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
May 28, 2020 • 32min
Ep. 179: Wharton's Peter Fader: The Nature and Value of Loyalty
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."
May 14, 2020 • 22min
Ep. 178: Luiza Mattos | Covid-19: The View from Brazil
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.
Apr 23, 2020 • 45min
Ep. 177: General Stanley McChrystal | Leadership in a Crisis Is about Connection and Trust
Stanley McChrystal, CEO of McChrystal Group, knows how to lead a dispersed team in a crisis. A retired four-star general, he commanded US and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan and was the former commander of the nation's premier military counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command. He joined the podcast during the Covid-19 crisis to talk about three ways to lead through a crisis: trust, empowered execution and inspiring leadership—all underpinned by connection.
Apr 16, 2020 • 20min
Ep. 176: Maureen Burns | What Do You Want to Stand For with Customers and Employees when This Is All Over?
Whether we've been deeply, personally affected by this pandemic or are simply trying to get ourselves and our loved ones through it, we're all sharing a version of the same experience. For customer experience professionals, that's been a new challenge. My colleague Maureen Burns and I have seen some companies fumble it badly. But many others have tuned into the experience with empathy. They're creating experiences and offering innovative solutions that are building a deep reservoir of trust and loyalty with customers and employees that will last long after this pandemic is a bad memory. In this episode, Maureen joined me to talk about what it is that customers and employees really need right now, and how the answer varies by company. And I also asked Maureen for her answers to some of the practical questions that Net Promoter practitioners are asking about soliciting customer feedback at a time like this.
Mar 26, 2020 • 30min
Ep. 175: Roger Martin | Want to Increase Shareholder Value? Focus on Customers Instead
A decade ago, when Roger Martin was dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, he called for a shift away from the business world's focus on maximizing shareholder value to a new era in which value for customers and the value of customers would take primacy. He called it "The Age of Customer Capitalism." His work had a profound impact on my thinking. Very few leaders have been able to act on his vision, but now, a decade later, the era of customer capitalism that he predicted is finally dawning.
Mar 12, 2020 • 26min
Ep. 174: Theta Equity's Dan McCarthy | Investors Need to Know: What's Your Customer Worth?
In the second part of our conversation about customer-based corporate valuation, Dan McCarthy of Emory University's Goizueta Business School and cofounder of Theta Equity Partners explains how investor—and executive—behavior would change if companies had to disclose metrics that revealed the true strength of their customer base, rather than the many accounting disclosures today that actually can mask damage done to customers and customer relationships in pursuit of short-term profits.
Feb 27, 2020 • 43min
Ep. 173: Theta Equity's Dan McCarthy | Now There's a Way to Link Customer Behavior to Share Price
Dan McCarthy spends his time figuring out what loyalty is worth to shareholders, and how to measure it. As cofounder of Theta Equity Partners and assistant professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, he and his colleague, Wharton professor Peter Fader, have developed a technique called customer-based corporate valuation that helps shareholders value a company by analyzing how its customers behave. Their approach signals a shift from a "growth at all costs" mindset toward sustainable growth based on the acquisition and retention of profitable customers.
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.
