It’s tempting to attribute USAA's success to its special expertise in serving military personnel. But Tony Wells, USAA’s former chief brand officer, says it comes down to empathy for the unique challenges members face. In this episode, Tony shares how USAA lives its mission every day, how the company quickly adapted to support employees and customers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and how it continues to prepare for disruption.

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Former tech executive Kara Goldin, author of the new book “Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts And Doubters,” shares the story behind Hint Water: How her quest to find an alternative to diet soda led to the creation of an entirely new type of beverage. Her story reveals how persistence and a singular focus on meeting core customer needs can result in outsized success.

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The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), now part of NatWest Group, is older than some of the world’s countries. For much of that time, the very essence of the bank was to put its customers first. But in more recent history, the storied bank had lost sight of that mission, says Paul Smith, director of customer insights and marketing at NatWest Group. In this episode of the Net Promoter System podcast, Paul talks about the journey back: From an old-line and challenged bank into a customer-focused organization that is now part of NatWest Group.

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Few people are loyal to a body shop. Instead, people find them, literally, by accident: after a fender bender, most customers select a shop from their insurer’s direct repair program. But when Steve Grimshaw, executive chairman of Caliber Collision, first took over as CEO of the body shop company in 2009, he realized that with repair experiences often driving insurer policy renewals and most body shop business coming from insurer referrals, customer satisfaction matters a lot. 

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Lori Cobb found her passion in a leadership role at Cummins Inc. that included responsibility for customer experience and insights: “I love solving problems, and I particularly enjoy solving customer problems,” she says. “And customers were hungry to have somebody just listen to what their needs are.” Today, she’s CEO of Mockingbird Ventures and a principal of AIM Advisory Services. In this episode, she shares some of the lessons she learned on her journey into customer centricity.

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Darrell Rigby believes passionately that Agile is the future. “I do believe that this is the way that companies will be run going forward." His biggest fear, though, is that "there’s a lot of Agile that’s being done wrong. If we don’t fix that, then Agile is likely to turn into the next management fad.” Coauthor of a new book, Doing Agile Right, Darrell leads Bain & Company's Agile practice. He joined me to discuss how, when done right, Agile creates a culture obsessed with customer satisfaction.

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Mark Robinson, president of UPS Capital, the financial services subsidiary of UPS, joins me to discuss how the adoption of the Net Promoter System at UPS Capital was turbocharged by Agile ways of working and how Agile teams were able to radically speed up needed fixes to the customer experience that frontline employee identified in their huddles.

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Some customer metrics are so good at predicting customer behavior and the value of a company’s customer base, says the Wharton School’s Peter Fader, that “any sensible investor should be demanding these kinds of metrics. And of course, any sensible executive should be obsessed over these kinds of metrics internally.” In this, the second podcast in our two-part discussion, we talk about how executives can use these same metrics to change the way they look at customer investments.

As a professor of marketing at Wharton, Peter Fader has focused most of his career on analyzing data to predict how customers will behave. He is also cofounder of Theta Equity Partners, which offers customer-based corporate valuation—a way of valuing firms based on the quality of their customer base. His most recent work, in the January/February 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review and cowritten with recent podcast guest Dan McCarthy, is called “How to Value a Company by Analyzing Its Customers.”

To provide perspective on the impact of Covid-19 in South America, Rob talks with Luiza Mattos, a Bain & Company partner based in São Paulo, Brazil. Luiza is one of Bain's customer experience, Net Promoter System and Results Delivery leaders, and she recently researched how consumers in South America have been spending their time since the start of the pandemic. She also discusses the strategies companies in the region are using to make sure their customers and employees feel connected and supported.