Reinvent Your Value Proposition Or Lose Customers, Bain Warns

Customer expectations keep moving, but many enterprise CX programs still sit too far from the CEO and too far from value. In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Bain & Company's Jamie Cleghorn, Global Head of Customer Practice, and Eduardo Roma, Global Head of Customer Experience Transformation for Customer Strategy & Marketing Practice, about what it takes to reconnect customer experience across strategy, technology, and execution.

They unpack a practical blueprint built around a bold Customer Value Creation Plan, “transformation engines” that turn insight into action, and the culture and capabilities needed to sustain change. The conversation also explores how AI can speed up learning cycles, enable always-on customer signals, and support agentic workflows, without losing trust or the human element.

The conversation also digs into the operating mechanics: always-on customer signals, predictive learning, and agentic workflows that shorten cycles from months to days. The speakers challenge leaders to drop “call containment” thinking and design AI-supported service that feels fluid, trusted, and human.

If you are trying to move from siloed improvements to enterprise-wide growth, check out this conversation for a clear look at the mindset shifts, operating model changes, and day-to-day mechanisms that make CX transformation stick. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to CX today. I'm Nicole Willing. Customer expectations are evolving quickly across both B2C and B2B environments, changed by advances in data, AI, and digital engagement. So many organizations are rethinking core elements from offering brand marketing to data pricing and experience, how they come together as a unified process system rather than operating in the dialogue. So today's conversation focuses on how enterprises are navigating the challenge and what it takes to deliver truly integrated customer-led transformation. To do that, I'm joined by Jamie Kleikhorn, the global head of Bayment Customer Practice, and Eduardo Roma, who is the global head of customer experience and transformation within the customer strategy marketing practice and to share their insights. Jamie, Eduardo, thank you for joining me and taking the time.

SPEAKER_03 1:01

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

So to start us off, how do you see customer experience reconnecting across strategy, technology, execution in enterprise transformation today?

SPEAKER_03 1:14

Yeah. I like how you talk about connecting across, Nicole, because I I do think that it is uh really a uh a critical uh connector. I would say in a couple of ways, right? I think that first and foremost, starting with purpose, right? And then we know that, and we know through the data, and we know through our experience support and our clients that the fundamentals of customer loyalty are really, I think they really hold very strongly. Meaning you enrich customer lives and you reap the rewards, right? And we know by looking at the data, the customer-centric leaders, and we track them over the years and we track them systematically, they outperform the market when you look at it from terms of being a sustainable value creator, total shareholder return by three to four times, right, the benchmark. So that that is the first thing that I think it really I think serves as a first point of connection, which is very, very strong. The second one, and I think it is particularly relevant at a time of um disruption, such as uh what has happened in AI, is that customer really provides a very clear North Star for the organization, right? At Bain, we have this uh belief that when in doubt, focus on the customer, right? Which is especially at times of disruption, I think it is really, really important, right? And organizations get lost. But if they have real clarity on three things, right? Who they want to win and to keep as customers, do we really understand them? What is it that we differentially offer to them that is very valuable and much better than competitors can do? And how do we deliver that consistently and profitably? So I think it really serves as a really, really critical uh connector um in all of that. Um the issue is that organizations are not doing that. I mean, we can get into that kind of uh uh if you wish.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Yeah, I mean, how should organizations think about that, you know, when it comes to ownership of, you know, because CX is going across all these functions now, isn't it? So what what's uh the best way to approach that?

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Yeah, it is going, it goes across lots of functions, and some of the issues that we observe, right? I think first one is that a lot of what is the kind of traditional CX conversation, and I put it CX in inverted commas, but because it tends to be kind of a very, I think, limited way of thinking about the customer, is I think it is number one disconnected to value, right? And then our organization talk about CX and talk about managing for metrics rather than really linking it to value and growth. I think number two, I see a lot of that really too many degrees of separation from the CEO and then the X code table, right? It's often delegated down to a function rather than really being owned and led by the leadership team. And I think the two things together make it CX something that is not really investable, right? Which is and organizations get stuck, right? And then they get stuck in this point where they're managing for metrics and functions doing that rather than thinking kind of the big picture. Right. So you asked for the um the blueprint of how to how to think about that. The way that we think about the blueprint for customer experience transformation in this new era is has some uh three very critical components, right? I think the first one is start with a very clear goal. And I think I talked about the purpose of enriching customer lives, that needs to be created, translated into a very bold, what we call a customer value creation plan, right? So rather than thinking about the business along the lines of the PL and balance sheet line items, how do we think about the health of our business through the life cycle and the relationships with customers? Right? How do we acquire more customers? How do we serve them in the right way? How do we retain and renew relationships, and then how do we deepen relationships with customers? Those all can really allow organizations to focus on customers, but then really translate that into a very, very substantial value creation plan, like a private equity company would do, right? Which is, but rather than just doing, let's apply kind of a price or cost item, let's actually think about it very systematically, value, customer first value-led along the lifecycle of the customer, right? I think having clarity on that goal, I would say just number one, I think is very important as a starting point. Number two, and I talked about some of the limitations of thinking about CX more narrowly, right? And I think the way that we think about the transformation engines to deliver that value creation plan, it is not just the experience, right? The experience is important, but as we often say, just having a kind of a digital experience is now table stakes, right? It's not no longer a differentiator, right? Really, organizations really need to think about more expensively and think about what is it really our value proposition to our customers, right? Where they participate in the ecosystem, the overall offering, not just the tangible um value, but also the emotional value of what we bring to them compared to what else exists in the market, right? So thinking about customer value propositions, it is really important to expand. And then the other area, I think, of really thinking more expensively is thinking about customer engagement. And what I mean by that is the always-on dialogue with the customer, where we're being helpful to them in the right moment, in the right way, helping them achieve what they are trying to do rather than we personalize messages to sell themselves, right? So when organizations think about the transformation engines more broadly, experience, proposition, and engagement, they think about customers more holistically and that they can deliver that versus that value creation plan. The last thing that I'm going to say in terms of the blueprint is you can only sustain that and that it only works if it is built upon a very solid base of customer-centric culture, capability, and execution. Right? So really investing in the fabric of the organization and mindsets and behaviors, and how do we do all of that is uh is crucial.

unknown 7:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

I might pick up on one point, Eduardo, maybe too around um the value proposition. Um a lot of companies tend to think about uh customers and customer experience management in a static frame, in a static mindset. And um how do I optimize the system that I'm running, you know, and how do I track customers, how do I optimize their their life cycle through it? One of the things we're starting to see with the sort of frontier of technology is that the art of the possible and the value proposition is actually starting to change dramatically. And so um the reality is you do not live in a static world, you live in a hyper-competitive world. Um, and one of the biggest challenges that um established companies see is that there are insurgent competitors that come in that um are willing to radically rethink how value gets delivered to customers and how to use technology to deliver that value in a more personalized way, um with a different set of features, um, sort of blending the boundaries of historic uh uh segment categories, um, offering segment categories. And so, you know, as much as we saw, you know, whether it's Neobanks or FinTechs or uh insurgent brands, um happen, you know, insurgent retailers, et cetera, happen in sort of the SaaS era, I think we're gonna see that on steroids over the next five years, ten years. Um, and you're gonna see an evolution of how consumers show up. Um they might not always show up as themselves, they might show up as their proxy, as their agent, as their digital twin. And so, you know, there's a risk that as we sort of have an old CX mindset of optimizing the static world we live in, that the ballgame is actually shifted to something dramatically over here, and we're uh we're optimizing for an old world while while the new world um moves without us. And I think that is one of the challenges that particularly big established companies have is they uh they often don't see those insurgent competitors until they um are fully formed and fully present and starting to take share, and that's the point at which they wake up. So, what's the so what for a big company is um you need to be reinventing your value prop. You need to be thinking about technology and the art of the possible, you need to be thinking about that for you, and you need to be thinking about how your your customers are going to be using technology as as consumers, um, and you need to be able to uh to match them. And when you start to add that, start to think that the chessboard might move from here to here to here to here to here quickly over the next five years. That's a that's a big, big shift in mental model.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, definitely. Things are moving so quickly now. And you know, this as you said, this customer-centric approach to transformation, it can mean different things for different organizations. So, from perspective, um, you know, what does that look like day to day for a company that's going through this process?

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Yeah, the ones that are doing this well, right? Because we see a lot of companies is still getting trapped, right, into this. I think the companies that are doing this well, I would say, Nicole, and I think as Jamie's saying, right, the it the game has really changed, right? It is really now about the scale and velocity of learning, right, as an organization, and how you how do you create learning systems, right? And then we created a net promoter system, and that that was kind of important as one way of using surveys to do that. The world has really moved on, right? And I think organizations, a lot of organizations are still stuck into a model that does not provide that scale and velocity of learning, and that is not using the data in a more in a more effective way, right? So I think the kind of just to contrast, right, where we see uh leaders and laggards in this space, I think the it moves from just managing in functions and product silos to really shifting the the business definition to think back to think about relationships, yeah. Right. I think that's the first one. How do we think about the health of the relationship with customers, right? That is so shift from product and silos into relationships. The second one that I think separates um companies that are winning versus the laggards in this space is the laggards are still using NPS to explain the past, right? And really thinking about transactions or thinking about kind of the product versus organizations that are really using the data to drive growth, right? To move the needle. I talked about shifting the goal, is the relationship. How are we getting more customers up that ladder? How do we how are we helping more customers to be successful, right? And how we're using the data day every day to do that and continuously. And the last thing that I would say is that um the Lagards are thinking, it's not a lack of data, right? In fact, actually, I think it is actually there's a lot of data.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

I was gonna say it's probably too much data, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:51

Probably too much, right? And then kind of the and now it's everything that you can, oh, you can call transcripts, and then we can measure this journey and that interaction across all the different channels. There's a signal overload, right? And I think the the winners in this space, they are really moving towards, and we can we can talk about it in more detail if that is helpful, really more towards always on intelligent signals that are linked to customer relationships and linked to value, right? And then they have operating systems around that rather than looking at a lot of metrics, big dashboards where you can admire the problem, but not much gets done.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah, absolutely. Because as you mentioned, you know, everybody's investing in data and analytics, but it's what you know, the effectiveness of actually what they do with it. So, where does that disconnect come from between you know having all of this insights that are generated, but really turning that into real business actions and decision making?

SPEAKER_03 13:53

Yeah, I we see that as a system, right? And I think as a system that continuously learns and improves, right? And I think the different elements of that system, I think the first one is that you're continuously sensing for customer signals, right? So I think this idea of using uh telemetry, right, to we really understand what is happening with with our customers, we really we can detect intent, uh, we can detect a need. So, and that could be a change in circumstance with a customer that triggers a need to contact them or do something for them, or a deviation from a happy path, right? A customer who's trying to do something that but that but they're getting stuck. How do we use the data and the telemetry to detect those moments and to create an opportunity to engage those customers, right? And then do that proactively rather than reactively, rather than having kind of a system of, oh, we we look at all the problems and we prioritize. No, no, no, we're actually doing that in the flow of work, right? I think that's the first thing, which is how do you a system that where you can sense um what is happening with customers always on. The second part of it is um how do we learn as an organization what really drives value, right? So I talked about shifting from reactive to really predictive and proactive. Do we understand, right, if we fix this, this is what happens to customers, this is what happens to value, right? Do we have that, and that requires proprietary data, that requires proprietary knowledge that organizations build over time. It is not just kind of a technical capability that you buy off the shelf, right? But you really have those, the that um ability to learn in terms of what really drives value for customers and drives value for the organization. The third part of what um of that system is really, and this is something that I think now with technology and with IGentec AI in particular, how you can embed actions into workflows, right? Where you can actually, you're not only detecting real time, you not only have the learning systems to understand if I do this, this is what happens, but you're actually fixing and intervening, right? So just to give you an example of um a client that we we we supported on this journey, they they thought about customer engagement at scale, and they moved to a model where it used to take them somewhere between 60 to 120 days to find an opportunity to engage with customers to get that engagement out in the market, right? 30 to 40 people involved touching it, right? We help them create an end-to-end agentic workflow that is fully automated, they are able to do that in a single day, right? So if I'm um managing the health of the relationship of that particular customer group, I know which customers are becoming more successful with us. I can detect and identify opportunities to engage them. Um, and the engagement could be on something that could be a service, right? Interaction, where we're helping them on something, or we could help them discover a feature that exists in our app that will be very helpful for them. And we're putting that in the market and we're engaging customers and we're learning immediately, right? And then we create that learning and system of continuous improvement that is very, very different than a more um step-by-step process that takes very long and then is very fragmented.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

And I think just to just on that, so going from three months to one day, like that's a that's a massive step forward. And we're not there yet. I mean, so you know, that's where we're getting, but I think the the latest step I heard of we could, you know, this might be a vanity stat, but the the average human's attention span is now down to nine seconds. Um and so, you know, what's the goal state? What's the end state is to is to be able to do that in that nine-second window. How do you get to a you know an instant always on, and look, we we know how to get there. We know how to instrument an organization for that, we know how to build digital twins of customers and put predictives, and we know how to you know let the technology really sort of serve up that right next action um pretty crisply and and cleanly. Um what is hard is how do you how do you take that and get a 50,000 person, 100,000 person, 300,000 person organization to show up like that every day. And that that is really, I think, brings it full circle back to um where Eduardo started with the culture, which is the the technology, the art, what the technology can actually do is way ahead of what an organization can actually effectuate. And so what we're seeing is CX needs to re-anchor itself as customer value management, customer engagement management at the CEO level, because the CEO really is the only person that can cut across offer and brand and marketing and in-store experience and online experience and et cetera, et cetera, and really sort of drive that that value through. And so this is this is that unlock. And I think we're gonna enter a new era of um of customer leaders and customer laggards. You know, customer voice is going to become very, very fluid, um, more so fluid with a Gentic than it was in sort of simple um e-commerce. And so, you know, the the market will serve as what the market does. The market's a sorting function to let customers go where they want. And um we're gonna see a new generation of companies that can do that. And the companies that can do that with scale and with speed, um, those are gonna be the winners. And so um it's it's the big companies that can reinvent themselves around this insurgent mindset around how do you serve the customer, you know, using AI to do it instantly, that's kind of the holy grail that we're we're shooting at here. Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yeah, I mean, and then obviously the big debate around that is how to use AI, you know, to enhance customer experience while maintaining the human element, while maintaining customer trust. So, how are the the organizations that you see that are doing it well, how are they approaching that?

SPEAKER_03 20:16

Yeah, and and we we think about this, Nicole, as now that organizations have digitized a lot of the experience, they actually need to humanize those experiences. Right, and it is humanized both through kind of the digital interaction as well as as the human um uh interaction, right? So we see that across kind of in different ways, right? So I think first kind of when I talked about the example of customer engagement in a single day, instead of the 30 to 40 people, it's it's a team of three or four, right? It's a team of three or four that are they have the right instrumentation, they are learning on what is resonating with customers, and then they are creating more opportunities to engage customers, right? So you have AI instrumenting and complementing what um humans um can do to serve customers more effectively. The other uh area where I see organizations um miss the point, actually, on non-AI, especially when you think you have things like, for example, contact centers, right? And then where you have virtual assistants and bots, oh, fantastic, they can now answer all the kind of the calls, right? And then but they think about it from a call containment perspective, which is kind of the wrong objective function, right? Which is it is and it's not in the end of the day about what the bot can or cannot do. Yes, that is important, but it's how as humans, how do we interact with virtual agents in a way that is intuitive, that is personalized, we're getting what we want, but also we're not trapped, right? If there's any point where there is a there's a human support on that digital journey, there's fluidity in that interaction to enable it to happen, right? And organizations that think about the interaction between Human and digital create that fluidity and the ability to connect human to human when it's needed. I think they really have a very differentiated approach and ability to win in the market.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

And then you know it's human experiences, they're using the technology to support the person providing the service so that that can be more seamless. I mean, we've all had the experience of being on the phone with a service agent and they're navigating through a hundred systems and they can't quite figure out what's going on, and you know, everyone's waiting three minutes to pull up a file, and taking all that friction out and giving them sort of that AI assist to give, let them provide you with the solution in real time is going to be going to be very powerful. So that's there are going to be parts of the experience which are going to be technology-centric, human-tended, and there's going to be parts of the experience that are going to be human-centric, technology assisted. And really systematically figuring out where those are and bringing those to their full potential is going to be a big part of the next generation of innovation companies are going to do.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah, definitely. You mentioned that word containment. I was talking to a CX head recently, and they were saying, I don't want to be contained as a customer. Exactly. As human beings, other people, if you take that, like you're saying, you know, if you take that customer-centric approach, a customer doesn't want to be deflected or contained. They want their problem dealt with.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Yeah, so um I would I would could carry on talking about this forever, but uh final question. Um, you know, for the leaders who are just starting this journey, what is the most important mindset shift that they require to really deliver better customer experiences in this environment?

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Yeah, I would highlight a couple of things, right, for those starting on this journey, but also for those who have been on this journey for a while, but now we're seeing this inflection point and say, how do we now change our approach, right? Because there's a lot of that happening. We're all kind of beginners in a number of ways, right? With uh how fast the technology and how fast technology competitive positions are shifting. I think first and foremost, I would say be clear on the why.

unknown 24:11

Right?

SPEAKER_03 24:11

So we talked about starting with a purpose, is really start with kind of what we want to stand for in the eyes of the customer, right? And I think that is that needs to be the North Star, that needs to be the starting point, right? Aligned to that, right, um, and complementing that, I think it is work backwards from a very bold customer value creation plan. Right. So really understand what are the opportunities to acquire more of our customers, serve them better, re-intertain relationships and deepen relationships with customers. I think once you work back from that, you're not only anchoring on customer-customer relationships and the growth that comes from that, but you can then identify very tangible initiatives that you can go after in as an organization, as what we often call as missions, right? So really empower leaders to go after those missions to deliver and in doing so find ways to scale and amplify those results, right? So those are the two things that I would say be clear on the why and work backwards from a customer value creation plan.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Well, great. Thank you so much, JV and Eduardo, for your time. Thank you for sharing your insights. And uh thanks to our audience as well for joining us. So you can stay connected with us through CXLA.com and newsletter channels. And for more conversations exploring how organizations are building stronger and more connected customer experiences, stay tuned and we'll see you next time.