Ep. 232: Matt Harris | When AI Shifts the Balance of Power to Consumers: Preparing for a New Business Reality
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Release Date: 04/18/2024
Ep. 262 | Megan Riggs: From Farmers Market Fav to Supermarket Staple: How a Lean Juice Company Scaled Fast
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 261 | Andy Pierce: False Confidence at Machine Speed: How to Make Synthetic Customers Useful
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 260 | Jeannie Walters and John Abraham: A Company with No Memory: When Your Systems Don’t Remember the Customer
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned 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...
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Ep. 259 | Rachel Bicking: Customers’ First Micro-Frustration Makes or Breaks the Next Purchase
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 258: Charlon McIntosh & Melissa Pint | Accountability is the Product at Frontier: “We Didn’t Do Interesting. We Did Effective.”
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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Ep. 257: John Finley | Stop Chasing Surveys: How to Earn the Next Customer Choice
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
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...
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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...
info_outlineMatt 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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Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: https://www.robmarkey.com/contact-rob
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