The Modern Customer Podcast

The consumer experience is transforming, and technology is at the center of it all. One company leading the way is health insurance provider Humana. There are a lot of options to focus on with the customer experience, but according to Geeta Wilson, director of customer experience at Humana, the company looks for where it can make the biggest impact first—by using technology to deliver a better exp...

Kerry Bodine believes that happy customers lead to happy shareholders. Her book, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business , helps business leaders understand the financial benefits of great customer experiences—and how their organizations must change in order to deliver them. In 2014, she founded Kerry Bodine & Co., a customer experience consultancy focused on cust...

There's a lot you might not know about ACE Hardware - for example did you know the world's largest Ace Hardware store is in Indonesia and is 160K square feet? This global company—known as #TheHelpfulPlace—has focus on service you can't ignore. The service focus in addition to specialty items and authentic 1:1 experiences is their best weapon against competitors such as Amazon. The company is much...

Dan Roam will always be your most interesting dinner party guest, not just because he will explain complicated topics to you on the back of a napkin. For years he has been espousing the benefits of communicating through simple images. He broke ground with this bestselling book Back Of The Napkin, and has recently released a new book called Draw To Win: A Crash Course On How To Lead, Sell and Innov...

How important is it to organize your data around your customer? It turns out that variation in customer demographics can be a powerful thing, and you want to make sure you are taking that diversity of customer into account when building customer programs. Today on the Modern Customer Podcast Zoher Karu ebay's Chief Data Officer talks about the importance treating different customers differently. H...

Peter Strebel serves as chief marketing officer and senior vice president of sales responsible for creating and driving innovative branding, communications, marketing and business development strategies to increase awareness, capture market share and build revenue for the brand. Strebel stewards Omni's centers of excellence including revenue management, global sales, e-commerce, customer loyalty,...

The role of the Chief Customer Officer is not an age-old role. It's a unique new role that's set up differently at every organization. One example comes from MetLife who has seasoned industry executive Claire Burns running customer strategy. Burns serves as the Chief Customer Officer for MetLife which covers 110 million customers and 65K employees. The global company has an extensive and diverse p...

The Dallas Mavericks are famous for a few reasons. They are the 9 th most valuable basketball Franchise in the NBA valued at $1.4 billion dollars. The other unique aspect of the team is  Mark Cuban  their highly involved and enthusiastic owner. The Dallas Mavericks Chief Technology Officer--interviewed in this podcast--is used to hearing from Cuban whether it's about engaging digital fans or a cus...

Amazon repeatedly tops customer experience lists in addition to every other category for innovation. So what's the secret? John Rossman was an early employee with Amazon and started with the initial leadership team in the early 2000s. In his book The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind The World's Most Disruptive Company provides an inside-look at what makes Amazon so successful. Today Ros...

Why does it seem like start-ups are having all the fun lately? All too often big companies will launch an incubator or start-up environment in their company only later to close it once the company starts to feel nervous about their growth. In today's Modern Customer Podcast we learn from Michael Docherty the author of Collective Disruption: How Corporations & Startups Can Co-Create Transformative ...

Some of today's most innovative brands are content publishers that are engaging customers with content in addition to finding smart ways to monetize their websites. Take PopSugar who are tapping into big data, machine learning and predictive analytics to make better decisions about how they engage with customers. PopSugar—a site that's attracted more than 100 million visitors worldwide and 1.5 bil...

A new study from "The Math, the Magic and the Customer" found that inundated with troves of analytical data - today's marketers often mistake the "algorithm" for the "person".  Today's marketers seek to have gotten so ROI-centric on every campaign according to Bain they are missing out on some of the magic of engaging with and understanding customers. The report says that "Humans, after all, are p...

Are we living in the experience economy? In today's episode of the Modern Customer Podcast I interview Joseph Pine, co author of The Experience Economy  –a book that predicted we are living in the Experience Economy. The book was updated and re-released—and almost twenty years after its initial publishing it still provides excellent fodder for the customer experience conversation. It was the origi...

Most of us hate flying. From delays to TSA lines to smaller and smaller seats on flights—flying is not what it used to be. Many of us enjoy the ease of using Uber on the streets but when it comes to the skies, the airlines—no matter how terrible they treat customers—appear disruption proof. Until now! Enter Surf Air, an All-You-Can-Fly private membership that provides business and leisure traveler...

Remember Mary Kay or Avon? These companies put bread on the table for hard-working women and their families. In fact today's modern woman cannot always work a 9 to 5 job, and that's precisely why Stella & Dot founder and CEO Jessica Herrin set out to create a company that was flexible enough for the modern woman to build a business for herself without working 9 to 5. As she says, "9 to 5 just does...

Niels Aillaud, Head of Digital Marketing and Chief Digital Officer of Whirlpool knows the importance of customer reviews and takes them very seriously. Whirlpool, an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of home appliances, manages a wealth of solid brands such as KitchenAid, Maytag and many more—Aillaud is working to track all conversations about the various products and services withi...

Historically we've always looked for ways to evolve how we use our money. We've been transacting for thousands of years and we're getting savvier on how to enable consumers to transact with greater ease. Clearly mobile payments are becoming bigger. Skip Allums, Lead Designer at Paypal and today's guest on The Modern Customer Podcast calls it a rising tide. In this podcast we address questions such...

Today on the Modern Customer Podcast we're joined by David Edelman, global co-leader of McKinsey's Digital and Marketing & Sales Practices, based in Boston. For more than 20 years, Edelman has specialized in helping marketing executives manage the strategy, organization, and infrastructure transformations required to become "digitally adroit" leaders. From creating digital centers of excellence, t...

General Mills is a 150 year old company. You have definitely heard of their famous cereal brands such as Trix, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and even their new cereal brand Tiny Toast. You surely grew up eating Cheerios, Betty Crocker cakes, Hamburger Helper and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. You might not know that today they also own Annie's, Epic (amazing jerky), Larabar and Cascadian Farms. They produce and m...

For today's Modern Customer Podcast we are joined by Erin Walline, the new Executive Director of Global Customer Programs for Dell. With a unique background in product engineering and user experience (UX), Erin looks to apply human-centered design philosophies to business strategy and operations across internal organizations, ensuring Dell's customers have a seamless experience at every touchpoint...

B2B marketing is not for the faint of heart. Translating technical products and services and turning that into engaging content is not the easiest. Being a marketer in today's complicated digital environment takes courage, patience and persistence. Being CMO isn't for everyone—the average length of stay for a CMO is 18 months, not a lot of time to prove your worth. It's important to turn results a...

There's never a dull moment at Yahoo! The company is in the news daily with rumors on who will purchase it, what Marissa Mayer is up to, and it's been like this for years. You can imagine it might affect the employees that work at Yahoo from day to day. However according to Yahoo's SVP of Global Operations John Devine, this is not the case. With a redefined approach to customer care that is direct...

Most of us can't even conceptualize life before digital. In the "old days" people looking for a hotel would drive down the road. If the hotel was all booked up, they would drive on down the road to the next hotel. Enter Hilton, a 96 year old brand that has innovated at every turn. In the 1950s Hilton wanted to make it easier for customers to book rooms and created the world's first central reserva...

You might have heard of @Veronica because she has 1.76M followers on Twitter. While she frequently speaks on topics like listening to your customers on social media she rarely uses social to complain herself. The only time was when she hosted the Season 6 Premier of Game of Thrones on Facebook Live and her dress showed up with a hole in it. As a writer, producer, and speaker, Veronica's primary go...

When it comes to industries where brand advocates play a key role, perhaps no industry does influencer engagement play a bigger role than in sports. Superstar athletes play a key role in driving engagement to the brand—we see it every day especially on social media. TaylorMade-adidas Golf company has seen a sales conversion rate of almost 3.5 times higher than the overall site average thanks to br...