Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

Episode 267: API Heat Transfer was responding to requests for quotation when, according to research in one of its priority segments, buyers had already decided who they trusted. The manufacturer of heat exchangers had strong products and deep engineering expertise. It understood much less about how customers chose a supplier for a particular order.

It would have been easy to miss the gap in understa...

Episode 266: In Bain's early 2026 Consumer Banking Benchmark, provided by NPS Prism, Chime had the highest NPS among the companies we measured. That raised a basic question: How does a financial technology company serving people who live paycheck to paycheck earn greater loyalty than institutions built around customers with much higher balances?

Sam Krause ...

Episode 265: Ryan Fuller started questioning online reviews after two terrible stays at highly-rated vacation rentals. Both had 4.9-star ratings. After Ryan posted negative reviews, the people behind each listing independently offered him £200 to change his review to five stars. 

"It was disappointing," he said, "that clearly many people took them up on this offer." On the flip side, the experi...

Episode 264: BARK maintains more than 800 subscription price points because it has promised customers that their price will not increase as long as they remain subscribers. CEO Matt Meeker explains why honoring that commitment matters, even when tariffs, public-market expectations, and pressure on margins make it costly.

Matt started BarkBox in 2011 after struggling to find breed-appropriate toys fo...

Episode 263: What does it feel like to go into space? To rocket past the Kármán line, float in perfect silence, and return to Earth—all in 11 minutes? Blue Origin's astronauts experience an expensive thrill ride: part theme park roller coaster, part life-altering pilgrimage. In this episode, Allie Kuehner, a Blue Origin astronaut from the New Shepard flight NS-33, relives the intense pause before liftoff, t...

Episode 262: What happens when a cold-pressed juice passion with humble beginnings in your own kitchen counter suddenly meets nationwide demand? Complications arise that demand fast decision making.

Meet Crunchy Hydration CEO and founder Megan Riggs, whose company scaled at lightning speed, sending her into problem-solving mode. (The memorable company name, she says, is because her ...

Episode 261: What if you could use AI-generated customer twins to test value propositions, pricing, and demand before you go to market?

That is the idea my Bain colleague Andy Pierce is exploring. Synthetic customers can help teams move faster, pressure test offers, and simulate trade-offs much faster and at far lower cost than traditional research alone. Says Andy, "You can do things at half the ti...

Episode 260: When customers must re-explain the same problem, reopen old tickets, and chase for follow-ups, a shiny new tool won't help unless it's connected to support or sales history. How can leaders act on real signals to build shared memory and fix the root cause?

Jeannie Walters, founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, and John Abraham, a customer experience consultant, believe that most custo...

Episode 259: How do you prevent first-trip hassles such as a room not being ready at check-in, Wi-Fi outages, or service delays from discouraging first-time customers from returning?

Today's guest, Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation at Kobie Marketing, says that after a slightly negative first trip, customers are 80% less likely to return. Kobie—a technology platform that bui...

Episode 258: How did two new leaders turn angry customer calls into executive promises to earn customer trust and advocacy? 

Charlon McIntosh, Chief Customer Operations Officer, and Melissa Pint, Chief Digital Information Officer, both joined Frontier Communications on the same day in 2021. 

At the time, Frontier faced both bankruptcy and a reputation crisis: Millions of customer ...

Episode 257: How do you earn the next banking customer's loyalty, one moment at a time? Focus on what customers choose, and why.

According to John Finley, head of marketing, technology, and innovation at BMO, a bank operating across North America, customer loyalty shifts with context. His team takes signals—what customers say—and wires them back into the very next touc...

Episode 256: What turns CX skeptics into advocates? A listening engine that makes caring for those you serve the gold standard.

At IMG Academy, a private sports academy and boarding school in Florida, Chief Operating Officer Mike Milliron led the launch of a centralized experience team. "Not interested," said everyone from athletics, academics, athletic development, and student life. Why? IMG Academy's c...

Episode 255: One of healthcare's biggest blind spots? When patients turn 18. It's the moment they age out of pediatrics and fall headfirst into a system designed to prioritize older, sicker adults. Physicians, stretched thin, reserve energy for complex cases, giving young adults shorter visits and less attention. That means early signs of medical trouble, like anxiety or preventive needs, go missed.

Episode 254: What if the future of AI in customer experience is built not by giant platforms but by small, reusable, open source AI agents?

Gurdeep Pall, President of AI Strategy at Qualtrics, believes open, modular AI agents will outmaneuver big tech's locked-down systems. In this conversation from the X4 Summit, Gurdeep argues that "experience agents"—task-specific bots that can plug into any sta...

Episode 253: Desjardins thought its cooperative roots made it member-first by default. Then members started leaving.

Desjardins is a 125-year-old financial co-op based in Quebec. It has deep community ties and a proud history. But that pride masked a painful truth: Members no longer saw it as customer-centric. The organization believed its cooperative structure guaranteed loyalty—until low NPS scor...

Episode 252: Most CX maturity assessments ask how you think you're doing. This one demands proof.

Erin Wallace, director of client engagement at MyCX from Bain & Company, is helping to lead a fundamental shift in how companies measure CX maturity. Most tools rely on perception-based self-assessments that reward self-promotion over progress. The Customer Experience Roadmap and Accreditation (CXRA) dem...

Episode 251: In 2018, Dell set out to do something big: turn customer feedback into a system that could not only provide insights, but help set priorities and run the business.

They had the data. They had the intent. But they made a compromise that many organizations settle on: Rather than enforce one unified approach to customer feedback, they allowed each team to build its own. While this helped with i...

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...

Episode 249: When "revenge travel" brought guests roaring back to Four Seasons Hotels, they capped occupancy, turning away guests and revenue.

Scott Taber, senior vice president of global hospitality, describes the Four Seasons philosophy: No points, no perks. Just great properties, individual recognition, personal service, and an emphasis on making sure the first five minutes aft...