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

Send us a note: Contact Rob

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

Send us a note: Contact Rob

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

Send us a note: Contact Rob

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

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

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)

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: Jason Guardino, Chief Experience Officer and Gastroenterologist, The Permanente Medical Group, and Karen San, Senior Director of Care Experience, The Permanente Medical Group

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback

Send us a note: Contact Rob

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: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/insights/compassion-in-healthcare-podcast/

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

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 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

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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