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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest: Ryan Fuller, Founder, Larracos Labs

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Timestamped Topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13:01 – Evaluating restaurant experiences across 36 distinct dimensions

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Timestamped Topics

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

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

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

11:04 – Expanding beyond subscriptions and entering Target stores

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

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

35:32 – Responding to tariffs while protecting longtime subscribers

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Timestamped Topics

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

Notable Quotes

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest: Megan Riggs, CEO and Founder, Crunchy Hydration

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Timestamped Topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time-Stamped Topics:

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

Time-Stamped Quotes:

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

Resources Referenced on Today's Show:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Timestamped Topics

[00:00] Shiny tools derail real outcomes

[00:02] Learn without a survey mindset

[00:04] The company with no memory

[00:07] AI listening, beyond survey bubbles

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

[00:14] Trade-offs beat vague promises

[00:18] Redefine success beyond scores

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

Guest: Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation, Kobie Marketing

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

Time-Stamped Topics:

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

Time-Stamped Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Time-Stamped Topics

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

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

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Time-Stamped Topics

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

Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest: Mike Milliron, Chief Operating Officer, IMG Academy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-Stamped Topics:

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

Time-Stamped Quotes:

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

Resources

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