Experience Is the Product: Why Our Consultants, Not Our Software, Interpret What Your Customers Are Telling You
I run operations at Satrix, so I’m the one who has to answer the question that comes up in nearly every one of our budget conversations with customers now: “Can’t Satrix just use AI for this?”
My answer is that we do, for the parts AI is good at. We use it the way we use survey platforms, transcription services, and spreadsheets: as a tool that makes experienced people faster. What it does not do is decide what your customers meant, whether a complaint is a commercial risk, or what your leadership team should do about it. Those decisions are made by people who have been doing this work for decades, and that should be the reason clients hire us.
If you are evaluating research partners for 2027, the question that matters most is not “what tools do you use?” It is “who will be interpreting my customers’ feedback, and how long have they been doing it?” Here is our answer.
Why Experience Matters to Me
Before I introduce the team, let me be specific about what tenure buys you, because “experienced” is a word every firm uses.
Experience changes what gets heard in an interview.
When a CFO says “the implementation was a bit rocky,” an interviewer who has conducted hundreds of B2B conversations knows to ask whether that was the data migration, the timeline, or the security handoff, and knows from the pause which one it was. A scripted follow-up misses it. Cority’s Director of Customer Success credits our “very experienced and professional” interviewers with uncovering churn drivers her own team couldn’t. WEX has renewed its interview program with us every year since 2018 for the same reason.
How customer feedback helps WEX continuously improve.
The same experience matters when we code comments
Open-ended responses in Satrix programs are read by a consultant and coded into a codebook based on the sentiment as written, the respondent’s other ratings, and what we know about the account. “Support has been fine” from a Promoter and from a Detractor who just cut licenses are different data points. A consultant who has coded the same client’s feedback wave after wave also knows when a theme is genuinely new versus when a customer has found new words for an old frustration. That contextual judgment is what makes a theme defensible in front of a Board.
Ultimately, it affects the recommendation
Recognizing that two respondents used similar words for different problems, or that internal politics inside an account is the real churn driver, requires having seen those patterns before, across other clients and industries. The recommendation is what the client is paying for. Everything else is input into that recommendation.
Experience also creates continuity
Every member of our team has been with Satrix for more than five years. The consultant who designed your program is the one who will interpret next year’s results. There is no institutional knowledge lost between waves and no learning curve to pay for twice.
So who are the people actually doing this work?
Evan Klein, Founder & President
Evan has spent more than 25 years championing voice-of-customer-driven change and founded Satrix in 2008. Before that, he established and led the Office of Client Satisfaction at iCrossing, a 550-person digital agency, where he introduced Net Promoter Score® and Customer Advisory Boards and built the systematic approach to gathering and acting on feedback that became Satrix’s methodology. Earlier he managed a global consulting practice serving nearly 900 customers at Thomson Reuters, helping transform the business into a service leader with high satisfaction and retention. ACI Worldwide’s brand team put it plainly: as president, Evan “takes a very hands-on approach,” worked with them directly on their project daily, and presented results to their executive leadership team.
Jonathan Beretta, Chief Operating Officer
I joined Satrix in 2013 and oversee client delivery, operations, analytics, and quality assurance. My background is nearly 20 years in customer retention, employee engagement, and process improvement across B2B and B2C industries, including a role on Equifax’s global operations senior management team, where I managed a nationwide, deadline-driven legal services department and built engagement-planning and touchpoint-mapping programs for Fortune 500 clients. I’m a LEAN Greenbelt and hold a law degree, so I tend to be obsessive about process discipline and making sure the evidence holds up under scrutiny. In practice, my job is making sure every number, theme, and quote in a Satrix deliverable can be traced back to its source and defended.
Tami Kinney, Vice President, Client Experience & Strategy
Tami brings more than 20 years in market research focused on customer experience and brand development. She started her research career at Kimberly-Clark designing studies to understand product performance and preference, then built the research department at Radio Systems Corporation from the ground up. Most recently before Satrix she designed customer experience programs at MaritzCX/InMoment, one of the largest CX research firms in the world, developing brand tracking, journey mapping, and segmentation studies. That breadth of methodology, from concept testing and user experience to VoC and segmentation, is why Tami is often the person who reshapes a client’s program design when the business question changes mid-year. ACI named her alongside Evan as one of the people who “get it done.”
Stephanie Yosef, Vice President, Client Experience & Strategy
Stephanie joined Satrix in 2019 with more than 18 years of success in client experience, employee engagement, and retention. As Senior Director of Client Services at ADP TotalSource she was responsible for retaining $300 million in business and led a team of nearly 60 HR business partners and executive leaders. She also spent a total of 21 years in B2B and B2C sales across HR SaaS, pharmaceuticals, and retail, and was formerly a PHR-certified HR professional. Stephanie has consulted client bases ranging from 27 companies to more than 2,400, working with everyone from the C-suite to hourly employees. That is the perspective she brings to churn, renewal, and employee programs: she has sat in the seat of the executive whose retention number is on the line, and she interviews like someone who has.
Behind these four is a reporting and analytics team, led by our Director of Reporting & Analytics, that has likewise been with Satrix for years and turns the coded data into the Board-quality reporting our clients rely on. This team has conducted thousands of in-depth interviews, hundreds of customer and employee surveys, and facilitated numerous advisory boards over their tenures.
How we keep experience sharp
Tenure is only an asset if it stays current, so we invest in it deliberately. Every week the entire team sets aside time for professional development. Some weeks that is coding calibration: two consultants code the same set of verbatims independently, compare, and resolve differences so a theme means the same thing no matter who reads it. Some weeks it is an interview debrief, dissecting where a probe surfaced the real story or where it didn’t. Some weeks it is industry immersion ahead of a new client program, so we walk in knowing the vocabulary. And some weeks it is training on the tools we’ve built, including our AI-assisted ones. We don’t rely on hiring new people every time a new capability comes along. We build those capabilities into the team through that weekly discipline.
Where AI fits
We use AI in siloed, GDPR-compliant environments so client data never trains a public model, and we use it for the mechanical work: transcribing interview audio, clustering large volumes of comments into candidate themes so consultants can begin coding sooner, flagging identifying details for redaction in anonymous employee feedback, recomputing every metric in a finished deck from the raw data to catch errors before delivery, and rolling trended presentations forward with new survey waves. Those tasks used to consume analyst hours; now they consume minutes, and the hours go to interpretation.
That’s where we draw the line. AI does not conduct our interviews, does not code our verbatims, does not write our recommendations, and does not present to your Board. We are explicit with clients about where it is used, we keep every theme auditable back to the source comments, and we stress-test anything it produces against the original material. A prospective research partner who cannot tell you these things, or cannot tell you who on their team will be interpreting your data and how long they’ve been doing it, is worth a second question.
Software is easy to acquire. Judgment takes decades, and the judgment on your program should come from someone who has earned it and will still be there next year. If you’d like to talk with any of the consultants above about your 2027 plans, we offer complimentary office hours; reach out and we’ll set it up.
About Jonathan Beretta
Jonathan Beretta is Chief Operating Officer at Satrix Solutions, a B2B customer experience and voice-of-customer research firm. Since joining Satrix in 2013 he has led the design, delivery, and analysis of hundreds of customer satisfaction, NPS®, win-loss, churn, and employee engagement programs, and today oversees the firm’s research operations, analytics, and quality assurance. Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn.
