Ep. 228: Tony Ezell | Sustaining Success: How Customer Loyalty Drives Organizational Stability
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Release Date: 02/22/2024
Ep. 256: Mike Milliron | “We Made It Cool to Care”: From CX Resistance to Results
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 255: Jason Guardino and Karen San | How Turning 18 Can Break Your Relationship With Healthcare
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 254: Gurdeep Pall | The Internet Side of the AI Battle: Why Walled Gardens Fail
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 253: Mathieu Staniulis & Séverine Clairet | Blinded by Pride: Inside a 125-Year-Old Co-Op’s Return to Customer-Centricity
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 252: Erin Wallace | The Data Doesn’t Care How Good You Think You Are
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 251: Mike Valanzola | Many Voices, No Shared Truth: How Dell Revitalized Its Customer Feedback System with Help from the CXRA
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 250: Sean McEntire | A Decade of Discipline: From NPS Pilot to Outer Loop Powerhouse
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 249: Scott Taber | Why Four Seasons Turned Guests Away
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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....
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Ep. 248: Utibe Bassey | Restoring Power, Recharging Customer Experience
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 247: Mari Cross | These B2B Customers Don’t Buy Features. They Buy Outcomes.
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
info_outlineHow 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
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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