's a game changer

[6:08] The Wheel of Progress model and its role in dissecting customer decisions

[10:41] Applying Jobs to Be Done in complex customer service scenarios

[15:00] The practical steps and challenges in implementing this framework

[20:14] Examples of transformative customer insights derived from in-depth interviews

[22:10] Strategies for businesses to effectively harness Jobs to Be Done

[30:54] Future trends and directions in customer experience research

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

[6:26] "You want to understand where the story starts. What [event] triggered people [wanting to conduct] research and go through pain. Understanding what triggers people have is very valuable because then you can start building a relationship—even before people have started going to a search engine to look for a solution."

[7:51] "When we look at the customer journey, we call it 'the cycle of progress' because we think that people make progress in cycles."

[16:01] "We try to design our offerings and the marketing and sales processes to focus on helping customers make progress."

[24:23] "Jobs to Be Done helps you to do the right thing and design thinking helps you to do things right."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about Eckhart's Wheel of Progress
• Learn more about HBS professor Clay Christensen's Jobs to Be Done Theory and his famous story about how to improve milkshake sales

Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, argues that generative AI will soon empower customers in unexpected ways. Consumers, he predicts, will soon use AI tools to continuously discover lower loan rates, higher-yield savings accounts, or more attractive insurance policies.

As a result, Matt anticipates a shift in customer-company power dynamics. Imagine, for example, an AI agent able to continuously move your deposits to the highest-yielding savings accounts or refinance your loans to the best available rates with little intervention required from you. Imagine consumer tools for interpreting medical scans and providing a diagnosis to compare to your doctor's assessment. Generative AI could even transform the future of mental health therapy to be more effective, efficient, and streamlined.

Join us as we discuss the present and future of consumers' newfound AI-driven power and analyze where organizations and their leaders should be pointed next to remain competitive.

Guest: Matt Harris, Partner, Bain Capital Ventures

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• [02:53] How businesses use generative AI for productivity and future innovation
• [09:23] Discussion on the Gartner Hype Cycle for generative AI
• [17:09] What it means for customers to be "superpowered" and an overview of a few generative AI applications in finance and medicine
• [22:28] AI's impact on society and the future of work
• [27:44] Adapting to a world with superpowered customers who now demand more from businesses, emphasizing the need for deepened customer relationships and greater levels of innovation

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

• [10:55] "Every new technology experiences [influx and they] disillusion the rest of the market because they have these spectacular failures."
• [14:20] "[Generative AI] is a much more powerful tool for customers than it is for companies. And an equal or larger part of energy should be going in these boardrooms to imagining a world where customers have the power of generative AI and the implications for your entire business model."
• [18:00] "I revere doctors. But how could we expect that a single human being would have all of the medical knowledge in their head? This is something computers will be better at."
• [22:16] "I think I could make an argument that generative AI, combined with predictive machine learning, and being moved forward as fast as these technologies are advancing, will be better at almost everything."
• [27:53] "We should be spending as much energy thinking and worrying and planning for a 'superpowered' customer world as we are thinking about how we use [technology] ourselves, and I'm just not seeing people doing that."

Additional Resources:

• Read Matt's article for BCV, The Age of the Superpowered Customer
• The Age of AI and Our Human Future by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher
• The AI Advantage by Thomas H. Davenport
• Prediction Machines by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
• Learn about Bain's spin-off, Bain Capital, which has operated as a separate company since 1984

Learn More About Our Guest and Host:

• Guest: Matt Harris LinkedIn Profile
• Host: Rob Markey LinkedIn Profile

Discover the engine of Earned Growth as Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld, Bain Fellow and "Winning On Purpose" author, hold a working session on how references and referrals significantly contribute to organic growth.

Rob and Fred unearth the pivotal role that references and referrals play in propelling Earned Growth. They answer key questions such as: How would you characterize different referral types? What are the best mechanisms for measuring and attributing value to them? How do you navigate the tricky path of fostering genuine, organic referrals at scale?

Together, they explore one of the thorniest issues in accounting for the value of referrals: How much of a new referred customer's value should accrue to the referring customer versus the referred one?

Guest: Fred Reichheld, Bain Fellow, founder of Bain's Loyalty Practice

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback:

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• 02:00 - Unveiling the Referral Spectrum
• 08:30 - Measuring the Impact of Referrals
• 15:45 - Attributing Value: Who Benefits?
• 22:10 - Fostering a Culture of Earned Growth

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

• 02:25 - Rob Markey: "A genuine referral, an authentic referral, is motivated by some form of goodwill towards the recipient."
• 05:45 - Fred Reichheld: "Earned Growth is not just a metric, it's a philosophy."
• 19:30 - Fred Reichheld: "The value of a referral is the cornerstone of organic expansion."

Additional Resources:

• Winning On Purpose by Fred Reichheld
• Bain & Company's Insights on Earned Growth

Guest and Host Bio Links:

• Fred Reichheld LinkedIn Profile
• Rob Markey LinkedIn Profile

Why would a world-class sports academy invest in a student center, rather than more coaches, fancy equipment, or dorms?

IMG Academy, a Florida boarding school, turns out some of the most successful college and professional athletes around. Its president, Tim Pernetti, led a massive cultural shift toward customer loyalty.

Tim says IMG Academy used to be highly focused on coaching and sports operations. To be clear, that emphasis on athletic excellence helped produce a large number of highly successful athletes. But Tim and the leadership team saw the potential to add something on top of this: a focus on serving a more comprehensive set of student-athlete needs. Today, IMG Academy leverages student-athlete input to refine its program and operations. New initiatives range from enhancing dining experiences to introducing flexible communal spaces.

Tim shares how an emphasis on employee recognition combines regular student and parent feedback to instill deep, enduring culture change.

Guest: Tim Pernetti, President, IMG Academy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• [00:09:17] Global influence and expansion
• [00:14:25] Culture shift toward experience
• [00:19:57] Response to student feedback
• [00:25:32] Investment in campus experience
• [00:30:01] Recognition's impact on staff
• [00:35:23] Challenges in universal buy-in
• [00:37:09] Commitment to improving IMG Academy

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

• [00:04:43] "Really, [our early] focus was on intense physical training, like total immersion in tennis. And the result was ten world number ones [were trained here]."
• [00:07:23] "This is an environment where you're bringing people in from all over the world. You want to have good people in the environment. We put a lot of weight into that, like getting to know kids, and getting to know their parents."
• [00:23:17] "We went into meetings with data and said, 'Here's what the customer is saying.'"
• [00:29:16] "[At] a place like IMG Academy, we have everything from coaches, people that serve food every day, and our transportation drivers, [and people] who cut the grass at five o'clock in the morning. And I've shadowed all of them."
• [00:30:12] "We [recognized a tram driver] with a financial bonus and a gift card to take his wife out to dinner. This guy now is known as the friendliest, nicest, most outgoing person on campus."
• [00:30:35] "The biggest tool you have in your toolkit right now is your personal and other leaders' acknowledgment and recognition when people do the right things."

Guest and Host Bio Links:

• Tim Pernetti's LinkedIn Profile
• Rob Markey LinkedIn Profile

How can businesses transcend traditional customer service boundaries to establish new customer experience benchmarks?

Stan Swinton, Founder and General Manager of NPSx, Bain & Company, discusses how a comprehensive approach to customer experience extends beyond gathering feedback or managing customer journeys.

Stan details Bain's NPSx framework—comparable to a restaurant star rating, he says—which offers an extensive customer-centricity analysis via 60+ dimensions and eight pillars. Stan shares how this methodology motivates companies to strive for top-tier customer satisfaction.

We also discuss the Customer Experience Roadmap and Accreditation (CXRA). Stan highlights CXRA's effectiveness in uncovering inefficiencies and enhancing customer-employee synergies.

In addition, we explore why businesses frequently restrict their customer experience initiatives to areas such as feedback management, and discuss the essential role of Customer Experience Officers in achieving genuine customer centricity. Finally, we examine the constantly changing landscape of CX benchmarks and expectations, emphasizing the importance of a flexible and adaptive approach.

Guest: Stan Swinton, Founder and General Manager of NPSx, Bain & Company

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• [16:56] Role of CX: Stan highlights how the NPSx framework aids in defining company decision rights and categorizes 60 different jobs or dimensions to be coordinated.
• [17:50] Framework Pillars: Eight pillars provide a structured context for internal dialogue on improvement within organizations.
• [18:15] Framework applicability: The framework's relevance, even for companies that are just starting their CX journey or are less mature in their CX programs
• [19:19] Framework evolution and review: The living nature of the framework, with ongoing revisions and updates to standards and maturity scales to keep pace with current trends in customer centricity
• [20:10] Benchmarking and improvement: How clients sometimes feel dissatisfied with their initial ratings but are encouraged to view it as a journey toward improvement, similar to achieving restaurant rating stars in the culinary world
• [21:48] Identifying opportunities: How the framework allows organizations to identify their strengths and areas for improvement in customer experience

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

• [04:49] "We would generally work with a company first to define their taxonomy. One of the things we recognize is a lot of different industries and clients have different ways of defining their experiences. But there are standards and there are best practices that we can bring to the table to help shape that taxonomy and definitions."
• [7:28] "One of the things that we recognize at Bain is that a lot of practitioners didn't come from a CX background. There aren't a lot of degree programs dedicated to CX. And when we were looking at the market, we'd say, well, how can you train yourself as a CX practitioner?"
• [12:31] "Our framework has eight pillars: purpose and leadership, proposition management, customer value and lifecycle management, customer journey management, customer service management, customer feedback management, customer data management, and employee experience."

Additional Resources:

• Bain article | The Elements of Value: Understanding the 30 elements of value for consumers can help companies gain an edge.
• HBR article | The Elements of Value: Measuring—and delivering—what consumers really want

Guest and Host Bio Links:

• Stan's LinkedIn profile
• Rob Markey LinkedIn Profile

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:

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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

How does an insurance industry leader integrate a simple yet profound question—Would you do that to your mom?—to transform customer service and decision making? In this episode, Richard Watts, board member at Farmers Insurance and former sales and service president at Progressive, discusses how asking this question improves business operations. He explores how this unique approach revolutionizes customer service and sets a new industry standard for empathy and customer focus.

Richard also shares insights into how this philosophy transformed internal practices, significantly influenced customer satisfaction and loyalty, and how it continues to shape his leadership and strategic decisions. We'll also revisit Richard's journey from biology to computer science and his shift toward customer-centric innovations in insurance.

Guest: Richard Watts, board member, Farmers Insurance

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 background [02:05]
• The genesis of the "Would You Do That to Your Mom?" philosophy [05:10]
• Reflections on the evolution of customer service in insurance [11:25]
• How empathy drives customer loyalty and business success [14:15]
• Challenges and triumphs in embedding this into organizational culture [18:30]
• The ongoing influence of this approach in Richard's career [22:45]
• Balancing data-driven strategies with ethical considerations [25:50]

Quotable Quotes:

"There isn't a single business initiative or change program that people don't say has to be CEO-led or have the CEO's blessing." [21:19]

"Having someone out there to take the machete and, hack through the jungle of all these processes, being able to go there and say, 'Okay, we need real-time processing. We can't live with these batch systems anymore." [22:30]

Host: Rob Markey

How do the needs of students at for-profit, mostly online colleges differ from those of typical college students? They often require financial aid, schedule flexibility, and academic support that can go far beyond the norm of traditional higher education. In this segment, we explore why graduation rates have traditionally been quite low at these colleges due to all the challenges students face. How do schools like this strike an appropriate balance of flexibility, support, and rigorous academic programs that will help their students succeed in the workforce?

Ruth Veloria is the chief strategy officer and customer officer at the University of Phoenix. She is on a mission to help more of the school's students successfully overcome challenges so they can complete their studies and reap the rewards of their education. Ruth and the team at University of Phoenix have spent over a decade working to improve student retention and success rates.

In this episode, roughly a decade after Ruth first joined Rob on the podcast, she shares how the University of Phoenix has achieved a remarkable increase in student retention rates, from 64% to 74%. They now graduate over a third more students than they did 10 years ago. Ruth discusses how the Net Promoter System helped fuel the university's deep commitment to learning from and acting on student feedback. She describes academic policies that are empathetic versus unempathetic, and how data analysis and feedback have been used to enhance student experience and to support policy and process change.

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:

• Overview of a subscription-like model for student enrollment [03:15]
• Transition of Ruth from the School of Business to strategy and customer experience leadership [07:10]
• Approaches to student retention and success [11:45]
• Utilizing data analytics and technology to improve student outcomes [16:25]
• Adapting to Covid-19: Impact on student experience and education delivery [20:55]
• Insights into student acquisition costs and orientation processes [25:30]
• Reflections on the implementation and evolution of the Net Promoter System [30:15]
• Ruth's advice for educational transformation and future goals [35:00]

Quotable Quotes:

• "We went from a 59 Net Promoter Score up to a 73 Net Promoter Score." [16:33]
• "We created a lot of entrepreneurs. We got a lot of people excited about changes they could make in the student experience." [24:19]
• "We actually set up a pilot team that was using a business leader and tech leader to come together to fix application problems. In fact, we still have that today." [25:06]

Guest: Ruth Veloria, chief strategy officer and customer officer, University of Phoenix

Host: Rob Markey

How do high-quality NPS benchmarks unlock strategic priorities and initiatives? What if your NPS data seems highly counterintuitive? For example, what if Detractors seem to be more loyal than Promoters?

Host Rob Markey and Jason Barro, a partner at Bain & Company and the leader of Bain's NPS Prism benchmarking service, unpack this situation in the airline industry. It's an illustration of how Net Promoter Score benchmark data might be misleading when not all customers have the freedom to choose, revealing the nuanced understanding required to transform raw data into strategic business insights.

Jason and Rob use this example to explore some of the ways a sophisticated knowledge of how customers buy, the choices they have available, and how a market's competitive dynamics inform the interpretation of customer loyalty benchmarks like NPS.

Episode Highlights:

1. Introduction to Jason and NPS Prism [01:02]
2. Using NPS Data for Market Insight [02:05]
3. Exploring the complexity of NPS in different industries [05:12]
4. Concept of Trapped Customers [10:17]
5. Earned Growth Strategies [23:52]
6. Banking and Insurance Customer Dynamics [27:22]

Quotable Quotes:

"The more captive you are, the more likely you are to give high share of wallet to somebody that you don't like very much." [15:53] - Rob Markey

"One of the effects we see in the Prism data for airlines more broadly is that high frequent travelers are happier than low frequent travelers." [18:06] - Jason Barro

"You can see this strategy of, 'Earn the respect and happiness of your customers,' is a path to profitable growth, and you can see…just how much it actually matters." - Jason Barro [23:28]

Additional Resources:

NPS Prism by Bain & Company

Net Promoter System Overview

Listen to Jason's earlier podcast, NPS Prism: The Source for True, Deep NPS Insights

Bios

Jason Barro

Rob Markey

Get in touch:

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 Rob a note here.

From reshaping the playful culture of a global toy company to cracking the customer-centricity code at Zurich Insurance, how did Conny Kalcher manage the leap?

Conny Kalcher, now the group chief customer officer at Zurich Insurance, has a rich history of pioneering customer-centric transformations. Conny introduced a swath of fresh perspectives and approaches to the more traditional environment of Zurich Insurance. She did this not long after retiring from a rewarding career at LEGO, where she helped a customer-centric transformation. Her influence transcends the boundaries of any one company, partly a result of her active participation in Bain's NPS Loyalty Forum, where she has made large contributions to the ongoing Net Promoter System movement. For context to today's discussion, you might want to listen to her conversation with Rob Markey in episode 55, Brick by Brick.

In this episode, Rob and Conny delve into her remarkable journey from the playful and imaginative domain of toys to the structured and staid sphere of the insurance business. Conny's customer engagement methodology breaks industry molds. She draws parallels and contrasts between her long career in an organization selling toys made of stackable bricks and her new role in a complex global behemoth selling insurance policies and managing financial and operational risk. Conny's anecdotes reveal that most of the principles behind understanding and catering to customer needs are universal, regardless of the specific type of customer or product. As Conny reminisces about her time in the toy industry, she sheds light on how the lessons learned there acted as a catalyst for nurturing a customer-first culture at Zurich Insurance. It illustrates how a keen understanding of customer sentiments can be a game-changer in any industry.

Topics covered:

1. Transition from the LEGO Group to Zurich Insurance [02:20]
2. Customer-centric transformation [04:00]
3. Corporate strategy and vision [06:50]
4. Metric implementation (NPS) [07:07]
5. Decentralized vs. centralized organizational structures [11:00]
6. Earning customer loyalty [24:30]

Quotable quotes:

1. "Anybody who needs to change something I would definitely advise to also think about, 'How can we do processes, structures, ways of working to make people naturally change,' because people want to do the right thing, basically." [01:45]
2. "We've defined our strategy for this strategic cycle to become the preferred insurer of our customers. So, it's all about earning the loyalty of those customers." [27:15]
3. "My proudest moment in the Zurich [Insurance] journey is when I go to the local offices and I talk to the people there and I see the fire in their eyes, and I see the new brand on the walls, and they talk in a new kind of language that they didn't use to talk in." [32:37]

Additional resources:

1. Zurich Insurance's long-term strategy and near-term targets
2. Episode 55 of Customer Confidential Podcast: Brick by Brick: Rebuilding the LEGO Group by Rediscovering Customer Centricity
3. Net Promoter System overview
4. Insurance industry reports by Bain & Company

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

Bios:

• Conny Kalcher, group chief customer officer at Zurich Insurance
• Rob Markey

Host Rob Markey welcomes Mark Slatin, CEO of EmpoweredCX, to dissect the intricate dynamics of trust within customer experiences. Drawing insights from real-world examples, they explore the role of product and service quality in establishing trust, the impact of reliability and consistency in decision making, and the potential pitfalls of self-orientation. Delving deeper into the Trust Equation and explaining its different facets, Mark underscores the necessity of understanding the customer's journey and perspective. They address the challenges of reliability, targeted marketing implications, customer vs. company centricity, the art of meaningful recommendations, and more. And they explore how to balance customer needs with shareholder expectations. Mark also provides an analytical perspective on the integral components of trust in a business landscape.

In this show, Rob and Mark discuss the Trust Equation, which you can learn more about here:

https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation 

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/trust-equation

Guest: Mark Slatin, CEO of EmpoweredCX

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

In this episode, we launch our new show name: The Customer Confidential Podcast. We chose it after seeking lots of listener and guest input and believe that the new name better reflects the show's mission—namely, to delve into untold stories of customer and industry transformations, sharing the journeys of both well-known and unsung heroes of customer centricity. We also seek out deep conversations with the thought leaders who inspire the best practitioners. 

Also, in this episode, which also marks our 10th anniversary, host Rob Markey welcomes back frequent guest (and Rob's longtime mentor) Fred Reichheld, Bain fellow and founder of Bain's Loyalty practice. Rob and Fred trace the evolution of Fred's earned growth rate concept from its roots in Fred's early work on customer retention at Bain. They unravel the intricacies of customer-centric metrics and how they have changed. They note the impact of genuine referrals vs. those that are bought and differentiate between earned and purchased growth. Importantly, they acknowledge and explore challenges in quantifying earned growth and how some companies have begun to tackle them successfully.

Guest: Fred Reichheld, Bain fellow, founder of Bain's Loyalty practice, and author of Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers

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

How do you measure patient experience and empathy within the healthcare industry in a way that truly captures real emotion and real experiences?

Dr. Adrienne Boissy, guest staff neurologist at Cleveland Clinic and chief medical officer at Qualtrics, sits down with Rob Markey to discuss the need for a more comprehensive approach to capturing the patient experience. She also shares how healthcare professionals and caregivers alike can leverage compassion and self-empathy to better manage the often hard-to-handle career moments such as helping colleagues, patients, and their families process challenges together.

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

If you'd like to learn more about Adrienne, visit her LinkedIn.

How can an organization's passion for high-quality culinary delights forge unbreakable customer bonds? For food wholesaler METRO's customers, buying food is a personal experience. It's the art of witnessing, inhaling, savoring, and examining the produce, meat, and fish in the store—a sensory feast that leaves customers' hearts full.

Creating exceptional fresh-food buying experiences is METRO's mission. In this episode, guest Peter Gries, customer and sales officer at METRO, and Rob Markey discuss why the company values its diverse customer segments. Peter also shares an insider's perspective on the change journey transforming the company's relationship with its customers.

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

If you'd like to learn more about Peter, you can find him on LinkedIn.

With an array of streaming platforms and the same amount of time in the day, getting an accurate read on where your customers spend their screen time has never been more important. And this shift in customer behavior has been particularly challenging for companies that rely on traditional ways to collect data on their customers.

In this episode, guest David Kenny, chairman and CEO of Nielsen, and Rob Markey discuss the impact streaming has had on Nielsen's business, how the company is evolving to meet new challenges, and how strategic innovation fosters customer trust.

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

If you'd like to learn more about David, you can find him on LinkedIn.