Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

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...

Most of us think about Uber as a true digital disrupter. Yet, there is a very large human side to Uber. When a driver, a rider or "an eater" (someone ordering food through Uber Eats) needs help resolving something that can't be addressed purely in-app, they contact Community Operations, an organization of some 30,000 people run by Troy Stevenson. In this episode, Troy describes how he helped Uber...

When veteran leader Amy Cribbs took on the challenge of improving customer experience at Vanguard, the world's largest mutual fund company, she felt ready for the challenges of adopting new, Agile ways of working. But her experience proved to be full of surprises. A expected, the new cross-functional teams helped Vanguard design better customer experiences and deliver them faster. But there was a...

When Vanguard, the customer loyalty leader in its industry, decided it needed to do more to keep pace with rapidly changing client expectations, that meant more than just investing money in client experience or in digital or mobile technologies. It meant shifting to new ways of working that would give Vanguard the flexibility and speed necessary to respond continuously to changes in customer needs...

Andrew Clayton, global head of customer experience at E.ON, talks to Rob about how you inspire an organization to respond to customer feedback, not once or twice, but continuously, with unflagging energy. Since the early 2000s, he has scaled sustainable NPS programs at three major companies, Allianz, Bupa, and now E.ON. He has become an expert at winding that customer feedback loop into the DNA of...

Alex Terpstra, head of innovations at ABN AMRO Bank, was born and raised for customer service. His father, a retailer in the Netherlands, never failed to remind young Alex who put food on the family's table.  "Every day on our dinner table we were talking about customers."  On this episode of the Net Promoter System podcast, Alex explains how he helped ABN AMRO to launch radically new services for...

A recent  Wall Street Journal  article ran under a catchy headline, "The Dubious Management Fad Sweeping Corporate America." The dubious management fad, according to the article, is the Net Promoter Score. Of course, the headline bothered me and my podcast guest, Maurice FitzGerald, the former vice president of customer experience at HP. But once we read past the attention-grabbing headline, we ag...

IBM used to collect customer feedback through longitudinal surveys—until Kathy McGettrick, the vice president of market development and insights at IBM, realized the surveys put all responsibility for creating quality experiences on IBM's sellers and ignored other aspects of the customer experience. So Kathy launched a digital platform that sent client feedback deeper into IBM. Today, some 40,000...

Razia Richter's path to the executive suite at Petco took her on a wild, winding tour of the company's operations and back-office functions, from accounting to inventory analytics to supply chain, to name a few. By the time Razia was put in charge of Petco's customer experience and the adoption of the Net Promoter System, she had personally busted through just about every organizational silo imagi...

Loyal listeners may recall my last conversation, with Joshua Rossman, formerly the senior director of global customer loyalty and NPS at eBay. Since that interview, Josh has left eBay and consulted with a variety of companies on using the Net Promoter System to help guide customer experience improvements. Now he's at McAfee, one of the world's largest security technology companies.  Josh has maste...

Kevin Parker is the chairman and CEO of HireVue, a platform for automating job interviews. Hirevue combines video interviews of job applicants with an AI-powered algorithms that can filter for qualifications faster than any HR team. Of course, an algorithm doesn't evaluate candidates the same way a human could. Like any breakthrough in machine learning, it's a grab bag of promising signals, emergi...

Host Rob Markey and Ignacio 'Nacho' Deschamps, group head of international banking and digital transformation at Scotiabank, discuss the role of the Net Promoter System in culture change. They also explore what Nacho has learned during Net Promoter System journeys at three different banks around the world, including how to survive the wait for results to catch up to investment during year two.

Host Rob Markey talks to Ignacio 'Nacho' Deschamps, Group Head of International Banking and Digital Transformation at Scotiabank, who explains why he has long put customers and technology at the heart of his career in banking and describes how many of Scotiabank's digital efforts are developed locally and then shared internationally throughout the bank.

This week, on the Net Promoter System Podcast, I'm sharing Part 2 of my interview with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan and head of the Joint Special Operations Command during the Iraq war.   We pick up the conversation where we left off: how a leader, who has successfully built trust among a team of rivals, can then push the organization to change its str...

General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan and head of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq, joins me for part one of a two-part interview. In our discussion, he describes how he forged trust among the military's most elite fighting units. Today, he shares what he learned with civilian executives, as a co-founder of the McChrystal Group, offering battle-t...

When I rent a car, I too often find myself waiting in line for the service desk, wondering why my car wasn't ready and waiting for me, as promised.  Now I can test my hypotheses against the real world experience of this week's guest, Eric Smuda. He led customer experience practices for two different giants of the rental car industry, Avis Budget Group and Hertz. He draws back the black curtain, an...

Like fitness or dieting, getting started with the Net Promoter System is easy in some ways. Executives are typically optimistic and excited about their fledgling program, riding the high of their early wins. And then something emerges and threatens that momentum. But like maintaining good health, the companies that stay the course learn to anticipate their customers' needs, allowing them to deepen...

CA Technologies' Dayton Semerjian joined me on the podcast in 2016 to discuss his approach to managing the enterprise software company's customer experience in a rapidly changing industry. At the time, the business-to-business service provider was deep in a Net Promoter journey that would ultimately rebuild its customer relationships and return it to growth. Fast forward two years and Dayton's eff...

Host Rob Markey talks to Brian Scudamore, the founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, whose rubbish hauling business started as a way to pay for college and grew into an international franchise. Brian discusses how the company's commitment to customer service helped set it apart from competitors and what it takes to maintain service standards in a growing business.

Big things have been happening at Citizens Financial Group, the New England-based financial services company. After spending 26 years as part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the company returned to the public market in a 2014 initial offering that raised $3 billion. And the bank has been undergoing a multiyear turnaround effort that has put customers at the center of its business. In this episode,...

Host Rob Markey talks to Bain Partner Gerard du Toit. His team recently asked hundreds of executives if they've adopted 20 of the most popular customer experience tools, and more importantly, whether they're happy with the results. While customer experience tools are not a panacea, they do form an arsenal with which companies can arm themselves to compete. Gerard also discusses the results and oth...

Medical outcomes matter, but they're not the only factor in patient satisfaction. A provider's ability to communicate and express empathy are also critical to the customer experience in healthcare.  Host Rob Markey welcomes back Maurice FitzGerald, retired vice president of customer experience at HP Software and author of Net Promoter—Implement the System . Rob and Maurice discuss the unique custo...

Host Rob Markey welcomes back Jeanne Bliss , author of the new customer experience book, Would You Do that to Your Mother? In her book, she argues that companies need to humanize the customer experience to help their employees provide the service that customers want.  Jeanne also advises senior leaders as founder and president of CustomerBliss , and previously oversaw the customer experience at La...

Follow-up calls offer an opportunity to hear real customers describe, in detail, the things that make them love your company, or not. And they can involve senior executives in learning what it's like to be an average customer or an average frontline employee—to get out of the mindset of "corporate" and into the world where customers interact with your company every day. In this episode, Rob Markey...

Cable company executives know they have shaky relationships with many customers. In fact, most have been working to improve their customer experience. And one or two are taking truly radical steps to improve. Comcast, one of the biggest Internet providers in the US, is among those working hardest to earn more trust and loyalty from customers. In this episode, Rob Markey talks to Charlie Herrin , C...