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

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

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

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

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

Guest: Gurdeep Pall, President of AI Strategy, Qualtrics

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-Stamped Topics:

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

Time-Stamped Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notable Quotes

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

Key Topics Covered

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

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Time-Stamped Topics

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

Notable Quotes

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

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

Time-Stamped Topics

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

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes

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

Additional Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

Topics Covered:

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

Notable Quotes:

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

Additional Resources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Key Topics Covered:

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast.

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

Notable Quotes:

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

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

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

Additional Resources:

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

Episode 248: The lights are back on. So why are customers still angry? At Dominion Energy, engineers once believed their job ended when electricity was restored. But as outages grew more visible and customers grew more vocal, Utibe Bassey, Dominion’s vice president of customer experience, began to challenge that assumption. Knowing how to fix the grid, she argues, isn’t enough if customers never understand why it failed or when it’ll come back.

Utibe grew up in Nigeria, where power outages were a daily reality. To help Dominion’s engineers understand more viscerally and emotionally what that feels like, she shares photos of surgeries lit by candles and students studying by kerosene lamps. Her message: Reliability is human. Power is personal.

To change behavior, she turns to data. With NPS Prism, Utibe gives each team a clear view into how customers perceive the company’s performance. It helps them understand how perception lags behind technical fixes. Outage after outage, her teams are learning that telling customers why the lights went out can matter more than how fast they come back on. With that data, technical teams don’t just ask, “Did we fix it?” They ask, “How did it feel for the customer?”

Learn how audit and compliance teams frame decisions in customer terms, how outage estimates prioritize updates over accuracy, and how CX team members can rotate into operations—and vice versa—to embed empathy into processes.

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: https://survey.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9WZ1zLMjfzYj5qe

Key Topics Covered:

• Why engineers need to explain outages, not just fix them
• The cultural disconnect between the mission and the customer mindset
• Using the power of highly memorable photos to bridge emotional understanding
• How precise answers compare to more empathetic ones
• Journey orientation and shared CX goals
• Perception compared to reality and confronting ETR skepticism
• How NPS Prism drives internal change
• Planned outages as a culture lab
• From door-knocking to All in Service Week
• An overview of CX in incentive plans

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 frontline facing or they're in audit, supply chain, or ethics, to connect the dots between, ‘Hey, if you don't do the thing you do well, even if it's three or four steps removed, it impacts how customers see our company.’”

[6:00]  “Customer service is a huge component of CX, but it's not CX. We say to our colleagues, customer service/customer experience is the sum of all the interactions an individual has with a brand.”

[11:00]  “When I joined Dominion, I told one of the folks on our team that success for us is not the same as success for a team, let's say, that's launching an app. Success for us is going to be found in very small changes in people's thinking.”

[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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest: Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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

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

Key Topics Covered:

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

Notable Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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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.”