Ep. 250: Sean McEntire | A Decade of Discipline: From NPS Pilot to Outer Loop Powerhouse

Episode 250: Comcast solved the age-old problem of how to make employee suggestions a powerful, reliable source of value-driving improvements at scale.

Sean McEntire, Comcast's Vice President of Customer Strategy and Operations, explains how the Outer Loop channels every employee elevation—no matter how small—through a disciplined screen, assigns a named owner, and tracks progress in public view. Ninety thousand teammates now feed a single pipeline that forces scattered ideas into accountable hands and verified fixes, solving 7,000 customer pain points so far.

A frontline agent's push for an easy‑to‑use, large‑button remote shows the system at work: The idea passed triage in hours, landed on the product team's desk, and shipped nationwide within months—evidence that voices on the floor can reshape the hardware in customers' hands.

Once an elevation clears triage, technology, operations, or product leads must respond within set deadlines—accept, reject, or ask for data. Every decision and follow‑up lives on the same dashboard employees use to log ideas, so trust grows with each visible step. As McEntire puts it, "CX is all about transparency. If you're going to be transparent with your customer, you need to be transparent with your teammates."

The result? Faster fixes, rising JD Power and NPS Prism rankings, and a workforce that, 10 years into the transformation, keeps feeding the Outer Loop because they've seen their suggestions become reality.

Guest: Sean McEntire, Vice President, Customer Strategy and Operations, Comcast

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

Give Us Feedback: Help us improve the podcast (feedback link)

Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey.

Time-Stamped Topics

• (00:01) Comcast's early days of the Outer Loop
• (03:00) Why NPS never drifts when the Outer Loop is active
• (06:00) What it takes to operationalize trust with 90,000 employees
• (08:30) Large-button remotes and other frontline-sourced Outer Loop ideas
• (11:00) Inside the elevation system: votes, comments, and Outer Loop visibility
• (13:00) Why rejecting ideas can build more trust than accepting them
• (16:00) An industry-wide trust gap and the Outer Loop's role in closing it
• (18:00) Moving beyond scores to what drives CX progress
• (20:00) Synthetic feedback, benchmarking, and the new Outer Loop data stack

Time-Stamped Notable Quotes

• [3:00] "This is our ten-year anniversary of operationalizing NPS within the organization. And we consistently, to this day, listen to both our customers and teammates. We learn from that feedback. […] We act on putting new solutions into the business that improve the lives of our customers and our teammates."
• [5:00] "We are approaching our 7,000th resolved NPS elevation. So that's 7,000 net new experiences for both our consumers and teammates. And that's true progress."
• [12:00] "CX is all about transparency. So, if you're going to be transparent with your customer, you need to be transparent with your teammate."
• [16:00] "CX never sleeps."
• [23:00] " It's not the score, it's the system. And if people focus on the score, you spend more time trying to explain a few basis points of score change and trying to correlate what may have caused that when it may have nothing to do with that. So it's, the score will be your north star on, 'Are you making progress?'"

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the NPS® Outer Loop by Bain & Company: https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/bain-outerloop/
• Listen to our two-part 2018 podcast on the origin of Comcast's NPS journey with Charlie Herrin, Comcast's chief customer experience officer: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/insights/inside-a-cable-giants-net-promoter-turnaround-nps-podcast/