Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
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
Full Episode
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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