MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

Welcome to a special episode of Experience Action. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sasha Fard from Capital One Canada, at the recent Medallia Experience event in Las Vegas, Nevada. We had a quick but powerful conversation that I think you'll enjoy, where we cover how to approach different leaders to get them enthusiastic about customer experience, as well as really the importance of looking at both customer experience and employee experience from a leadership and management perspective. I really enjoyed my time with Sasha and I really enjoyed the powerful event of Medallia Experience 2025. I hope that you enjoy this and listen in for things that you can apply to your customer experience and your business.

Jeannie Walters: 1:17

Today, I'm coming to you from Medallia Experience 2025. This is a big event in Las Vegas. We've heard many amazing speakers. I'm here with one of them today. This is Sasha from Capital One, and thank you for speaking with me. And how about you just tell us a little bit about you and your role and what role you play at Capital One?

Sasha Fard: 1:36

Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Jeannie, really excited to be here. So I am the Country Lead for the customer experience management practice at Capital One Canada. So I lead a cross-functional team to measure and improve the customer experience both overall and across all of our key touch points and journeys. So I literally work with every team across the Canada business. So that includes the digital channels team, the contact centers, the onboarding team, product marketing strategy, literally across the board, which is exciting because I am a curious person and I like to learn about different parts of the business. So that works, yeah, and my role is essentially to make sure that we're listening to our customers and making sure that we're taking action on the feedback that and improving our business results.

Jeannie Walters: 2:28

And I think that's been a big theme here. Right, We've talked a lot about how it's more than just listening and collecting that feedback, but we have to act on it. But you just touched on something that is really important, Because when we talk about acting on it, it sounds so simple, right, Like, oh, just act on the feedback that you hear. But it's so cross-functional. We have to actually get leadership and accountability across the entire organization. And when you're talking about a large institution like Capital One, when you're talking about you've got many layers of customers, employees, everything. So if you were looking back on your journey, you know you mentioned today that you really focused on change management. So I would love to learn a little bit about that part of your journey. And then also, what do you think people are looking for when they talk about change management? That's another thing that can sound so grandiose right.

Jeannie Walters: 3:22

So, what about your journey there?

Sasha Fard: 3:23

I think change management is key. I think the focus at least like my focus, I'll start from my experience has been so much on VoC and VoC actionable insights. And before I thought that's what's going to get me there, that's where it's going to get me success, and then I realized that's more table stakes. Right, you need to have that, it's important, but you're not going to be successful just with actionable insights. And the most important thing I find in this entire process is making sure that there's buy-in and accountability, to make sure that folks are reviewing the feedback and also taking action on the feedback. And, like you said, that sounds. You know it could be something so easy. Yeah, just make sure you buy in. But this isn't CX, EX, is not ad hoc, right?

Sasha Fard: 4:10

It's not just one time where we're saying, hey, you know, are you interested in, can you do this? We're essentially asking them to onboard an entire system. You know, piece by piece, not all at once. So it's a high level of there is commitment there and so really need to make sure that we don't bypass that accountability portion and going straight to insights and solutioning and making sure that folks really understand the methodology what are we trying to do here, and also how they can benefit from it and how we can help make it easier for our stakeholders to achieve their own objectives, versus just being like a little checkbox that they have. So I think accountability is key and the way to do that is through change management. You know, looking at the ADKAR principles awareness, desire, knowledge it's really, really key and that's why, you know, I really focus on that, you know, in my role, because once you get folks on board and once they see the value and understand how it works, then the other pieces just at least in my experience just follow.

Sasha Fard: 5:14

So once we had accountability, the other steps just like people wanted to know more-

Jeannie Walters: 5:19

Yeah, yeah, and you also mentioned that you're a curious person and that's a good part of your role. That's one of our values at Experience Investigators is curiosity, because I think, like customer experience, we have to be curious people.

Jeannie Walters: 5:33

Some of the leaders that we work with they might not be as curious, right? They're like hey, I'm doing my thing and you're giving me information that is extra. So what is that conversation that you have to get them on board with that accountability when they're kind of like this isn't my role? This is not what I'm about.

Sasha Fard: 5:49

Right, right, I think that you know we're CX EX enthusiasts. You know we love this place. Not everyone, like you said, is in that space and you know just working I come from consulting side and then when I went on the brand side I realized how different it is because it's so big, like you said, and leaders are really focused also on other priorities, right, so they got to meet, you know, their compliance. There's like regulations.

Sasha Fard: 6:15

You know being in banking, there's just so many things that they need to do just to run the engine in their department, and so you really need to have a good business case to get their attention, and the way that I found to be successful in that is, you know, making sure you understand what their objectives are and showing how you can help make it easier for them to meet their objectives. So that essentially means tying in CX EX with what they're looking to achieve in order to get their buy-in. So you know really speaking their language. You don't need to be a CX EX enthusiast, but if someone says you know, if you do X, y and Z and if you onboard my system or this system, we're going to make it. We're going to give you a clear path to help you become successful. I think most people would want to learn more.

Jeannie Walters: 7:04

Absolutely, absolutely. But I think the part that sometimes CX skips is speaking that language. So, I really appreciate that, because we talk about you need to understand your organizational goals, your leadership goals, and then what levers can we pull in CX? So if somebody's out there right now, they're about to kind of embark on their own journey. What are some of the lessons that you've learned that you know you can share?

Sasha Fard: 7:30

I think buy-in accountability again is super critical, and what that means is, as CX EX folks, we have to wear multiple hats right. We have to be good at insights. We have to be good at, you know, change management, problem solving. One other skill that I think is very useful to have is being a good salesperson too.

Jeannie Walters: 7:51

Oh, I love it.

Sasha Fard: 7:52

Yeah, because you're selling an idea, you're selling an approach and we're not talking about accounting or finance. That's been around for 100 years. Everyone kind of understands what that is and how it works. This is a new discipline, and so you need to be a good salesperson by understanding their objective. When you get on a sales call, in the discovery call, they ask what's your objective, how can I help you? And so you need to take that approach to really, you know, focusing on the outcomes versus you know, this is what EX is, and here are all the features.

Sasha Fard: 8:31

I think understanding how to be a good salesperson, even though some people don't like sales and they're like I just want to do the EX parts.

Sasha Fard: 8:34

Like, sales is a key component to it and that means not overwhelming them at the front. And you know, in sales I used to kind of dabble in sales is to just get small commitments over time versus asking for everything right at once. So just getting buy-in and starting small, showing the value and scaling it.

Jeannie Walters: 8:53

I love it, yeah, and I think that when we talk about CX and EX, sometimes it is easy to get into that VoC language all the time and just talk about feedback metrics, right.

Sasha Fard: 9:05

Right.

Jeannie Walters: 9:06

And say, well, our NPS is doing this, or we noticed CSAT over here. So what you know, if we kind of think above that level, if we think about the vision of CX and EX, what gets you excited about that, Like what is meaningful about that part of this work?

Sasha Fard: 9:22

I think what gets me excited just in general, is creating impact within an organization. That's what gets me excited, and we won the Global CXPA Impact Award, which I thought was very fitting.

Jeannie Walters: 9:36

Congratulations.

Sasha Fard: 9:36

Thank you, and what I love about that is that it was focused on impact. It wasn't just about we launched a study and we got some good feedback and this is what they said, but it was really about gaining buy-in, making sure folks understood it and took actions, understood root cause and then showing the business impact as well, because a lot of times, folks don't know what the business impact is, and also maybe the team that you're working on understands it, but so many other teams within the organization don't know, so you need to share that with them as well and say, hey, for this team, I did this. What's important for you. I can do something similar for you and just start building relationships and credibility across the org.

Jeannie Walters: 10:19

That's excellent.

Jeannie Walters: 10:21

Well, I get excited about this too, and I think the work you're doing and all these CX leaders are doing out there is really, really meaningful. So thank you for doing this with me, thank you for taking time out of Medallia Experience to chat with me, and thanks for all you're doing.

Sasha Fard: 10:34

My pleasure. Thank you so much, Jeannie

Jeannie Walters: 10:36

Thanks.

Jeannie Walters: 10:37

Thank you so much for tuning in to this special episode of Experience Action. Now, as always, we are here for your questions. Don't forget, you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannievip. I would like to also extend my thanks to Sasha for sitting down with me, as well as Medallia for hosting this incredible event. Now, if you think this would apply to others, I encourage you to share this episode for those who want to hear about customer experience and employee experience and, of course, if you haven't already, please subscribe, rate review and share the podcast with those you think who would benefit. Thank you so much for being here. We'll see you next time.

Jeannie Walters: 11:15

To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.