Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

Episode 262: What happens when a cold-pressed juice passion with humble beginnings in your own kitchen counter suddenly meets nationwide demand? Complications arise that demand fast decision making.
Meet Crunchy Hydration CEO and founder Megan Riggs, whose company scaled at lightning speed, sending her into problem-solving mode. (The memorable company name, she says, is because her early carrot juices were too pulpy/crunchy for people's liking.)
There was one key problem with scaling their product for a broad consumer audience. "With cold-pressed juices, you cannot wholesale unless you high-pressure pasteurize or heat pasteurize. I had a ton of stores reaching out to carry it, but I couldn't sell it to them," Megan said. So, Crunchy Hydration made a series of smart choices. They swapped fragile glass bottles for shelf-stable cans and kept pivoting in lockstep with consumer feedback. They unlocked national distribution after moving from perishable juice to functional sparkling water.
Next, they saw velocities spike to 150 units per store per week—nearly 20 times the buyer's benchmark.
They weighed pay-to-play math like $5,000 per SKU per store slotting fees or free-filling 12,000 cases across 4,000 outlets. They learned distributors wouldn't merchandise for you and that maintaining relationships was imperative. To succeed, they needed to choose a leaner path.
Today, they're a coast-to-coast operation with just 12 employees. They juggle DTC subscriptions, retail velocities, and cash-flow gaps that can stretch four months. The result? A community-driven beverage that competes on flavor, cultural relevance, function, and customer devotion, all in one.
Guest: Megan Riggs, CEO and Founder, Crunchy Hydration
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Timestamped Topics
[00:00] Early juicing company origins and the product's shelf-life problem
[00:03] Switching to shelf-stable functional cans
[00:07] Pricing trust at $2.50 a can: too expensive?
[00:12] Their first big grocery win and stock-out lessons
[00:20] Slotting fees vs. free-fill economics
[00:25] How their lean, 12-person team managed national reach
[00:29] Picking partners and saying no to bad money
[00:31] The new vision for 2026 and the evolution of the ongoing direct-to-consumer push
Notable Quotes
[00:01] "I wanted to create something on another level, from the flavor portfolio to the smoothness that you're tasting. People were spending hundreds of dollars a month on their juices because it truly was different."
[6:00] "I'm grateful that I have access to clean water, and I take a sip. And even just those five seconds of mindfulness, it's going to change the trajectory of your day, plus all of the benefits that are actually in this water. You really will feel different."
[00:16]  "Our net promoter scores of 10 are the people really diving into being the brand ambassadors that are then talking about how Crunchy is part of their identity."
[00:38]  "I did everything from the start with Crunchy, from driving the forklift, being the delivery person, learning how to build websites, doing socials, creating graphics. I learned all of that, but I also know what I created was not what was going to help us get to the next level."
[00:40] "We're big believers in time-blocking and knowing what metrics define success before you even start."

Episode 261: What if you could use AI-generated customer twins to test value propositions, pricing, and demand before you go to market?
That is the idea my Bain colleague Andy Pierce is exploring. Synthetic customers can help teams move faster, pressure test offers, and simulate trade-offs much faster and at far lower cost than traditional research alone. Says Andy, "You can do things at half the time and a third the cost. You can be a hero internally by helping your business functions get to success better, faster, cheaper."
But synthetic customers can also mislead you if you treat them like magic. Left ungrounded, large language models tend to be overly positive, can drift over time, and may reflect bad data rather than real human behavior. 
To put theory into practice, we'll explore a 24-month telco case study that ran in parallel with a synthetic panel and hit ~85% overlap with human survey responses after confronting both bias and brown-nosing behavior.
Guest: Andy Pierce, Partner, Bain & Company
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Time-Stamped Topics:
00:00 — Value proposition basics and the design target question
00:05 — Pricing as the most natural lever and why finance often doubts research
00:09 — Early LLM experiments
00:10 — Telco case study
00:12 — Over-positivity and tuning to an ~85% survey overlap
00:14 — Quarter-by-quarter improvement
00:35 — Rational vs. experiential vs. emotional 
Time-Stamped Quotes:
[32:00] "We've already started to see a world where I can train an LLM on a new idea, develop a new value proposition—or an extension to an existing value proposition—and instead of trying to predict the research outcome, I'm trying to predict actual sales in the marketplace."
[37:00] "It's not good enough to just create the persona … you still have to test against real humans."
[38:00] "Synthetic customers are here to stay. It's not a fad. And clients are already using them to build a competitive advantage."
Resources Referenced on Today's Show:
Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People — https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109
Simulating Human Behavior with AI Agents — https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai-policy-brief-simulating-human-behavior-with-ai-agents.pdf
How Synthetic Customers Bring Companies Closer to the Real Ones — https://www.bain.com/insights/how-synthetic-customers-bring-companies-closer-to-the-real-ones/
UXAgent: A System for Simulating Usability Testing of Web Design with LLM Agents — https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09407v2
The Rise of Synthetic Respondents in Market Research — https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/education/2024/the-rise-of-synthetic-respondents
Synthetic Users: If, When, and How to Use AI-Generated "Research" — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/synthetic-users/
A Tale of Two Identities: An Ethical Audit of Human and AI-Crafted Personas — https://arxiv.org/html/2505.07850v1
Luxury in Transition: Securing Future Growth — https://www.bain.com/insights/luxury-in-transition-securing-future-growth/

Episode 260: When customers must re-explain the same problem, reopen old tickets, and chase for follow-ups, a shiny new tool won't help unless it's connected to support or sales history. How can leaders act on real signals to build shared memory and fix the root cause?
Jeannie Walters, founder and CEO of Experience Investigators, and John Abraham, a customer experience consultant, believe that most customer frustration isn't about a single moment. It's about when someone becomes worn down by repeated fixes, handoffs, and follow-ups. When organizations chase shiny tools without a clear execution plan, it's harder to agree on what "great" customer experience actually means.
Learn how AI-assisted listening (for things like tone, behavior, and patterns) surfaces exhaustion signals that surveys miss, why sentiment analysis becomes a dead end without action, and how to replace tool-chasing with cross-functional fixes that stick. We'll also cover the danger of becoming a "company with no memory," and the simple prompt leaders can use to ask, "What can we learn … without a survey?"
The goal? When you stop celebrating case-by-case resolutions, you eliminate those frustrating repetitions that drain trust.
Guests: Jeannie Walters, CEO, Experience Investigators, and John Abraham, Customer Experience Consultant
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Timestamped Topics
[00:00] Shiny tools derail real outcomes
[00:02] Learn without a survey mindset
[00:04] The company with no memory
[00:07] AI listening, beyond survey bubbles
[00:12] Repetition, not incidents, drives exhaustion
[00:14] Trade-offs beat vague promises
[00:18] Redefine success beyond scores
Notable Quotes
[00:02] Jeannie: "The siloed nature of organizations is still here, and that's just the nature of how big organizations work. What I am more excited about is that it's not just about that holistic idea, but really helping individuals understand where they fit."
[00:07] John: "The big debate [used to be] around driver questions and how long should the survey be. Now, the debate is much more, 'What can I learn without a survey?'"
[00:08] John: "It's one thing to take a large data set and say,  'Okay, anybody can log in and play around with it.' It's very different when you see data, and you work in a frontline team or at a location."
[00:15] Jeannie: "We have to say, 'This is who we are, and this is the promise we're making to you.' If we say we're gonna be all things to all people, we're saying we're nothing to no one."
Additional Resources
- Jeannie reveals how any leader can win with her proven method to drive performance, retention, and revenue by making customer experience their greatest competitive advantage in her upcoming book, Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations.

Episode 259: How do you prevent first-trip hassles such as a room not being ready at check-in, Wi-Fi outages, or service delays from discouraging first-time customers from returning?
Today's guest, Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation at Kobie Marketing, says that after a slightly negative first trip, customers are 80% less likely to return. Kobie—a technology platform that builds and runs rewards and loyalty programs—is solving this. They use a "journey atlas" to read social signals, spot subtle first-trip frictions, and then trigger targeted offers or fixes. They model lift and rewards liability so that investment can follow behavior change. Journey maps freeze a tense customer moment. A live atlas shows where small failures block the next purchase and coordinates fixes across channels.
Inside the business, spending becomes about precision. Simulators forecast lift, break-even, and profit impact by segment and moment, so finance are able to see trade-offs before money moves. The payoff? Practical programs that grow trips, expand categories, and raise lifetime value.
Guest: Rachel Bicking, EVP of Innovation, Kobie Marketing
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Time-Stamped Topics:
[00:03] First-trip friction that kills repeat purchases, with examples and fixes
[00:10] Personalization that simplifies the customer experience
[00:12] Emotional Loyalty Scoring, habit, status, and reciprocity
[00:21] Coordinating recovery across store, app, and site for the same customer
[00:23] Using precision to avoid incentivizing the wrong customer base
[00:27] Designing redemptions to expand baskets, categories, and trip frequency
[00:31] Accounting for redemption cost and liability without derailing good decisions
[00:34] Using simulators to forecast lift and break-even before spending a dollar
[00:36] The moment modeling convinces finance to reallocate the budget
Time-Stamped Quotes:
00:05 — "What we're trying to do at scale is identify those moments that matter and those micro-moments that then lead to a negative or positive experience. Because we want to amplify the positives and we want to make sure that we intercept the negative ones."
00:07 — "I think there's been a broader inclination to say, 'Hey, if it's below a certain amount, people don't care.' And this is where personalization becomes really important. If I get delayed checking into my hotel room and I have to go to the next meeting and I don't have time to put my stuff down, ten minutes matters."
00:08 —  "Data-wise, we're always trying to break down customers' interactions [and] rewards into a series of metadata, into a series of features, so that we can make them more explainable at scale."
00:13 — "If personalization is done well, the experience from a customer perspective should be very simple. It should be guided. It should be deliberate."

Episode 258: How did two new leaders turn angry customer calls into executive promises to earn customer trust and advocacy? 
Charlon McIntosh, Chief Customer Operations Officer, and Melissa Pint, Chief Digital Information Officer, both joined Frontier Communications on the same day in 2021. 
At the time, Frontier faced both bankruptcy and a reputation crisis: Millions of customer complaint calls were pouring in, with only one way to reach the company. Charlon and Melissa inherited a brand that customers didn't trust. To fix it, they built a system where complaints trigger commitments, leaders face weekly scrutiny, and new product and feature launches aren't approved until they are absolutely ready.
"Our CEO, Nick Jeffery, outlined a very simple four-point strategy for us," says Charlon. "Build fiber, sell fiber, improve the customer experience, and improve our operational efficiency." In alignment with these goals, Frontier treated millions of monthly calls as a focus group, and started by redesigning its messy billing process. They used data on call reasons and complaint volumes to guide a weekly, two-hour "earning customer loyalty" meeting across departments. One Friday at a time, owners identified fixes, rather than providing chest-beating updates. 
Charlon and Melissa's collaborative relationship is an enviable example of cross-functional teamwork. They finish each other's sentences and share a single scorecard. "There is no IT strategy," Melissa says. "There is only the business strategy."
"And customers tell us if it worked," adds Charlon.
A digital-first agenda became the default. Customers now use chatbots for routine tasks, with a one-tap handoff to a person. Progress runs on shared operations and IT metrics, with the CEO actively observing from the customers' viewpoint, even using customer tools himself, to identify adjustments they could implement in real time. 
"We were able to shift adoption from nearly a hundred percent of our transactions being handled in a call center to today, where less than 20% of our interactions are assisted between chat and phone calls," Charlon says. "The point isn't deflection. It's a faster, better answer."
Guests: Charlon McIntosh, Chief Customer Operations Officer, Frontier Communications, and Melissa Pint, Chief Digital Information Officer, Frontier Communications
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Time-Stamped Topics
[00:02:00] Frontier's turnaround mandate and four-point strategy
[00:05:00] How experience assurance sets standards and shapes launches
[00:07:00] How call volume helps spot customer experience opportunities
[00:09:00] How a weekly  "earning customer loyalty" forum drives executive action 
[00:10:00] Frontier's prioritization of billing and communications cleanup
[00:18:00] How digital channels rapidly shift interactions
[00:23:00] How their chatbot resolves most chats by understanding intent
[00:27:00] Diving into results experienced thus far and record-low churn
[00:39:00] Issuing a no-go on a marquee launch to prioritize quality
[00:45:00] Looking ahead to the future of data and AI 
Notable Quotes
[00:08] "The interactions with our customers every day in our contact channels, those are like mini focus groups. They're telling us what's confusing, what's broken, what we've done wrong, where they need help, and where they need additional support. We used the reasons customers were calling as our initial guide to say what's happening."
[10:00]  "As a care leader, I have the data. I can tell my partners across the organization where we are making poor decisions and where we have low quality. It's the ability to get them to listen to me. That's what makes the difference in my team's success and our ability to improve the customer experience."
[15:00]  "As a turnaround company, since we did need to turn around pretty quickly, we did not have the luxury of completely changing core legacy backend systems. … Our strategy was to create a layer on top of them that would bring systems together."
 [18:00] "A digital-first strategy means things are going to start being automated, and you put things in your customer's hands; you're giving more power to your users to have automated tasks. That drives different traffic in your backend systems—different traffic patterns—that backend systems need to accommodate."