Jeannie Walters: 0:00

Welcome to a special episode of the Experience Action Podcast. I'm Jeannie Walters and I'm thrilled you're here. I think you're going to get a lot out of the conversations I'll be sharing today. Now, I had the privilege of being at the Medallia Experience 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I served as a judge for the Expy Awards this year. That gave me access to leaders like you who are really putting in the day-to-day work to transform their organizations. Now, of course, at this conference, we talked a lot about AI or I think everywhere you go, that happens now. And there's so much excitement around what AI can do. It can support our executives and our contact center agents alike. There is a lot to unpack there. And it's moving so fast. I encourage you to do what you can to keep up with that. But today what I want to talk to you about is the theme that I saw throughout this conference. Instead of just talking about AI as an aspirational tool or something that we believe will help in the future, this is the year it felt grounded. This is the year that it felt like we were being more pragmatic about the actual uses today, not tomorrow. So at the Medallia Experience Conference, this was addressed in keynotes or in breakout sessions, in everyday conversations in the hallway, or it is here. But today I want to share with you the theme that I saw. And that was about how to be a leader. We need to make sure we are leading for for the moment our organization is in, or not necessarily the moment that we believe will be in the far future. Or what do I mean by that? I mean that the leaders who were showcased in the Expy Awards, the speakers on stage, the practitioners in the breakout sessions. They all talked about the fact that, you know what, you have to pretty much where your organization is and what they're ready for. We can't necessarily dive into the deep end every time. We have to make sure that we are meeting our leaders where they are, that we are understanding our data and technology, that we are approaching this or with essentially a beginner's mind , understanding what is it we really want to do, what are the right steps to get there, and what can we do today. Even if that means that some people in our organization aren't quite ready, maybe our processes aren't quite ready. This is about progress over perfection. So I'm going to share two conversations with you today that I think you'll get a lot out of. The first conversation I want to share with you is with the Experience Transformation Leader Award winner, Paloma Paraja from Santalucia. Santalucia is an insurance organization, and even with a lot of the things that go along with that, Paloma really stood out as a leader who understood transformation.

Jeannie Walters: 2:56

Can you go ahead and share your role there and some of the things you do at Santalucia?

Paloma Paraja: 3:01

Yes, of course. I arrived in Santalucia in 2022, a few years ago. I was in charge of leading the implementation of Medallia, so I know all these processes very well. And nowadays I lead the customer experience team where we bring together four main areas. Our voice of customer program, which is based obviously in Medallia. Everything that has to do with digital experience, which is strongly connected also to the voice of customer program through digital and the XA. We also manage loyalty and retention of customers, where we use the customer insights to prevent turn and to take actions. And then we manage customer units and continuous improvement through all the organization.

Jeannie Walters: 3:46

Excellent. That's a lot.

Paloma Paraja: 3:48

Yes, a lot of things.

Jeannie Walters: 3:50

A lot of things. And you know, one of the things that I read about in the award submission and saw you speak about today. We talk in customer experience about how important it is to get buy-in, to get executive buy-in, and to get leaders who say, Yes, I believe this, and they're willing to give us a little bit of you know grace when things are not always going perfectly. And so you talked about that. So my understanding is it's a hundred-year-old organization, is that right? So this is legacy. You've been doing things the same way for so long, right? So, how do you earn that type of endorsement and support from leadership?

Paloma Paraja: 4:33

Well, Medallia has helped us a lot to do that because of course we are a hundred-year-old company, so everything is so fragmented because it's being created through the time and the years, and every system has their owners, their own teams, and they are not connected at all. So we basically work in silos. So with Medallia, we changed our point of view and we started not to measure yes, scores, numbers, and these kind of things, but started to truly understand what was happening, not only for customer experience, but also in our internal processes and how this was affecting customers. So um I think that maybe one big case having ambassadors that start to believe you in these crucial moments. From the very beginning, claims and service teams were the our first sponsors in the house, and they have a big impact on both customer experience but also business and economics. So they believe heartily in us, and in fact, nowadays they proactively consume the information themselves, they propose us uh some new projects and ideas, and starting by this team, we were able to increasingly uh get other teams on board, but the key was starting to use speech the same language, like translating everything we were measuring in their own idiom and language, and facing what customers were saying, or transmitting us through other unstructured uh sources with their own operational and informational data, which they control very well and they know very well. So, this is I think the clue for us.

Jeannie Walters: 6:28

I love that you talk about how now they're coming to you and they're saying, like, will you please help us with this?

Paloma Paraja: 6:33

Absolutely.

Jeannie Walters: 6:33

Which is the dream of so many customer experience leaders, right?

Paloma Paraja: 6:37

So many times we have such a big list that we have to like prioritize and explain the teams why this project is not being the first one, right? Because we don't have enough capacity with all of them. It yes, it is a dream.

Jeannie Walters: 6:50

And the the whole prioritization, it has to be around business outcomes and what customers want and all of those things. So I think that any customer experience leader sometimes can feel overwhelmed, like, oh my gosh, so much, right? And so many points of input, so many places where people are asking for things. So I love what you said about starting with a smaller group, with a group that you trust, with a group with high stakes too. They claims that's the moment of truth, right? Like that's what customers care about and how they'll judge their customer experience in insurance.

Paloma Paraja: 7:24

Yes.

Jeannie Walters: 7:24

So I know you mentioned ambassadors and like really finding your people, kind of your champions. What are the recommendations you have for customer experience leaders who are listening or watching to this, who are thinking, I don't even know where to find those people in my organization. Maybe it's a big organization. What are some of the ways that you find those people who kind of get it, who understand customer experience and can be those allies for you?

Paloma Paraja: 7:50

I think that maybe searching the areas or the team with uh direct or higher impact in customer experience for beginning. Um sometimes the easiest way is uh like choosing those persons that are in front of customers every time because it's easier to see like the relationship between uh what they are doing and what the the customers live in. But um then you have to connect those profiles that are key for making changes inside the organization. Um, it works good if you can do it directly with direction management and this level. Uh in fact, our CEO is our maybe biggest sponsor, but from starting, maybe you can choose uh those um like heads that are a little bit um close to the people and and close to the customers, and choose at least one in each different area and try to convince them. But I think that when you start to tell stories, many people start to listen to you. So it's maybe easier to find people that want themselves to get to work.

Jeannie Walters: 9:13

And storytelling is so important, right? Very important. Uh we can't do anything with just one number, right?

Paloma Paraja: 9:21

No, it's impossible.

Jeannie Walters: 9:22

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I think the other thing that I'm seeing right now in the world is that we are, as customer experience leaders, we have to do so much inside the organization to actually deliver for the customer. And that's so related to employee experience as well. And you've mentioned this connection. So, what are some of the really important points of connection between employee experience and customer experience so that we can deliver for that customer?

Paloma Paraja: 9:52

It's very, very, very important. We share Medallia for both programs, which is easier to connect. Uh, we are still working, I have to confess, we have started by those groups that are in front of the customers, our contact center, which was the easiest one. And when we started to measure it, we noticed that we can translate in numbers and in business impact how our agents were feeling and how was the customer experience with these concrete agents. And you have to start agent by agent and customer by customer.

Jeannie Walters: 10:32

I love that.

Paloma Paraja: 10:33

Then you can aggregate and find kind of patterns and areas where you have to work too. But you need to start with little groups, putting names, and then escalating it to the whole organization, to all the teams that are not as easy as imagining that has an impact on customers, but all of us has because the people in front of the customers like translating the message to them, but this message is created by all the owners that are behind the scenes, and they need to know they have an impact too, on customers.

Jeannie Walters: 11:15

Absolutely, absolutely. And really, I think the theme that I'm hearing from all of the winners, all of the award winners, and all the incredible leaders is this is about taking one step at a time and progress over perfection, right? Like start small, figure out what you can do, get more buy-in, expand from there, and really pay attention to both sides of that coin because none of us can do this alone, right?

Paloma Paraja: 11:41

No, and you can do it in one day. Yeah, it's impossible.

Jeannie Walters: 11:44

No, you can't.

Paloma Paraja: 11:46

No.

Jeannie Walters: 11:46

Well, congratulations again on winning the award. Congratulations to you and the entire team at Santalucia.

Paloma Paraja: 11:51

Thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 11:52

And thank you so much for talking to me today, Paloma.

Paloma Paraja: 11:54

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeannie Walters: 11:55

This next conversation is someone you've seen before. Camille Kremer, Senior Director of Customer Experience at the Holiday Inn Club Vacations, has been actually my co-host on CX Pulse Check in the past. I encourage you to go look up that episode. We were able to sit down at Medallia Experience and get some updates.

Jeannie Walters: 12:16

This is such an interesting company, first of all, very unique in a lot of ways, but I think a lot of us can relate to the idea of we have a lot of different kinds of regions and properties and different things going on. And yet we have to centralize things and everything else. And we just came out of the keynote where they talked about that. Before we dive in, I would love for you to share a little bit about your role and what you do at Holiday Inn Club Vacations.

Camille Kremer: 12:44

For sure. So I think even you starting off with there's a lot of different parts. It's a very big company. One of the things that we've been really strategic with is how we formed our CX team and that we are a center of excellence. So within our one central team, we handle all of the major what we call moments that matter. So it's all the touch points in the customer journey, whether that's after you've checked out from one of our resorts or across any one of our three contact centers, we do uh interaction surveys after that. If you go on a sales tour, we'll ask you how that experience was. And then if you're interacting with any one of our digital properties, we're gonna ask that to you. And so our small but mighty team, all three of us, handle all of those incoming signals. We do everything from uh the survey design to doing the analysis and the insights. And then the most important thing, like you always talk about in Experience Investigators, is it's not about just collecting information because metrics without movement are mausoleums, right? That's just boring. So we do continuous improvements. So our group is not only customer experience, but continuous improvements that we can actually uh drive change in the organization.

Jeannie Walters: 13:53

I love it. And one of the things that one of the phrases I heard in the keynote today from uh the Medallia folks was insights to impact. And I loved that because I think a lot of times we think about well, you gather the insights and then you take action and then things happen, but really it's about the impact, right? It's about what can we do for our customers and our organizational goals. So you are looking at your data, you're looking at all of these different things, and at the end of the day, we have to kind of identify what's really going on and what can we actually do about it? And where do we start? Like, how do we prioritize? Is it a certain property or a certain you know process or a region or all those things? So that's what you're doing a lot of. So, what are some of the I guess bits of advice you would have for people who feel, I mean, everybody I think feels a little overwhelmed, right? So, how where do you start? How do you you know prioritize in that way?

Camille Kremer: 14:53

Awesome question. Because it's everybody's got data. And there's data that has to turn to information, information turns into knowledge, but data, we've got so much of it. I think everybody's dripping in it, data data everywhere and not a drop to drink, as it were. Um, so we've got all of these inputs, and just like you said, how do we figure out what are the things that are interesting, but more importantly, what are the things that are impactful? Yes. So we do

Jeannie Walters: 15:18

There's that word, impact, right?

Camille Kremer: 15:19

It's got to be not just actions for the sake of actions, because you can move around a lot and not move a needle. So what we do is we really try to hone in on how do we find precision in uh in our analysis? How do we find the things that if we put our uh resources, time, and effort towards it, that it will move that needle as opposed to just spin our wheels. We use tools within the Medallia platform because we're here in Medallia, so I'm not afraid to plug the tool. Uh, we use a tool within Medallia called Action Planner that literally does, God bless, all the little linear regressions, it does statistical modeling for you, it finds uh key drivers within your data that not only have a correlation, but have a high impact. And so when you start to look at the all the inputs that are coming in for us, let's say across resorts, it would be easy to be overwhelmed. And in fact, if I wasn't using the this impact tool that I'm gonna talk about, if I didn't look at that and I just looked at our resort data on the aggregate, historically, I'm sorry, Holiday Inn Club Vacations for admitting this out loud. Historically, uh, our number one problem from our guests after they check out is internet. Internet, yeah. Okay. And if you go to text analytics, and for anybody who's text analytics, the bubbles, biggest bubble, internet. And it's got a lot of red with it.

Jeannie Walters: 16:44

So let me back up for a second. So when you say they're complaining about the internet, essentially that probably boils down to the Wi-Fi's not working very well, I can't stream, that type of

Camille Kremer: 16:56

Yeah. So it's typically uh connection or speed.

Jeannie Walters: 16:59

Okay.

Camille Kremer: 17:00

Because we do ask sub questions to it, and then people can leave comments and we ask, what were you trying to do? I was trying to, you know, use my Amazon Fire Stick, or I was trying to use my Roku and it didn't work, or my kids were trying to play games and it didn't work. So, but internet is what it kind of boils down to, and people will indicate that as a problem. So if I was just looking at data data everywhere, yeah, I would see internet's a very problem. People mention it a lot. I would think, as a typical user, we should go fix the internet. The difference is if you really use a precise statistical modeling, when you run through all of our metrics, internet is actually a low correlation with very low impact. It's what's considered an unimportant weakness. We have other things that we should be focusing on that the vocal minority are not talking about, that they're maybe not indicating on a survey. So, how do we find precision? We really try to be mindful of it's not about the loudest voices because not everybody's saying it all the time. And it's not about scores that you're seeing a lot of. It's is that score really the thing having the impact? So once we're able to identify that, we take it into, we use a scientific method model to design experiments. So we say this is the thing that should move the needle. Statistically, if I improve it by this much, my overall experience should improve by this much. These are the actions I'm gonna take, and then run the experiment to see if we get to the outcomes. That's how we're doing it, our small and mighty team, by hand right now. So, where I'm excited with the keynote is Medallia is gonna offer that to us now with root cause assist, right? It should be able to cut through the noise and offer that sort of insight up to anyone. And I think that is gonna move a lot of companies in the right direction, focusing on the right things and not being distracted by the noise, like internet. Because at the end of the day, five years later, my vacation was not defined by my internet.

Jeannie Walters: 19:02

Right, right. You'd hope not, right?

Camille Kremer: 19:04

Right, yeah, but not a great vacation.

Jeannie Walters: 19:06

And I think you bring up a really important part about the experiments too, because we data can tell us so much, but humans are humans, and sometimes we don't make sense. Our behavior doesn't always match up with what we tell you. And so running things in a small way to test, to design, to get that input from customers and co-create with them along the way is so, so important. And I think that's one of the things that as we see more and more AI introduced into the processes, we're going to have more opportunities for those experiments. But to your point, we have to make sure that we're not just prioritizing, you know, well, it's the top of the list. It must be the most important thing. Because if we're not looking at the greater context of the customer experience, then we're missing out on all of that. So I'm I'm really excited about where we're going. And at the same time, I have a few like hesitations about let's not jump into just the technology and tools. Let's make sure that we have the right intent around that and that we understand that. So when you look to the future, what are you most excited about in this field of CX and all the exciting things that we're seeing?

Camille Kremer: 20:20

So many things. So very excited about really what AI is going to enable, right? It's going to be speed to service, which everyone loves. It's going to be hyper-personalization. The AI tools, especially Smart Response through Medallia, will read the metadata about you and the information from your survey and craft a really thoughtful uh response using, I just learned this yesterday, uh, models that have been trained on the best service type language. So this is going to be the best kind of response in the fastest possible way. And I am excited for that. I am like you, a little cautious that if we enable that in one place in the experience and maybe not everywhere, we might mismanage expectations, which you and I have talked about in the past. You know, don't want to set uh unrealistic expectations in one place. So I'm excited about speed to service, I'm excited about customization. Uh, I'm excited about really having another tool and help enable good strategies. But I think before we lean on AI to solve everything, there needs to be thoughtfulness and strategy up front. Yeah. Very excited about it, but I think everybody needs to be methodical and thoughtful how they do it.

Jeannie Walters: 21:39

Amen. Yes. Amen. Perfect. Yeah. I think I think we have so, you know, I feel like we're in this phase too where we don't know what we don't know yet. Right. Like we don't even know the power of some of this. And so if we are not intentional, if we are not thoughtful, if we are not really setting up the strategy for success on its own and then leveraging AI to enable it, then we might, to your phrase, be out over our skis, which is appropriate because the Winter Olympics are going on right now. So yeah. Well, I always love talking to you. Thank you so much for taking time out of the conference. Thank you to Medallia for having us.

Jeannie Walters: 22:18

I also want to thank Deborah Bearden. She is a part of the very engaged Medallia user group and also the Enterprise Customer Experience Manager at Simmons Bank. Deborah reached out to me because the third quarter of this year she'll be hosting a book club all around my book, Experience is Everything. Deborah and I were able to sit down and just share a few stories. I wanted to share a little bit of that conversation with you as well.

Deborah Bearden: 22:45

I'm Deborah Beardon with Simmons Bank, and I am the enterprise customer experience manager for uh Simmons Bank. Have been that for five years. I have a lot of uh financial services background, um, but more importantly, I am a CX book reader, and I am so happy to be here with Jeannie Walters and talk about Experiences Is Everything, which is coming out in April. So, one of the things that uh I partner with Frida Sullivan with Medallia is we created the Medallia CX book club. We're going into the fourth year. Now we have four books a year. And so your book is the third quarter.

Jeannie Walters: 23:29

So exciting!

Deborah Bearden: 23:30

So excited. So um, one of the things that we like to do in the book club is um we read the books with um purposeful intent to take something from it, several things, and go back and implement it. And it may be data-driven, it may be customer driven, people-driven, which is my favorite because everybody can have the same tools, but they don't know how to apply it. Right. Your uh presence in the Medallia Experience last year kind of started this because I thought she needs to write a book. She needs to write a book, we need to get it, we need to highlight it in you know, the book club. Um and when you live what you read, I'm a huge lifetime customer. And um, we we had some fun talking about this earlier, where some people write books and they're great writers, but they don't live what they write about. And so I've already seen you before your book last year. That's right. I always invite the author, and you've been so gracious, so thank you. Um, I love all this swag here about the book, and I haven't even gotten the book yet.

Jeannie Walters: 24:47

Well, and I love what you said about reading with purposeful intent, because if you know, I really wrote this book to serve business leaders. And part of it is that a lot of people understand the concepts and the tactics, like voice of the customer over here. We understand customer experience is really good to have. What this book is about is about the foundations and about getting the mindset, strategy, and discipline to really succeed. And so, my hope would be that the intent would be I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna internalize it and use it in my everyday life as a CX leader or as a business leader, wherever they are. So I'm really excited about the book club. So we hope that you'll join us, right? We hope that we'll have lots of people. And uh, I can't wait to hear your feedback and everybody's feedback about the book. So thank you so much, Deb.

Deborah Bearden: 25:40

Thank you, Jeannie. Appreciate you.

Jeannie Walters: 25:42

I hope you enjoyed this special episode of Experience Action. We love talking to leaders like you because we all learn from each other. We are all on our unique journeys with our unique organizations exactly where we are. We can't always speed up to the future that we want. We sometimes have to take baby steps to get there. And that's okay. Remember, progress over perfection. That's what these leaders shared. So I hope that whatever you're doing today, you're recognizing that you are making progress. I can't wait to hear your question. So don't forget, you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannie.vip. And thank you to these leaders and Medallia for hosting us at the Medallia Experience Conference. If you are going to a conference and curious if I'm going, please reach out. I always love interacting with you there. Thanks so much for all you do or keep on keeping on. See you next time. Thanks for listening to Experience Action brought to you by Experience Investigators. If you're ready to turn insights into action, join our CXI membership. That's our community for customer experience investigators just like you. It's where CX leaders get the tools, support, and inspiration to move from ideas to true impact. And don't miss my new book, Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count In The Age Of Customer Expectations. It's available now for pre order. Learn more and reserve your copy at experienceinvestigators.com. Until next time, keep asking questions, keep improving, and keep leading with experience.