Today’s interview is a combo podcast in which I interview (separately) Ron Secrist, Managing Director, Head of Client Experience at Citi, and Christina Sansone, Vice President of CX Transformation at Dish. I met both of them when I attended Qualtrics’ X4 Summit in Salt Lake City last month and talked to them about their Qualtrics journey, what they are doing with AI and what listening and taking action at scale means for them.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – How to get 2.7mln ‘Mom & Pop’ stores to adopt a new distributive trade platform – Interview with Prashaant Huria of Unilever – and is number 507 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Ron:

• We’ve been talking with Qualtrics for about five years. We did our big conversion in November of ’22. So it’s been about 18 months since we have been using their platform and I would say the acceleration of our program in that 18 months is nothing more than astonishing.
• What Qualtrics has allowed us to do is to tie customer feedback and someone’s likelihood to recommend to how we create value both for our clients and for the bank.
• We now know how to value what a great experience looks like versus if somebody has a less than great experience and that’s been transformational fo us.
• Now I know for certain that actually each dollar I spend for experience, I know what that’s going to pay back. And I know that not only will our clients be happier, but also that our business will continue to thrive and grow because we’re both mending together.
• One tangible listening to taking action example:
  • One of the things we heard loud and clear from customers, especially in our retail bank, was that a lot of the product offerings we had were much too complicated. So, over the course of last year and this year, we’re rolling out what we call simplified banking, and it’s a very public rollout. We basically simplified our program to something that customers would easily grasp, and basically we followed almost an airline loyalty program that has a set of tiers with different benefits associated with each tier.
• Our plan is to continue to learn how we can get more and more feedback, more and more data from our customers on what’s important to them, and use the tools to inform how to make each of those interactions that they have, whether it’s digital or with a human in person or on the phone, more efficient and easy for our customers.
• My whole goal with using those tools is to do more and more work on behalf of our client, to solve problems for them before they even know that they’ve happened.
• And so if we can find ways to proactively help our customers succeed, I have no doubt that one, they’ll be happier, two, they’ll make more progress from a financial standpoint for themselves. And three, our business wins because we have happy customers that want to continue to do more business with us.
• Ron’s best advice: Make it reliable, make it work every time, and show people that you know them by proactively doing work on their behalf.
• Ron’s Punk XL brand: Spotify

Here are the highlights of my chat with Christina:

• DISH has been named number 1 for customer satisfaction in the cable, satellite and TV space in the U.S. by JD Power for six years running.
• One of the things that we’re really looking forward to is bringing CX and EX closer together, because today we’re managing them separately and we’re linking them manually.
• Using the Qualtrics platform, we’ve been able to go from understanding some of our CX touchpoints in three to four weeks and now we’ve got it down to three to four days.
• Now, we’re looking forward to getting it down to three to four hours.
• Our journey.
  • We started with, how did we do? Very, very reactive. We learned a lot, but we were generally fixing things more for future customers than previous ones.
  • We transitioned that into that, how are we doing? So getting that in-the-moment feedback, this is why the overall satisfaction survey responses were so, so important to us.
  • And now we’re really moving into how do we anticipate so can we predict things and preempt them.?
• Right now we’re in the middle of those last two right now and, what we are focusing on, is how AI can help us manage and analyze data at scale and that’s going to get us to that preemptive space.
• On customer complaints/feedback: If it happens to one customer or one customer has this experience, we have to assume there’s more like them.
• If we understand the attribute of that experience, then it allows us to go back through all the other customer information and find cohorts that have a likelihood to be experiencing the same thing.
• And so we can then do a proactive treatment.
• The most interesting thing to me is when our customers answer our survey and they decide to give feedback by video. That gives you a much better feel for who these customers are, how they live, and why our service is so important to them.
• Our next step is to try some of these new AI features and see what else it is we can learn and how maybe some of the things that we’re still doing somewhat manually today, we can automate.
• We’ve got to build a lot of trust in that. I want to make sure that we’re validating what the AI is telling us. That’s always kind of the challenge there. But then that means we can analyze more and more and more data.
• Christina’s best advice: You have to start with listening. But, you have to take that and act because listening without action doesn’t go anywhere.
• Christina’s Punk XL brand: Sonos

About Ron

Ron Secrist leads Client Experience for the U.S. Personal Banking business within Citi. His focus is to bring Citi’s mission of ‘Enabling Growth and Progress’ to life for US Personal Banking’s clients. Since he joined Citi in September 2022, Ron has focused on leveraging automation to make our client experience data easier to access, improving our time to fix customer issues, and defining an aspirational strategy for how to transform the client experience across USPB to win in the market. Prior to Citi, he worked at Capital One for 23 years and held a variety of roles in areas such as card direct marketing and digital transformation. Ron holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia.

About Christina

Christina is currently the VP of Customer Experience Transformation at Dish. As a customer experience professional, she is passionate about building better experiences for both customers and employees. Her career encompasses a wide range of industry and cross- functional business experience that she leverages to create and curate experiences that drive business value. Christina is always seeking new ways to build experiences that excite and engage customers, setting a new standard for their expectations.

Credit: Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash