Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

The Customer Confidential Podcast unlocks a world of unparalleled customer and employee loyalty insights. Rob Markey, Host, Partner at Bain & Company, and a Net Promoter System pioneer, uses his deep expertise and empathetic approach to challenge conventional wisdom, peel back layers of typical advice, and expose the real stories of industry transformation. Take a deep dive into discussions on CX, customer journey, customer insights, Net Promoter Score, and more. Every episode is a master class in loyalty. Guests include CMOs, CXOs, and heroes of customer-centric transformation, along with thought leaders who inspire them. Exploring organizational structures, operating models, goals, and metrics, Rob and his guests from companies such as Vanguard, American Express, and more bring to light practical marketing, product, customer experience, and technology strategies for earning customer-focused growth. This podcast is your source for untold stories of customer and employee loyalty. Challenging, insightful, and instructive—all in one place. Earned growth starts here.

Ep. 256: Mike Milliron | “We Made It Cool to Care”: From CX Resistance to Results 09/04/2025

Ep. 256: Mike Milliron | “We Made It Cool to Care”: From CX Resistance to Results 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: , Chief Operating Officer, IMG Academy Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast here: 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’sfun to actually see those things come to life.” Resources (Episode 230 with former IMG Academy president, Tim Pernetti) /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37985550

Ep. 255: Jason Guardino and Karen San | How Turning 18 Can Break Your Relationship With Healthcare 08/21/2025

Ep. 255: Jason Guardino and Karen San | How Turning 18 Can Break Your Relationship With Healthcare 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: , Chief Experience Officer and Gastroenterologist, The Permanente Medical Group, and , Senior Director of Care Experience, The Permanente Medical Group Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give us feedback: Send us a note: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37872040

Ep. 254: Gurdeep Pall | The Internet Side of the AI Battle: Why Walled Gardens Fail 08/14/2025

Ep. 254: Gurdeep Pall | The Internet Side of the AI Battle: Why Walled Gardens Fail 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: , President of AI Strategy, Qualtrics Host: , 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/index/show/baincompany/id/37800240

Ep. 253: Mathieu Staniulis & Séverine Clairet | Blinded by Pride: Inside a 125-Year-Old Co-Op’s Return to Customer-Centricity 08/04/2025

Ep. 253: Mathieu Staniulis & Séverine Clairet | Blinded by Pride: Inside a 125-Year-Old Co-Op’s Return to Customer-Centricity 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: , Vice President, Products, Solutions & Digital, and Chief Transformation Officer | , Vice President Customer Experience & Marketing Strategy, Desjardins Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give us feedback: Send us a note: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37638060

Ep. 252: Erin Wallace | The Data Doesn’t Care How Good You Think You Are 07/21/2025

Ep. 252: Erin Wallace | The Data Doesn’t Care How Good You Think You Are 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: , Director of Client Engagement, Bain & Company Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: 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: Learn more about the Global CX Standards: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37002995

Ep. 251: Mike Valanzola | Many Voices, No Shared Truth: How Dell Revitalized Its Customer Feedback System with Help from the CXRA 07/17/2025

Ep. 251: Mike Valanzola | Many Voices, No Shared Truth: How Dell Revitalized Its Customer Feedback System with Help from the CXRA 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: , Senior Director, Voice of Customer and NPS Operations, Dell Technologies Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give us feedback: Send us a note: 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, /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37422895

Ep. 250: Sean McEntire | A Decade of Discipline: From NPS Pilot to Outer Loop Powerhouse 07/14/2025

Ep. 250: Sean McEntire | A Decade of Discipline: From NPS Pilot to Outer Loop Powerhouse 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: Vice President, Customer Strategy and Operations, Comcast Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: Want to get in touch? . 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: Listen to our two-part 2018 podcast on the origin of Comcast’s NPS journey with Charlie Herrin, Comcast’s chief customer experience officer: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37374545

Ep. 249: Scott Taber | Why Four Seasons Turned Guests Away 07/10/2025

Ep. 249: Scott Taber | Why Four Seasons Turned Guests Away 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: , Senior Vice President for Global Hospitality, Four Seasons Hotels Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give us feedback: Send us a note: 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, Learn more about how Four Seasons was impacted by Covid-19 in our brief: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/37336390

Ep. 248: Utibe Bassey | Restoring Power, Recharging Customer Experience 06/12/2025

Ep. 248: Utibe Bassey | Restoring Power, Recharging Customer Experience 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 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: , Vice President of Customer Experience, Dominion Energy Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: Want to get in touch? 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/36935570

Ep. 247: Mari Cross | These B2B Customers Don’t Buy Features. They Buy Outcomes. 05/29/2025

Ep. 247: Mari Cross | These B2B Customers Don’t Buy Features. They Buy Outcomes. 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: , Chief Customer Officer at Infor Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: Want to get in touch? . 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/index/show/baincompany/id/36744690

Ep. 246: Deon Nicholas | A Glimpse of the AI Future—It’s Here Today 05/15/2025

Ep. 246: Deon Nicholas | A Glimpse of the AI Future—It’s Here Today 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: , Founder, President, and Executive Chairman, Forethought Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: Want to get in touch? . 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/index/show/baincompany/id/36562430

Ep. 245: Eduardo Roma | When Effortless Digital Isn’t Enough: Competing on Customer Relationships 05/01/2025

Ep. 245: Eduardo Roma | When Effortless Digital Isn’t Enough: Competing on Customer Relationships 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: , Partner, Bain & Company, Global Head of Customer Experience Transformation Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give us feedback: Send us a note: 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: (A webinar by Eduardo Roma, Rob Markey, and Phil Sager) (Video located on Eduardo’s profile page) /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/36372835

Ep. 244: Eric Almquist | The Value Experience: Why Adding Elements of Value Adds Company Value 03/06/2025

Ep. 244: Eric Almquist | The Value Experience: Why Adding Elements of Value Adds Company Value 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: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience . Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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 , , and : Eric’s perspective on the elements of value: Episode 117 of Customer Confidential with Eric, What Do B2B Customers Want?: Explore the B2C elements of value in more detail here: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/35544385

Ep. 243: Cutler Andrews | When an 8% Donor Base Funds a University: Unlocking Hidden Alumni Engagement Opportunities 02/06/2025

Ep. 243: Cutler Andrews | When an 8% Donor Base Funds a University: Unlocking Hidden Alumni Engagement Opportunities 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience . Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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/index/show/baincompany/id/35165020

Ep. 242: Kunal Madhok | The Black Box Fallacy: Why Wells Fargo Doesn't Trust an AI It Can't Explain 01/16/2025

Ep. 242: Kunal Madhok | The Black Box Fallacy: Why Wells Fargo Doesn't Trust an AI It Can't Explain 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: Host: 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: 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/index/show/baincompany/id/34774700

Ep. 241: Abhii Parakh & Mike Estep | Flawless Over Flashy: Prudential's Unconventional Path to Customer Experience Leadership 12/19/2024

Ep. 241: Abhii Parakh & Mike Estep | Flawless Over Flashy: Prudential's Unconventional Path to Customer Experience Leadership 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: and Host: 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: 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/index/show/baincompany/id/34506060

Ep. 240: Caroline Lombardi | The Evolution of the Chief Customer Officer: From Scorekeeper to CEO Successor 10/31/2024

Ep. 240: Caroline Lombardi | The Evolution of the Chief Customer Officer: From Scorekeeper to CEO Successor 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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/index/show/baincompany/id/33678822

Ep. 239: Dan McCarthy | Food for Thought: How External Data Analysis Can Unlock Competitive Insights 10/17/2024

Ep. 239: Dan McCarthy | Food for Thought: How External Data Analysis Can Unlock Competitive Insights 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: , Director and Co-Founder of Theta, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland, College Park Host: , Partner, Bain & Company Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey . 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/33476817

Ep. 238: Brian Higgins | Building AI Trust: Verizon’s Bold Bet on Deliberate Progress 09/05/2024

Ep. 238: Brian Higgins | Building AI Trust: Verizon’s Bold Bet on Deliberate Progress 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey: https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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.” /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/32893942

Ep. 237: Murli Buluswar | From Analytics to Outcomes: Creating Data-Driven Insights at Citi 08/15/2024

Ep. 237: Murli Buluswar | From Analytics to Outcomes: Creating Data-Driven Insights at Citi 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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/index/show/baincompany/id/32575457

Ep. 236: David Tudehope & Joseph Michelli | “Zig When They Zag”: Macquarie's Customer-Centric Revolution 07/11/2024

Ep. 236: David Tudehope & Joseph Michelli | “Zig When They Zag”: Macquarie's Customer-Centric Revolution 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: , CEO of Macquarie Technology Group, and , Ph.D., author of Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/32083097

Ep. 235: Jon Freier | From Near Death to NPS Disrupter: T-Mobile’s Journey to Customer Leadership 06/20/2024

Ep. 235: Jon Freier | From Near Death to NPS Disrupter: T-Mobile’s Journey to Customer Leadership 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: Host: Give us feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: Additional resources: 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.” /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/31803062

Ep. 234: Naiara De León & Madison Dyal Anderson | All Customers Just Want to Belong: What Defines an Inclusive Retail Experience? 05/16/2024

Ep. 234: Naiara De León & Madison Dyal Anderson | All Customers Just Want to Belong: What Defines an Inclusive Retail Experience? 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 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: Guest: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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, /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/31305237

Ep. 233: Eckhart Boehme | Uncovering Hidden Customer Needs: The Power of Jobs to Be Done 05/02/2024

Ep. 233: Eckhart Boehme | Uncovering Hidden Customer Needs: The Power of Jobs to Be Done 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/31068008

Ep. 232: Matt Harris | When AI Shifts the Balance of Power to Consumers: Preparing for a New Business Reality 04/18/2024

Ep. 232: Matt Harris | When AI Shifts the Balance of Power to Consumers: Preparing for a New Business Reality 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: Host: Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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, by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher by Thomas H. Davenport by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb which has operated as a separate company since 1984 Learn More About Our Guest and Host: Guest: Host: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/30858053

Ep. 231: Fred Reichheld | Unleashing Earned Growth: The Referral Spectrum 04/04/2024

Ep. 230: Tim Pernetti | A New Playbook: Reinventing the IMG Academy Experience 03/21/2024

Ep. 230: Tim Pernetti | A New Playbook: Reinventing the IMG Academy Experience 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: Host: 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: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/30457578

Ep. 229: Stan Swinton | Redefining Customer Centricity: What is the NPSx Framework? 03/07/2024

Ep. 229: Stan Swinton | Redefining Customer Centricity: What is the NPSx Framework? 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: Host: 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: 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 | HBR article | Guest and Host Bio Links: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/30255723

Ep. 228: Tony Ezell | Sustaining Success: How Customer Loyalty Drives Organizational Stability 02/22/2024

Ep. 228: Tony Ezell | Sustaining Success: How Customer Loyalty Drives Organizational Stability 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: executive vice president of North America and chief marketing officer, Becton, Dickinson and Company Give Us Feedback: We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback Send a note to host Rob Markey: 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: Host: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/30024378

Ep. 227: Richard Watts | “Would You Do That to Your Mum?” The Simple and Powerful CX Litmus Test 02/08/2024

Ep. 227: Richard Watts | “Would You Do That to Your Mum?” The Simple and Powerful CX Litmus Test 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: 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: 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: /episode/index/show/baincompany/id/29823498

Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

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