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On this episode, we ask big questions about how customer loyalty is formed — and how AI can be leveraged to build stronger connections with customers.

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What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

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Crafting production-grade GenAI applications

Robert Zirk: In every episode of Questions for now, I ask influential thought leaders big questions.

Today, several of our previous guests will be asking the big questions to you, the listener.

During our previous recordings, we asked our guests to share one question that anyone listening needs to consider to elevate their CX strategy. These questions were compiled separately in no particular order from the full episodes, so what you're about to hear are brand new insights that also look back at some of our most impactful recent episodes.

So today on Questions for now, we ask: What big questions should CX leaders ask to improve customer outcomes?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital, where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

We have eight big questions to explore today, starting with a question from Lori Branton, global vice president of client success at TELUS Digital, from the episode How can you act as a customer experience change agent in your organization? 

Customers have come to expect fast, personalized and seamless experiences. However, a Gartner survey found that the majority of experiences are high effort, with 62% of B2B and B2C customers reporting their inquiries weren't resolved after switching from self-service to assisted service channels.

Lori asks leaders to approach this disconnect by reflecting honestly on the overall experience they deliver and use those insights as a starting point to identify where to improve, with emphasis on ensuring the experience is seamless and low effort for customers.

Lori Branton: Are we truly delivering a seamless and exceptional customer experience for our customers? Looking at that question, it can include things like: Are we evolving our satisfaction and loyalty metrics appropriately?

Are we measuring the appropriate things? Are we enhancing the ease in which customers can interact with us and get the support that they need? So truly understanding that, more and more, that's what customers are looking for is that seamless experience. Are you truly delivering a seamless and exceptional customer experience for your customers?

Robert Zirk: The Gartner survey referenced earlier found that brands who prioritize low effort experiences were more likely to have higher customer satisfaction rates, generate positive word of mouth and retain customers.

Customer retention is necessary to ensure the growth of your customer base is sustainable. When retention efforts result in better experiences for customers, that can serve as a powerful growth engine for businesses — especially in B2B.

Our second question comes from Daphne Costa Lopes, global director of customer success, strategic accounts and solution architecture at HubSpot, from the episode How can brands turn customer success into their second growth engine?

Daphne encourages leaders to focus their activities on creating value for customers, building a mindset of investing in future growth and shared success.

Daphne Costa Lopes: Are we doing today what's going to create the growth of tomorrow? Because growth doesn't happen within this month. Not even within this quarter. Growth is a longer term journey. So what are the things that I need to do today so that my customers grow tomorrow?

Robert Zirk: As Daphne suggests, business growth requires a long-term approach that's flexible and iterative. She cites the importance of three components to an exceptional experience: understanding the needs of customers, creating self service resources that provide value and engaging in strategic conversations with customers that help them achieve their goals.

Question three takes a lot of what we've covered in terms of providing a seamless experience that adds value and layers on the importance of deeply understanding your customer journey. To pose the question, here's Jim Mitchell, vice president of customer experience and digital innovation at TELUS Digital, from the episode How can brands design and deliver seamless customer experiences? 

Jim Mitchell: How can I meet the customer, in the channel of their choice, to solve their issue with low effort in a consistent manner?

I mean, that's really the mantra here. But do I fully understand my organization today where it sits internally and competitively with the customer experience? Competitively is very important. Of course you are always operating within your budget and what you can do, but do I understand where I sit today?

I'll speak quite often to C-level executives in an organization. And yes, they care about that customer experience, but when I ask them how they're sitting competitively, quite often, there's a bit of a question mark there. So do I have a pulse on what the customer is experiencing? How easy is it to do business with us today is a question I would ask myself if I were a CX leader, like really step back and be honest with ourselves about how easy is it and what else can I do and what is my budget for digital transformation?

Robert Zirk: It's no surprise that budget has been top of mind for many of our guests and the CX leaders who listened to our show. Forrester's Budget Planning Guide 2025: Customer Experience highlights that four out of 10 CX leaders expect to increase their investments in CX within the upcoming year at a rate surpassing inflation.

Elevating the customer experience through digital transformation requires strategic investment, but proving the link between CX and a return on investment can be a challenge.

Our fourth question comes from Jeannie Walters, CX expert and CEO of Experience Investigators, from the episode How can leaders win and optimize investment in CX? Jeannie's question stresses the importance of ensuring your appeal for greater budget is viewed as a win-win-win with senior leadership, benefiting your customers, employees, and business goals.

Jeannie Walters: For every dollar that I'm asking for, every dollar invested, how will that reduce friction for our customers? How will that improve the employee experience? How will that deliver for our organizational goals? And get really real about that.

Make sure that you're not telling yourself a story about, you know, “If we get Net Promoter Score up, everybody's going to be happy.” That is one of those indicators. It's not an outcome. And so we need to really get clear on outcomes. So I would ask: what are the real outcomes you want from the budget that is being invested?

Robert Zirk: Indicators can serve to illustrate trends and progress, but when customers describe your brand, they aren't going to cite those same statistics and metrics. Customer outcomes, on the other hand, are customer facing. Speed, convenience and personalization are all things that might prompt a word of mouth conversation.

Jeannie reinforces the need for leaders to look beyond the indicators and ask how those numbers connect with customer-facing outcomes.

Jeannie Walters: As a CX leader, one of the things and the reason I named the company Experience Investigators is because I think we bring curiosity. We have to be curious all the time about “Why are things happening?” So maybe there's something happening on the back end. What do we need to know in order to influence the customer experience that maybe others won't see? And that's the gift that we can bring as curious investigators is really looking at what's really going on here and how can we improve it so that all of these outcomes get better.

Robert Zirk: While your customer experience team no doubt plays a lead role in driving and measuring customer outcomes, their efforts can be hindered if the culture of the entire organization isn't aligned.

To emphasize this point, our fifth question comes from Shep Hyken, keynote speaker and author of I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, from the episode What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

Shep Hyken: What does your culture look like? Does the philosophy of the company, the culture of the company point to the North Star of creating loyalty? Does your culture support the end game that you're trying to achieve, not just your process, not just your system, not just the new technology that you're bringing in, but does the entire company, from the CEO to the most recently hired at the lowest position, understand their role and how it impacts the customer?

And even if their job is 100 percent automated, if their job is behind the scenes and they never interact with the customer, they're probably supporting somebody that is or supporting part of the process.

Robert Zirk: A Gallup study shows a direct link between company culture and customer value. When employees strongly identify with their company's culture, they're nearly three times as likely to take ownership of product or service quality and almost five times as likely to believe they can adapt quickly to customer and market changes.

TELUS Digital has won awards for innovation and excellence while also achieving world-class team member engagement of 78%, as measured by third-party Kincentric, across our approximately 77,000 team members.

Shep Hyken: It's much bigger than just the customer support or experience folks. We talk about creating cultures and getting them customer-focused. My process starts with leadership, defines it and lives and breathes it. Then it's communicated. Then everybody's trained to what their part of it is — and I mean everybody. Some are trained much deeper if they're customer-facing, some are trained on basically what their function is and what their role is with the customer, and then role models: managers, supervisors, and leadership — again, they're the role models and not just, say it needs to happen, but live and breathe it.

You defend the culture. Everybody's job is to make sure everybody stays in alignment with what we're trying to achieve and then celebrate it when it works. So that process or framework sounds pretty simple. And if you've got a company of a hundred, 200, 300 people, it's real easy to put this thing to work. If you've got 30,000 or 50,000 people and I have clients that are that large, it takes years to get that large ship to turn the way we want it to, but it's an effort worth making because guess what? Your competition's doing it and you're going to be playing catch up and keep up if you don't do it yourself.

Robert Zirk: As Shep notes, company leadership needs to foster a culture that places customers first. While many organizations strive to be customer-centric by creating positive experiences that meet customer expectations, that alone isn't enough to be competitive in today's business landscape.

Leaders should seek to go above and beyond customer centricity to build an organization that's “customer-obsessed” which Forrester defines as “putting the customer's needs, desires and satisfaction at the forefront of all business decisions and actions.”

Leaders who are customer-obsessed drive loyalty by developing a deep understanding of their customers, using that understanding to proactively identify customer needs and elevating experiences to exceed expectations.

According to Forrester, only 3% of companies meet the definition of customer-obsessed, so there is opportunity for businesses who can be first in their industry to reach that level.

Our sixth question is from Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author of The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership from the episode How can you act as a customer experience change agent in your organization? — the same episode Lori Branton appeared on that we referenced earlier.

Blake asks leaders to consider this simple question as a litmus test for customer obsession:

Blake Morgan: How often in your schedule does the word customer come up? I mean, you can literally open your calendar and see if the word customer is in there. Many senior executives don't spend much time flipping burgers next to employees, but that is really where the insight is. Go to your stores, go to your retail locations, go to the contact center. Go to the restaurant where your food is served. That is where the insight is.

And many don't want to get off the treadmill, even though the treadmill might not even be working anymore. It's not effective. Actually, you'll probably get the best insights out in the field. So I would say look at your schedule and make sure at least 10 percent of the time that you're with customers and you're paying attention and you're going to where the work is done.

Robert Zirk: Forrester research indicates that over a 12-year period, customer-obsessed businesses can achieve a potential 700% return on their investment. As we noted earlier, customer obsession begins with building a deep understanding of your customers.

Our penultimate question comes from Colin Shaw, keynote speaker and author of The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level, who, along with Shep Hyken, joined us on the episode What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI? Colin challenges leaders to look beyond surface level customer data and consider their customer's emotional journey with your brand.

Colin Shaw: What's the emotion you're trying to evoke in your customers?

And let me be clear, I'm not talking about people saying, "Well, I want them to have a positive emotion or a negative emotion." What I'm really talking about here is, what is the specific emotion? So is it trust? Is it cared for? Is it feeling valued? Is it feeling happy? What is it?

Robert Zirk: Let's use trust as an example. In a report from Edelman, 71% of consumers said brand trust matters more now than ever before. And 67% said that the trust they hold in brands increases their likelihood of becoming loyal advocates.

Colin noted that connecting outcomes to customer emotions is fundamental to creating experiences that build customer loyalty.

Colin Shaw: One of the things that I do with boards of companies and management groups, and again, the audience may want to do this themselves, is next meeting, go in and say to people, "We heard this really good question, ‘What's the experience we're trying to deliver? What emotions are we trying to evoke?’ Write down the emotion that we are trying to evoke in our customers." And then get people to read what they put out and I guarantee it's going to be different.

What that shows me is people haven't thought through that question. Once you've understood that, you should then be designing everything, including AI, to deliver that. Simple as that.

To put some numbers on it, because I think numbers are important, we did some work with Maersk Line, who are the largest container shipping company in the world, and the work we did with them basically showed that they should be evoking trust, cared for, and pleased. Once they did that, they improved their Net Promoter Score by 40 points over a 30 month period that led to a 10 percent rise in shipping volumes. There are tangible business results to be had by this. It just takes a different way of thinking.

Robert Zirk: According to Salesforce’s State of the Customer Connected Report, 80% of customers say the experience carries as much weight as the product or service they've purchased. So once you've identified the emotions you want your customers to associate with your brand, it's time to ask a big question from the customer's perspective.

Our last question of eight comes from David Avrin, customer experience speaker, consultant and author of Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With, from the previously highlighted episode How can brands design and deliver seamless customer experiences?, which is also the episode Jim Mitchell featured on.

David shared the most impactful question he's posed in 25 years of conversations with business leaders.

David Avrin: The question is: if your customers could wave a magic wand, what do you think they would want you to do differently? We always say, “If we could wave…” No. If they could wave a magic wand, what would you do differently? And then it makes us step back and say, "What do our customers really want? If they were going to say, 'I wish they would do this. I would love it if I could do this or they would offer this.'” It's not “What do we have capabilities of?” “What do we think our customers want?” is that question.

If they could wave a magic wand — your customers — what would you do differently? And the conversation that comes from that is profound. I mean, I'm always the one that believes, when I lead a strategic session, that the answers are in the room and I just act as a facilitator in that capacity. But I ask those kinds of questions. It's not like, "What do your customers love about you?" No. "What would your customers love, if you would do it, that you don't currently offer?" And the ideas come pouring out.

Everything that you say no to doesn't mean we should say yes, but do you know if there's a critical mass of requests that would justify potential, "I don't know, maybe we could do that? Is that a potential place of expansions? Will our industry probably be offering that in the next two years? Well, if so, what do we need to start doing now to prepare for that or to get a leg up on the competition?”

Robert Zirk: These questions reinforce how important it is to see the experience from the lens of your customer. It can be difficult to get the full picture from a single channel of feedback, so it's important to ensure you're listening and engaging across your channels. Likewise, it's important to ensure that the feedback process for customers is seamless and that you're asking the right questions.

David Avrin: People in business always ask the question, "What do our customers want? What are they likely to buy?" as opposed to "What's changed in their life? What are the other options they have besides us? A more important question is "What would they prefer?"

Some companies are doing some pretty remarkable things, some great innovative programs, expediting process, simplifying things. Identify those things that your customers and your prospects traditionally dislike about your industry. If you can address those better and first, then you gain that competitive advantage, at least for a time period.

Robert Zirk: We've just heard eight important questions CX leaders should be asking themselves about how they can improve customer outcomes.

Thank you to all of the guests who took the time to ask the big questions we heard today. All of the experts you heard on this episode have been guests on recent episodes of Questions for now and you can listen to their full episodes by visiting questionsfornow.com or searching up Questions for now — Compelling perspectives on digital CX anywhere you listen to podcasts.

And if you'd like to hear even more compelling insights from influential leaders in digital customer experience, be sure to hit the follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to Questions for now so that you can be among the first to hear the newest episodes as soon as they're released.

Thank you so much for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast. I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all… for now.

On this episode, our expert guests from past episodes each share one big question that customer experience leaders need to ask themselves to deliver better customer outcomes — and explore practical ways to find the answers.

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We’ve revisited some of our most impactful topics and compiled eight of the best questions that you, a CX leader, need to ask yourself to improve your customer experience. Join us as we delve into those questions.

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