What Is Your Current CX Or CS Strategy? Vol. 2
During our second season of CX Chats, we conducted in-depth interviews with 19 leading industry experts to discuss their current strategies. Here are their enlightening perspectives.
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Samantha Conyers – CXO – First Retail Group
Samantha’s current CX strategy at First Retail Group focuses on an “inside-out” approach. In retail, especially in a B2C environment, aligning the team with the organization’s vision, mission, and values is critical. This alignment fosters a culture that resonates with frontline staff, many of whom are experiencing their first job. By embedding core values into daily operations and recognizing behaviors that reflect these values, Samantha ensures that the customer experience is deeply rooted in the company’s ethos.
Watch Samantha Conyers’ entire interview
Julie Fox – Global Director of Customer Success – Cin7
Julie’s current CS strategy heavily focuses on data-driven insights and product adoption. With Cin7’s expansive customer base, understanding data is critical to improving customer outcomes. By focusing on product adoption and ensuring customers derive value from the company’s solutions, her team is helping drive retention and long-term growth.
To manage the vast number of customers, Julie has worked on scaling her team’s efforts through digital and self-service strategies. By implementing robust digital resources and predictive models, Cin7 can anticipate customer needs before they arise. This proactive approach allows her relatively small team to maintain high customer engagement and satisfaction levels while freeing them to focus on more significant strategic initiatives.
Watch Julie Fox’s entire interview
Sumitra Narayanan – Manager, Customer Success, Scale – Braze
At Braze, Sumitra focuses on three main pillars in her CS strategy:
Customer Nurture
This focuses on retention and growth through strong relationships and delivering customer outcomes.
Customer Adoption
Helping customers fully utilize the platform to meet their goals.
Customer Advocacy
Encouraging satisfied customers to become advocates for the company through referrals and product feedback.
Additionally, Sumitra sees innovation as a key focus, particularly internal processes, collaboration, and external customer engagement.
Watch Sumitra Narayanan’s entire interview
Jim Iyoob – Chief Customer Officer – Etech Global Services
Jim’s strategy centers around the concept of ‘effortless customer experience.’ This involves making interactions as seamless as possible for customers. As for the future, Jim sees AI not as a job replacement tool but as an empowerment tool, enhancing the capabilities of human teams to serve customers more effectively.
Watch Jim Iyoob’s entire interview
Angeline Gavino – Vice President of Customer Success – Katalon
Currently, Angeline’s CS strategy at Katalon focuses on retention. As the company scales, the need to specialize becomes critical. Her team, which was once revenue-generating, now concentrates on value delivery and retention to ensure sustainable growth. Improving processes, playbooks, and digital CS strategies are key focus areas.
Watch Angeline Gavino’s entire interview
Anika Zubair – Head of Customer Success – Griffin
At Griffin, Anika focuses on building the foundation for a scalable customer success function. As the company has launched its first customers, they are moving from early-stage chaos to developing repeatable processes. Anika and her team gather data on everything from product usage to communication preferences, building a feedback loop that will enable continuous improvement.
Looking ahead, her strategy will revolve around refining these processes, improving onboarding, and driving customer expansion. Griffin aims to establish a seamless customer journey and support product adoption and growth by creating a solid internal structure and leveraging customer insights.
Watch Anika Zubair’s entire interview
Alex Farmer – Chief Revenue Officer – Nezasa
At Nezasa, Alex’s CX strategy focuses on personalization and scalability. With around 80 customers and 60 employees, the company is at a scale-up stage, where building a foundation for growth is critical. Nezasa’s software helps travel agencies sell customizable, flexible package tours—a significant shift from traditional fixed packages.
The current strategy involves segmenting customers and aligning product plans with these segments. Automation plays a key role, particularly in personalizing customer interactions. For example, Nezasa has launched inbuilt analytics that allow customers to access quarterly business reviews (QBRs) directly through the product, tailored to their needs.
Watch Alex Farmer’s entire interview
Samma Hafeez – Senior Vice President – Insight Partners
Hafeez identifies the key components of a successful CS strategy as focusing on leading valuation indicators. She emphasizes an ‘outside-in’ approach to gathering intelligence and feedback to enable you to walk in your customer’s shoes. She champions a culture where customer success is synonymous with company success, urging an organization-wide adoption of this mindset. According to Hafeez, the strategy should be customer-centric and grounded in understanding customer needs and experiences.
Watch Samma Hafeez’s entire interview
Kevin McCahill – Founder – MasteryCX
Kevin’s strategy revolves around nurturing customer relationships, particularly in the challenging supply chain logistics environment. He strongly emphasizes the metric of ‘time to value’ (TTV), ensuring customers recognize the value in their products. This strategy is complemented by other key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagement, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scoring, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and actual usage analytics.
Watch Kevin McCahill’s entire interview
Debra Squyres – Chief Customer Officer – Bonusly
Under Debra’s guidance, Bonusly is undergoing a significant transformation. The focus is on creating an exceptional customer experience by focusing on a superior employee experience. This involves simplifying processes to enhance team effectiveness so the team has more time to engage with customers in more meaningful and compelling ways. Debra is intent on equipping team members to act as trusted advisors for their customers.
Watch Debra Squyres’ entire interview
Alex Mead – Chief Customer Service Experience Officer – Total CX
At Total CX, Alex is pushing the boundaries of customer service through innovation in natural language processing and AI. He aims to reduce the need for human intervention while improving service quality. His vision for the future includes a seamless integration of technology that anticipates customer needs and simplifies interactions. This strategy promises to meet current customer expectations and redefine them.
Watch Alex Mead’s entire interview
Sally Roberts – Head of Customer – Legatics
At Legatics, the current strategy revolves around user adoption, mainly focusing on lawyers, the primary users of their platform. The approach is to understand and cater to lawyers’ unique processes. Sally’s team measures success based on the number of legal matters processed on their platform and other metrics, such as user engagement and customer references.
Watch Sally Roberts’ entire interview.
Jeremy Watkin – Director of Customer Experience and Support – NumberBarn
Jeremy’s current CX strategy at NumberBarn focuses heavily on the voice of the customer. He emphasizes the importance of looking beyond survey results, noting that many customers do not respond to surveys. Jeremy has implemented triggers in their ticketing system to identify and address customer pain points. Additionally, leveraging AI and self-service tools to reduce friction and improve customer interactions is a key area of focus.
Watch Jeremy Watkin’s entire interview
Caroline Quinlan – CX Design Manager – AIB
Caroline’s current CX strategy at Electric Ireland focuses on a hybrid model, integrating the CX department with other departments to ensure a cohesive approach to customer experience. The ultimate goal is to adopt an embedded model where CX becomes a shared responsibility across all teams. This shift aims to foster a customer-centric culture. Leveraging data and insights to create a comprehensive view of the customer and driving CX culture and engagement are vital elements of this strategy. Caroline aspires to elevate Electric Ireland’s CX maturity to a leading level, ensuring continuous improvement and innovation.
Watch Caroline Quinlan’s entire interview
Arjun Menon – Sr. Manager, Customer Success Management – Salesforce
Arjun’s current CS strategy is rooted in the principles of seamless onboarding experiences, guiding customers toward their objectives and fostering positive interactions throughout their journey. By emphasizing customer-centric approaches, his team aims to forge enduring connections, drive tangible value, and cultivate long-term loyalty.
Watch Arjun Menon’s entire interview
Lynn Hunsaker – Chief Customer Officer – ClearAction Continuum
Lynn’s current CX strategy centers around maximizing the value of customer data through technologies like AI and data mining. Her focus extends beyond immediate customer interactions to encompass company-wide strategies, performance standards, and growth initiatives. Lynn envisions a CX landscape where strategic integration of customer insights drives every business decision.
Watch Lynn Hunsaker’s entire interview
Eddie Christian – VP, Customer Success & Customer Experience
At American Express, the CX strategy revolves around consistently gathering customer feedback to enhance engagement and brand awareness. This approach involves employing various listening posts, including surveys and success plans, to uncover customer needs and desires. By remaining agile and responsive to evolving market dynamics, American Express ensures its CX strategy remains relevant and impactful.
Watch Eddie Christian’s entire interview
Jill Crimm
Jill’s CX strategy revolves around four key areas:
Human-Centered Design: Understanding customers’ environments and behaviors to craft solutions that resonate personally.
Data and Personalization: Leveraging customer data to create personalized experiences, anticipating the next best actions, and utilizing customer 360 models to improve outcomes.
AI and Text Analytics: Employing AI to enhance efficiency in clinical settings, customer service, and decision-making processes.
Comprehensiveness: Simplifying the complexity of interconnected tools, software, and feedback loops through human-centered design.
Watch Jill Crimm’s entire interview
Donna Drehmann – Director Customer Experience – Eargo
Currently, Donna’s CX strategy at Eargo revolves around two key pillars: amplifying the voice of the customer and driving process excellence. She believes in the importance of listening to customer feedback and turning that lens inward to identify and eliminate process inefficiencies that hinder a positive customer experience. This dual focus allows her to address external customer needs and internal operational challenges.
Currently, Donna’s CX strategy at Eargo revolves around two key pillars: amplifying the voice of the customer and driving process excellence. She believes in the importance of listening to customer feedback and turning that lens inward to identify and eliminate process inefficiencies that hinder a positive customer experience. This dual focus allows her to address external customer needs and internal operational challenges.
Watch Donna Drehmann’s entire interview
