Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Rob Markey, Bain & Company partner and customer experience expert
The Customer Confidential Podcast unlocks a world of unparalleled customer and employee loyalty insights. Host Rob Markey, a Net Promoter System pioneer, uses his deep expertise and empathetic approach to challenge conventional wisdom, peel back layers of typical advice, and expose the real stories of industry transformation. Take a deep dive into discussions on CX, customer journey, customer insights, Net Promoter Score, and more. Every episode is a master class in loyalty. Guests include CMOs, CXOs, and heroes of customer-centric transformation, along with thought leaders who inspire them. Exploring organizational structures, operating models, goals, and metrics, Rob and his guests from companies such as Vanguard, American Express, and more bring to light practical marketing, product, customer experience, and technology strategies for earning customer-focused growth. This podcast is your source for untold stories of customer and employee loyalty. Challenging, insightful, and instructive—all in one place. Earned growth starts here.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Feb 13, 2020 • 36min
Ep. 172: UniCredit's Francesco Vercesi | With Agile, Customer Experience Improvements Never End
How does a banking group operating in multiple countries accelerate improvements in customer experience, particularly digital improvements, while still meeting the unique needs of individual countries? This was the challenge facing UniCredit, and the topic of my podcast with Francesco Vercesi, UniCredit's head of Agile, practice sharing and customer service. The answer, as his title implies, was to create a centralized Agile process, but with product owners in each country empowered to set their development priorities.
Jan 23, 2020 • 37min
Ep. 171: Gillian Tett of the Financial Times | Stop Busting Silos; Instead, Make Them Work for You
Silos are deeply rooted in human nature. We should stop complaining about them and instead ask: How can we harness the tribal behavior that generates silos to create value for customers? To learn more, I turned to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. Her book, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, explores the role of silos in the financial crisis and in our everyday lives. "Silos exist for the very simple reason that we're human," she says.
Jan 9, 2020 • 39min
Ep. 170: Airbnb's Raj Sivasubramanian | Will Customers Really Leave Feedback via Video?
In this podcast, Raj Sivasubramanian, customer experience insights manager at Airbnb, explains how Airbnb is experimenting with a system that makes it easy for customers to provide video feedback. I admit, I was skeptical. But Raj explains why that often provides longer, more detailed and often richly emotional feedback. More important, he says, when transmitted directly to frontline employees and leaders, that emotion often generates the sort of empathy that inspires and motivates thoughtful action.
Dec 19, 2019 • 51min
Ep. 169: Kim Scott | Radical Candor: Don't Be a Jerk
Kim Scott's book, Radical Candor, focuses on the role that feedback plays in helping other people succeed and the idea that delivering tough messages to colleagues is important when done right. But, Kim discovered, "an awful lot of people are using Radical Candor as an excuse to act like a garden variety jerk." In this episode, we talk about the revised edition of her book, which addresses some misconceptions about her ideas. We also listen to one of the funniest examples of radical candor gone wrong, from the HBO series Silicon Valley.
Nov 21, 2019 • 42min
Ep. 168: American Express's Luis Angel-Lalanne | Uncovering Customer Insights Beyond the Score
Luis Angel-Lalanne, vice president of customer listening for American Express, explains how his team goes beyond the mechanics of simply providing Net Promoter scores and the drivers behind them. At American Express, that can mean combining Net Promoter data with other operational data and performing an analysis to uncover previously unrealized links that affect customer experience .
Oct 31, 2019 • 47min
Ep. 167: Sandy Rogers | Figuring Out How to Measure Customer Experience
Sandy Rogers's efforts to measure customer experience at Enterprise Rent-A-Car were part of the inspiration for the design of the Net Promoter system. Today, Sandy is the global practice leader for loyalty at Franklin Covey and coauthor of Leading Loyalty, but in this podcast, he also describes how he managed to convince the leaders of Enterprise, a large, successful company, to take chances that would wind up changing their fundamental approach to customer service. It started with figuring out how to measure customer experience. Sandy is someone I've been learning from for many years, and as usual, speaking with him was both inspiring and educational. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Oct 10, 2019 • 12min
Ep. 166: Horst Schulze | Do You Want To Lead or Just Manage?
One of the most important, and difficult, roles of any leadership team is to instill in the workforce a culture and sense of purpose. Back in 2014, I did a podcast interview that put this challenge in simple, stark terms that have stayed fresh in my memory. That's largely thanks to my guest at the time, the inimitable Horst Schulze, co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel group and founder of the Capella Hotel groups. He's an exceptionally plain-talking common-sense leader who just doesn't take excuses for poor service. And he believes, passionately, that good service depends not on management, but on inspired employees.
Sep 26, 2019 • 1h 3min
Ep. 165: Horst Schulze | Behind the Luxury, a Human Purpose
Horst Schulze is famous for being the visionary co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton and Capella hotel groups. They are two brands that set the bar for luxury service, and yet, Horst will tell you, his vision of luxury depends on employees how share that vision and feel a true sense of purpose to deliver it every day.
Sep 12, 2019 • 1h 3min
Ep. 164: Beth Comstock | First, Listen to the Customer Story
Former GE executive Beth Comstock has a long and successful track record of finding stories within a company and using them to create strategies, build entrepreneurial teams and take imaginative risks. The author of the recent book Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change, Beth spent nearly three decades at GE. As vice chair of business innovation and, before that, chief marketing officer, she led efforts to accelerate new growth, develop digital and clean-energy initiatives, seed new businesses and build brand value. She was also part of GE's pioneering efforts to adopt Net Promoter® and learn how to use it as both a metric and as a vehicle for telling customer stories.
Aug 15, 2019 • 1h 5min
Ep. 163: Manulife Asia's Francesco Lagutaine | Delivering a Customer Experience Where Wow Isn't Enough
For Francesco Lagutaine, Manulife Asia's chief marketing and experience design officer, Asia is a market of contradictions. On the one hand, insurance products are relatively new to the region, so simply delivering well and reliably on business basics will still wow customers. On the other hand, customers have enormously high expectations for fast and simple digital services, because they compare them with platforms such as WeChat in China or Go-Jek in Indonesia. In this episode, he talks about how Manulife Asia has begun creating specialized teams to improve customer experiences.
