Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Wed, 21 May 2025
“Brand is the promise, the experience is the reality.” This week, Lacey Peace sits down with Abhii Parakh, Head of Customer Experience at Prudential Financial, to unpack exactly how the 150 year old legacy brand created a scalable culture of empathy, innovation, and action. From defining what CX really means to implementing belief-driven rituals and artifacts, Abhii shares a behind-the-scenes look at Prudential’s remarkable shift.You’ll hear how Prudential turned feedback from a single paper-fatigued customer into a multi-year digital transformation, why they built a champion network of 100+ internal customer advocates, and how they're blending human insight with emerging AI technologies to drive predictive customer experiences. This isn’t about generic platitudes — it’s about measurable change, internal momentum, and leadership buy-in.If you're leading CX at scale, battling organizational silos, or just wondering how to make customer experience more than a department, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for. Subscribe for more insider conversations with the most customer-obsessed minds in business. Key Moments: 00:00 Who is Abhii Parakh, CSM at Prudential?04:56 Building a Customer-Centric Culture10:19 Scaling Customer Experience Globally13:58 Three Elements of Culture: Artifacts, Rituals & Beliefs28:05 Impact of Predictive Analytics & Debunking NPS35:22 Adopting AI at Prudential: Challenges, Success & Predictions45:23 The Difference Between Generative AI & Agentic AI 50:27 Future of AI and Ethical Considerations –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What is customer experience and why is it important?
The brand is the promise, but the experience is the reality. We define customer experience as a sum of all interactions that a customer may have. So it's not just the call center. It's not just the digital experience. It's any experience.
Can you just paint a picture for the listeners how big Prudential really is? It's a massive 150-year-old company. How do you even start to tackle that problem?
We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice to 50 million customers across 50 countries globally. They actually had this email written to one of our presidents about how they're going to thank Prudential when the polar bears are dying and the ice caps are melting.
Wow.
Because of the amount of paper that was being sent to them. So we created a network of clients. champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company. Forrester recognized us last year as the most customer obsessed enterprise in America. You can't survive for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years without that culture of customer obsession.
Prudential adopted AI pretty early on. So when I was talking to you earlier, you'd mentioned that your peers are pretty amazed with where you guys are at right now.
all sorts of emotion with any new technology that's introduced. The trick is how quickly you can move folks from apathy and anxiety into adoption.
And how far away do you think that vision is? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Laci Pease. As always, I've got Rose, our producer, with me. Hey, Rose. Hey, Laci. How are you doing today?
I'm good. I'm thinking about a lot after that interview. That was a really cool one.
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Chapter 2: How did Prudential build a customer-centric culture?
to ensure that there's action being taken from all of this data that they get that their employees feel empowered and the three what was it the three elements of culture right ac yeah this was i mean this was one of my favorite parts was talking about how they've curated their culture yeah he listed out the three he said the three elements were rituals artifacts and beliefs
This is one of the things about customer experience that I love the most is when we can talk with people who are building cultures that cultivate this experience for customers. Because we've talked about it so many times. The customer experience always starts with the employee experience. It always starts with how the employees think about their customers and how...
How much do they actually care about this person that they're talking to on the phone or messaging over chat or emailing? And the way that Abhi and Prudential has been able to create this true human connection with their, what did he say, 50 million plus customers that they have? I think so. Yeah, like they've got millions of customers around the world in 50 different countries.
And they've across this entire huge organization been able to make it possible for all of their teams to connect with customers in a way that feels really human. And that puts the customer at the center of everything.
This episode is a great reminder that there is no customer base too complex and there's no industry too boring to deliver great customer experience. Like there's ways... proven ways to do it. And Abhi's not gatekeeping. He's laying it all out exactly how they create a truly customer-obsessed culture.
Before we jump into Abhi's episode, hit like, hit subscribe, go comment on Lacey's LinkedIn page, go comment on our Experienced LinkedIn page, get into the comments on YouTube. Tell us exactly what you want to be hearing from these executives because we're sitting down with them.
And without further ado, here's Abhi Parakh, head of customer experience at Prudential Financial. Well, Abhi, welcome to Experts of Experience.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I'm so excited. Before we dive into everything Prudential and what you guys are working on, I actually want to start with a different question. What exactly is customer experience? Like if I'm a college student and I'm like, hey, Abhi, what are you working on? What are you doing day to day? I'm interested in this customer experience thing, but I don't really know what that means.
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Chapter 3: What three elements define Prudential's culture?
Chapter 4: How does Prudential utilize predictive analytics?
So I've always been passionate about design, about experience. Before leading this team, which I started in this role four years ago, I had various opportunities to interact with the customer experience team, with the design side of things. I was just fascinated about how they use empathy as their superpower, how they get to make things easier for customers.
And there's such an art and science to make these experiences consistently enjoyable. And there's so much power that can be unlocked if you do it right, but also so much emotion and frustration that can be unlocked if you don't pay attention to it. It is such an important aspect in our personal lives when we have a good experience and then we recommend that company.
When I go to a really nice hotel and you discover a really nice restaurant and you were wowed by the service, those experiences matter and it builds word of mouth, it builds recommendation. So I've always been passionate about this space. But then four years ago, when the opportunity was knocking on my door, I jumped at it because I had so much passion for the area.
And it's been really amazing to be able to lead such a talented group of people so that we can make an impact on Prudential's customer experience.
I'm so glad you brought up the transition from four years ago, because I know when we were chatting earlier, you'd mentioned that when you took on this role, what it looked like at Prudential was really different than what it looks like now. So in the past year alone, you guys have won several awards for customer experience and customer service. Where were you at in 2021 whenever you took over?
Yeah, exactly. It was almost exactly four years ago, actually. So where were we, right? What was the state of CX? I would say we had the right aspirations at the company. We actually had a documented cultural aspiration, which we have today as well, just to be customer obsessed, right? You can't survive for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years, which is what Prudential has done.
We turned 150 years old this year. without that aspiration, right? Without that culture of customer obsession. So we had that aspiration, but I think it was hard to quantify that. It was hard. It wasn't tangible. What that really meant or how we were doing. So when we looked towards measurement,
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Prudential face in adopting AI?
We found that we were measuring our experience with customers in many different ways, pretty inconsistent across the board. So again, apples and oranges and how things were and very hard to get a full consistent picture across the board. We had some basic capabilities, right?
But we didn't have direct access to our customers to co-create with them and see what they wanted from us, but also predict what they might need. So there were pockets of goodness. There were areas where it was working, but it wasn't homogenous. It wasn't consistent, especially globally. So our measurement was inconsistent, right? But part of that was also because our incentive model
was unclear, right? It was unclear why you would focus on customer experience. And then all of that together, I think, was a little bit of shaky confidence because we weren't sure where we stood on customer experience.
So you just described to me where you guys were at in 2021 and how kind of it was pockets of goodness that you wanted to create more cohesively across the organization. Can you just paint a picture for the listeners of how big Prudential really is? And when we're talking about trying to scale customer experience across the board, what you guys are actually doing?
Because, I mean, it's a massive 150-year-old company. How do you even start to tackle that problem?
So Prudential is a 150-year-old company, like you said. We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice to 50 million customers across 50 countries globally. So we're huge. We're also a top 10 asset manager, which is not a very popularly known fact. So we manage wealth for huge organizations, governments, We have a lot of clients across the world that invest with Prudential.
So leading customer experience in Prudential, we create experiences that meet customer needs and business objectives. Our customers are defined as not just our end customers, but also our advisors, intermediaries, and brokers that help us distribute our products. to our customers, and then ultimately the clients from an institutional perspective that we work with as well.
So for example, group insurance would have employers that we consider our customers, our clients, but we also look at the employees of those employers as being our customers. So pretty nuanced and complicated, multi-layered stakeholders. Mm-hmm. So that's the first part of your question is how big Prudential is. A pretty big, global and complex organization.
In such a large organization, you can't do it centrally, right? Of course, you can spark the fire. Because our transformation has always been about embedding customer centricity into the DNA of the company, how we work, how we make decisions and so forth. Culture is made up of beliefs, of rituals and artifacts. Right.
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Chapter 6: What is the difference between generative AI and agentic AI?
A big global company. So from the top of the house perspective, when we started this, we brought the top 40 leaders of the company together every six to eight weeks, right? to talk about this belief system, to talk about what our strategy would be and align everybody on a set of common goals, common initiatives that would spark this movement. The second thing we did was launch a champions program.
So this is about engaging the rest of the company. We have that top level sponsorship. How do we engage the rest of the company? Of course, a small central team is not gonna be able to do that. So we created a network of champions.
They're called the customer experience champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company who are driving advocacy for the customer, what the customer needs are, and different ways that employees within the company can get engaged. with this movement for customer centricity. So those were the two big cultural ways that we embedded the belief around customer centricity within the company.
But then we designed rituals and artifacts too, right? So rituals like every quarter, we not only have an earnings call for external shareholders and investors, we also host an internal all employee VOC call. A voice of customer call that is attended by thousands of employees where cross-functional leaders, digital, business, service, tech, ops, sales, right? You name it.
They share what they're hearing from our customers. And what are we doing? What are we planning on how we're going to deliver on those needs? So we have a really good forum every quarter to do that. We also have an annual conference internally where we bring external speakers in, internal leaders. We celebrate our progress and we reinvigorate our momentum for the following year.
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Chapter 7: What are the future ethical considerations of AI in customer experience?
And regular monthly tactical meetings to look at feedback from customers and create strategic action plans with owners and timelines that then feeds into prioritization. So a lot of different rituals, artifacts have been put into place and a network of champions that keeps that belief alive.
I just wanna acknowledge those two words, rituals and artifacts. That's a unique way, because you could have just said, we have quarterly meetings. So what was the decision there with deciding to use that type of language?
And I would say some of the language is internal, right? As we think about these things, what our philosophy is, how we're gonna approach it. We didn't get it all right in the first go. This has been an iterative process and we've learned a lot throughout the transformation. But if you look at what makes culture, it is those three things. You need to have a strong belief in any culture, really.
I mean, even if you're in your religious community and you have a culture or your national identity, there are certain beliefs that you hold sacrosanct, right? There are certain rituals that you go to church every Sunday or wherever your place of worship is. And you have artifacts, like you have a textbook that has the rules and the, you know, everything is documented and you follow that.
So I think it's drawn from real life and it works really well in the real life business setting as well.
I know. I love it. I just love that language a lot. I think it's very interesting and it makes it feel a lot more human than just like very businessy of these are our – this is our meeting. This is our agenda. This is how we handle things. It just feels a lot more relatable and something that you could like support and buy into. And on that note, I did want to kind of touch on storytelling.
Like I love storytelling and how businesses use story to like get people on the same page. Was there an aspect of that that you guys incorporated? It sounds like, you know, creating that belief system really did require sort of shifting the mindset of how people talk and what language they're using and what they're thinking about.
Absolutely. I mean, storytelling is such a great way to convince people. Human beings have passed on information in the form of stories from prehistoric times. So storytelling is hugely important, actually a skill that we constantly strive to better within my team. through trainings and such, so important to communicating.
I'll give you an example of storytelling, a really kind of interesting one. When we were first starting our transformation and we had that sort of forum of the top 40 leaders that I mentioned, we wanted to make it real. We wanted them to hear from real customers on what their level of emotion and relationship with Prudential was. Well, when we first started, we actually didn't know how to do that.
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Chapter 8: How does storytelling enhance customer experience at Prudential?
Oh, my gosh. Yes, this is a classic. How much data is good data? And I think you can be drowning in metrics and not being able to take action. So that's a very important question. So the way I think about metrics is about business metrics. So all of your metrics should be put in context of the funnel because you could boost traffic, but then none of that traffic converts. right?
So it doesn't matter in isolation, I should say, what your traffic growth is in isolation, what your engagement rate is in isolation, what your conversion rate from visits to leads looks like, just as an example on the website that my team manages, right? What really matters is have you ultimately increased the contribution to the bottom line, right? Have you taken out steps and
within the servicing process, great, but has that increased calls, in which case, bad. So it really matters what the ultimate business metric is that you're trying to influence. And all of those early indicators should be put into context in the funnel, whether you're trying to save costs or you're trying to boost revenue or you're trying to increase experience.
All of those things have to be looked in tandem with each other and in the context of the end-to-end funnel. So that would be my advice.
Yeah, yeah, that's great. So I wanted to go into, you know, it's been four years now since you guys started rolling out a lot of these changes. What sort of impact have you seen on the customer and any other like fun or cool wins that you can share?
Yeah, actually, our customer experience transformation has been really successful, if I can say so. And we have the sort of proof points, right, on that. So I would say in terms of just hard metrics, and I know that customer experience, you know, there's this whole debate of... Which metrics to use? Is NPS still the right metric? Is NPS outdated?
There's so much customer experience, social media debate. A lot of that fueled by influencers who want to be controversial.
I know, it's just the LinkedIn thought leaders.
But look, from a practitioner perspective, my advice is the following. Just when it comes to the debate on NPS or any other metric, just pick a metric, right? Make sure that it's consistent. Make sure that you have benchmarks. If that metric is NPS and it works for you, great. And you can get buy-in on that better. Pick a different metric.
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