
Be Customer Led · 2026-06-17 · 36 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
46 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Trustpilot operates at the intersection of customer experience and trust. Skubick explains how the company moved from traditional marketing to a customer-led operating model by institutionalizing customer conversations across engineering, product, and support teams - not just customer-facing roles. The company implemented internal product usage sessions where employees log in as business customers to respond to reviews, attend weekly empathy sessions with real customers, and map end-to-end customer journeys. A critical differentiator is Trustpilot's Chief Trust Officer role and 200-person global team dedicated to platform integrity, removing 6.7 million reviews annually that fail standards and pursuing legal action against review manipulators. Skubick also challenges the industry's over-reliance on NPS in favor of open, crawlable Trustpilot ratings that drive SEO visibility and inform AI search recommendations. The conversation covers how to time review requests at meaningful journey inflection points, the importance of transparent say-do ratios, and navigating customer feedback that conflicts with business priorities.
Trustpilot employs a Chief Trust Officer and global team of over 200 people using a combination of manual interventions and sophisticated proprietary models. The company removed 6.7 million reviews in one year that didn't meet standards and actively pursues legal action against review sellers and businesses attempting to manipulate the system.
Trustpilot's open rating system, which provides feedback crawlable by AI search engines, is becoming more important than NPS because it drives visibility in AI search recommendations and helps businesses understand real customer sentiment that gets acted upon, whereas internal NPS scores often go unaddressed.
Reviews should be requested at meaningful inflection points after the customer can actually evaluate the product or service - such as after a purchase experience is complete or after a loan recipient can comment on the product itself - rather than immediately upon delivery when the outcome is still unknown.
When product, engineering, and operations teams use the product as customers do, they gain direct empathy for customer challenges and see friction points they wouldn't otherwise notice, leading to more informed product decisions and a stronger customer-obsessed culture across all functions.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode delivers a handful of genuine data points (6.7M reviews removed, 200-person trust team, FTSE 250's only Chief Trust Officer, top-5 cited platform in AI search), but much of the runtime is consumed by standard CX platitudes about empathy and mapping journeys, plus lengthy host anecdotes about Costco oatmeal and Cisco. The ratio of novel insight to filler is low.
we've removed, I would say this year it was 6.7 million reviews off the platform that didn't meet standards
we're the only public company in the FTSE 250 that has a chief Trust officer
The argument that open, crawlable review ratings are displacing NPS as the C-suite CX metric because AI engines rely on them is the episode's freshest idea. Everything else - talk to customers, map journeys, use your own product - is standard playbook recycling with no contrarian edge.
NPS is an interesting one because it's. I think it's declining in terms of the importance that it has had as it sits as a more internal number and the feedback's internal
the trustpilot rating, which is an open rating, uh, meaning that it's the feedback alongside the rating is open to all and crawlable by the AI search engines, is now becoming more and more important in that kind of quest to not be invisible
Alicia Skubick is a genuine C-suite practitioner - CCO at a real at-scale platform with prior CMO and Intuit experience - which gives her credibility. However, the conversation does not consistently extract the depth of practitioner knowledge her background should allow, keeping the overall caliber score moderate.
I started as Chief Marketing Officer, but like I said, I had fundamentally changed as a marketer into somebody who was always like, looking both at the customer experience and at uh, marketing
the founder and chairman would travel around and actually teach Every employee, no matter what function you were in, like how to interview customers
A few concrete data points exist (6.7M reviews removed, 200+ trust-team headcount, FTSE 250 distinction, top-5 AI citation platform), and the balloon-sealant anecdote is a vivid real-world example. But there are no revenue figures, conversion rates, NPS benchmarks, or timelines attached to any initiative, leaving most claims at an anecdotal or directional level.
we've removed, I would say this year it was 6.7 million reviews off the platform that didn't meet standards. And we also actively pursue legal action over like, review sellers
somebody who sold balloons and the sealant on the balloons, you know, people were going to Birthday parties with the balloons. And the balloons weren't, they were leaking
The host repeatedly inserts extended personal anecdotes (Costco oats, Cisco consumer product, Amazon trust busters) that consume significant airtime and redirect focus away from the guest. Questions are mostly broad and invitational with no meaningful pushback or follow-up probing on specific claims, resulting in an interview that often feels like a PR conversation.
I used to get this, uh, product at Costco, is called, uh, Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats. And it was a large bag, it was very good price
when you think about a scenario where you get feedback from your customers and it points in a direction that conflicts with the business priority, what do you think about that?
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Trust is built one voice at a time, and every review tells a story that shapes better products. In a world where customer expectations move fast, listening deeply is no longer optional; it's a competitive edge! In this conversation, we speak with Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer at Trustpilot, about how companies can build strong customer experiences based on trust and real feedback. Alicia shares her journey through marketing and technology roles and explains how Trustpilot puts the customer at the center of everything it does. She discusses how teams use customer reviews to learn, improve products, and build empathy inside the company. The conversation also explores trust, transparency, and how AI is changing customer experience. Highlights [05:22] Internal Customer Experience at Trustpilot [09:14] Role of Chief Customer Officer vs. Traditional Roles [11:20] Building a Customer-Obsessed Culture [15:15] Trust and Transparency at Trustpilot [18:48] Metrics for Trust and Integrity [20:45] Who's Missing from Review Data? [23:32] What Happens When Users Push Back? [27:27] Customer Data and Insights [29:43] AI: Threat or Opportunity in CX?
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome to B Customer Led, where we'll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors employees and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host, Marboo Brown.
Speaker B: Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Be Customer Led. You know, in today's where we are bombarded with all kinds of messages about offers for products and services, one of the biggest challenges consumers have to deal with is who can you trust? Which of these claims are real, which ones are just hype? Even when the claims are real, there are still so many options to choose from. Customers have to figure out what's the best quality, what's the best deal, what's the best value for money, and so on. Well, trustpilot is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. It is in the business of helping consumers figure out the answers to those questions. And on today's program, I'm honored to have Alicia Skubik, the chief customer officer for trustpilot, on the program with me to speak about what does customer experience mean when you're in the business of helping consumers figure out who is worthy of getting their business? Well, welcome to the program, Alicia.
Speaker C: Thank you so much. M. It's an honor to be here.
Speaker B: I am really glad to have you on the program. At the outset, we always like to start off by getting the listeners to know a bit more about our guests and directly from the source itself, instead of me going through that sort of thing. So can you give us a. Take a few minutes and give us the backstory of how you came to be the chief customer officer at, ah, trustpilot.
Speaker C: Thank you. So I always knew I wanted to be in marketing from, uh, a pretty young age. And there were like, two aspects to it. I was kind of a frustrated artist. So the creativity and marketing attracted me. And then also there was a psychology to marketing that I found fascinating as well. And I kind of cut my teeth in technology marketing. So I've been in some aspect of technology my whole career, but I would say that I was more of a, uh, classical Marcomms marketing. So pushing communications out, always trying to get customer insights as I did it. But that was probably where it kind of ended. And I was fortunate enough to get a really great role at a company called Intuit with, I think, very well known in the U.S. uh, makers of TurboTax and QuickBooks. And they have a very, very deep, deep customer empathy culture. And so the founder and chairman would travel around and actually teach Every employee, no matter what function you were in, like how to interview customers, how to get insights from customers, how to run what they called scrappy tests that it didn't always require huge budgets and um, volumes of data that you could get insights from from customers like anybody could and everyone should. And it started. Say it again.
Speaker B: Follow me home.
Speaker C: M. Follow me home. That's right, Absolutely. And this whole methodology, and it was so good and I loved it so much. And I found that when I followed the methodologies and you just got instincts as well around where can I get those insights? So following focus groups and looking at the way customers, not just what they said, but how they physically reacted, would give me a real tell as to what campaigns would have impact and which wouldn't. And it really changed the campaigns that I was running, but also the experiences that I was building. And so, you know, responsible for the E commerce site for the business, really looking at what is that end to end customer journey for those customers, um, from like the moment they first interacted with us all the way through to becoming a customer and staying a customer. And so I became a like, I guess a convert to that methodology, but also like a passionate advocate. And when I was fortunate enough to join trustpilot, one of the things that I was really, um, excited by was really bringing that kind of capability into the business. And I started as Chief Marketing Officer, but like I said, I had fundamentally changed as a marketer into somebody who was always like, looking both at the customer experience and at uh, marketing. And when our new CEO joined, I think he and I both felt like there was a missing opportunity for us to really bring the customer back to the heart of the business. And so he promoted me to chief Customer Officer. And we also looked at our values and updated them to put starting with the customer as one of the key values of the business.
Speaker B: Well, you know, that's a huge deal because having the customer at the center of the business as one of the key values is, uh, just, just makes a huge difference. I've been in a business where that's the case and, uh, in businesses where that's the case, and I know that it's, it really distinguishes those, uh, businesses, uh, from others. So at trustpilot, what does owning the customer experience mean?
Speaker C: Well, it's fascinating to me. It's a great question because there's two sides of it. At a company like trustpilot, because we are a customer experience company, right? So we help businesses to better understand their customers and their experiences. But at the same time, I'm looking at, like, how do we make sure that we are, uh, creating the best possible customer experience for our customers? And so starting with how we work internally, one of the things that we've implemented is really running sessions with each member of the team where they're using the product. And so it's really important to us. And what I mean by that is they actually, we have an account where they're able to log in as a business customer and respond to the trustpilot reviews. So we get reviewed by our own customers, both business and consumer. And so we're able to respond to those reviews. And so really getting that empathy for any consumers or businesses that are leaving us feedback, really understanding, like, you really get a sense of the challenges and the love for the brand that they have, but also how the product works, how do we make the product better? What would work? So the product team have been using those sessions to actually build out change to the product based on that customer feedback, but also internal feedback. We also run a lot of empathy sessions in our weekly standups. We have customers join us to give us more of a taste for the whole business around their experiences. Um, so there's a multitude of programs that we run. We also look at different parts of the business and think about how do we map those journeys for our customers and make them even better than they are. So really overlaying that with the feedback that we get in our own platform and understand where there are opportunities to make that a better experience. And then I think with our product, what's been exciting is it's, um, incredible. I was a customer at both Intuit and at Sage before that. So we used trustpilot, and I was a huge fan. So it was really exciting to join the company, having experienced it myself. And what we see in terms of, like, the product is people often start because they want to really enhance their brand and build trust. But then what they learn is, like, there's so much great, rich insight that they can learn from their customers. And so using that has been a big part of, like, the customer experience for our own customers. And what's exciting is because it's an open platform, um, it's become very meaningful in terms of AI search and helping businesses show up and share that experience externally. So I get to work on the customer experience on two sides.
Speaker B: Well, that's great. You know, as a matter of fact, I think sometimes people underestimate the importance of using their own product and, uh, just experiencing it as the customers experience it. You know, years ago, I was at another technology company, uh, Cisco Systems. And at the time we're trying to break into the consumer space and we had a product that we were trying to sell but consumers weren't buying it. So one weekend we had some of the senior executives take home our product in a consumer product and ask them to configure it for their home use. And after they did that they realized, okay, maybe we should go buy that other company instead of trying to, you know, instead of trying to sell what we have. Right. So people really underestimate, uh, the importance of really experiencing your own product and understanding it the way the customers do. And I think that's just a, ah, wonderful example there. So um, when you think about the scope of your role, and I think you've probably hit on this a little bit already, but how does it differ, would you say from like a traditional uh, Chief Marketing Officer or VP of customer success when you think of the scope of being in the chief customer officer role?
Speaker C: It's interesting because I think the chief Customer officer role is a new one on the C suite. And so there are different flavors of it I've found. So there are people who are manage customer success and, and marketing or just customer success. And so there's different areas. For me the role encompasses marketing and communications, customer support and customer experience, but not the customer success. So it really depends. But when I think about a traditional cmo, you know, I think the modern CMO is starting to transform. Most CMOs are building some of this capability. They may not have like the support, customer support aspect to their remit, but I think the looking at that journey of the customer really getting deep customer empathy and being champions of that is really, I'm seeing that more and more in the playbook for the modern cmo.
Speaker B: Well, you know, it's interesting because one of the things that I constantly talk about when companies spend a lot of money on advertising and marketing in various forms, but you know, in scenarios when I talk to people who are, you know, customer facing employees and whatnot, I always like to tell them you are the commercial. Right? Because you know, we might pay for a 32nd spot, but if somebody comes into a bank branch or they come into a restaurant or they come into a store, they don't spend 30 seconds, they spend a lot longer time. And uh, the amount of time that you engage with them and the kind of experience that you give to them is a commercial all by itself. And so I see these things as uh, interconnected much more than sometimes uh, people realize that they are. So I'm kind of really into this whole notion of customer obsession and uh, when you think about a customer obsessed culture, maybe you call it something different. What does that look like day to day and how do you all go about building that within the uh, trustpilot environment?
Speaker C: So I think it's really important, I think changing the values for us was really important to make that our first value. It's fundamental for us. Like customers and being at the center of trust are like at the heart of what we do. So that was a really meaningful statement um, for us. And it's really critical for leaders, you know, starting with the customer problem, really getting that deep empathy, ensuring that we've got our members of our teams really talking to customers. I know it sounds like a very obvious thing, but you'd be surprised the number of companies that where it's only the customer facing people who really have that interaction. It's fundamental in every function that we're getting that deep, deep empathy. Talking to customers, understanding what are their day to day problems and what are the things they're trying to solve in their day to day lives that we can do better than anybody else, uh, I think is a fundamental for us. So really getting that empathy, share being, making that shareable so that it's not in silos, really working to share any research, any insights, any interviews so that we can make that broadly available to the teams is also really fundamental. I always sense test when I'm interviewing, if it's marketing leader or CX leader, how much are they doing like desktop research and research through agencies and how much are they picking up the phone and talking to customers? I like to see a combination of the two. I want to have the quant data, I want to understand that. But I think the talking to the customers is fundamental. So really embedding that in. But I think it's really important to also build the joy of that uh, customer experience. Right. So at first seem like um, a challenge or a chore or almost like intimidating to do. But almost 100% of the time once people start to do it, they get that kind of like joy of doing it. The insights that you get, the creativity that it sparks I think is unbeatable. So I think it's kind of trying to infuse that joy and leading by example is really important as well. And then I think the using the product and really kind of capturing that experience and the feedback that we have again helps us to like step into those shoes. And lastly, I think looking at things end to end. So if you're looking at, you know, launching something or doing something, really thinking about, okay, what's the first interaction they're going to have? Walk me through that. And really kind of build that end to end view, whether that's online or sometimes you just do it on a wall and just map each asset and look at it. What is that experience? Well, what do they click on? Where does that go? What happens? What does that mean? And really, really getting deep into the weeds of that experience. I think this is one area where, like, being deep in the weeds is a compliment because the more you understand, like each experience, I think you kind of touched on it earlier. It's like the best companies, the best brands think about their employee interaction in that, uh, every single touch point and what it feels like for the customer. And that feels like you know it when you're a customer of those places, you feel it. So, yeah, that's how we try and embed it at trustpilot.
Speaker B: Yeah, you know, sounds great. And the bottom line is like you were saying that it's not customer facing people who need to have that visibility or that orientation or all those kinds of things, frankly, you know, when people see things from different vantage points, they see them differently. And so product people getting to have that, um, visibility versus someone else in the company, in ops or something like that getting to have that visibility, there will be different aspects of it that they can see that can actually help create a richer picture of what needs to happen for that end to end experience to be a great one. And sometimes people might see things that you never thought about. Right. So introduce some new positive things into the picture for the customer. So you're literally in the business of trust. I mean, like, how does that shape your own internal philosophy and how you treat your customers?
Speaker C: Yeah, I think for us it's really about like, as you said, trust is at the heart of what we do. And transparency and openness is really important, uh, around that. And that's something that we're constantly working on. We're not perfect and really making sure. Because I think, you know, when you think about what are like the principles around trust, it's kind of, um, really ensuring that you're open and transparent, um, that you have a high kind of say, do ratio. You do what you're going to say and you do it with excellence and you're highly competent at it. So I think what we try and infuse in anything that we do in the experiences that we give are those elements we do what we say we're going to do, we're good at it, and we're very transparent as we do it. And so I'm constantly auditing for that to make sure that we, and we are, as a team, to make sure that that's the experience that our customers have.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: You know, it's so interesting. I used to work for Amazon at one point, and one of the things that we were always concerned about was this whole notion of trust busters and what impact that has on the business. Right. Because if you deliver a product and it doesn't do what, what it's supposed to do, that that's, that's a trust buster. Right. Or if it's fundamentally different than how it was described, it's a trust buster. And so those are things we actually, uh, act in, you know, intentionally architected to make sure that we didn't have those trust, uh, busters. And, and so I think, you know, that is a very critical point. Well, in this age, I mean, even before AI fake reviews or people going out there and putting reviews that really maybe it was meant to sabotage another business or something like that, you know, people were doing stuff like that. Now we got AI that can generate all kinds of stuff. So how do you all deal with that to ensure that you still have integrity in the platform?
Speaker C: Yeah, it's the number one thing. Yeah. It is our guiding principle and central to everything that we do. And we have an incredible team led by, I think we're the only public company in the FTSE 250 that has a chief Trust officer. So we have a role at the C Suite that is focused around that and a team of over 200 people globally who focus on protecting the integrity of the platform. So it's really, really crit. And it's a combination. Obviously we don't tell all the ways that we do this because it's, um, important, but it's a combination of manual interventions and also really, really sophisticated models that we've been building over the history of our business. And so we are constantly updating it and looking and we don't always get it right, but we strive to always be better the next time and fundamentally change that. And we've removed, I, um, would say this year it was 6.7 million reviews off the platform that didn't meet standards. And we also actively pursue legal action over like, review sellers, um, and businesses that attempt to manipulate the system. We take it that seriously. So we go after the bad actors. And it isn't like a side effort. It's kind of fundamental to what we do. Um, so we issue warnings, like thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of warnings and alerts to consumers. And so again, it is what we do, the core.
Speaker B: Yeah, right. Cord to the business to make sure that the reviews are authentic. So are there some metrics that you really care about and are there ones that you think that maybe the industry kind of over indexes, uh, on?
Speaker C: It's really interesting that you asked that because I think we're at a, like a foundational change right now. And MPS is something I was like cut my teeth brought up on. And it's interesting to see kind of where that's going right now with a lot of businesses where. And the businesses that are kind of known for it, even if you look at their kind of fortunes right now, probably I would say this, but I say it as a prior customer too. The trustpilot rating, which is an open rating, uh, meaning that it's the feedback alongside the rating is open to all and crawlable by the AI search engines, is now becoming more and more important in that kind of quest to not be invisible. So it kind of now, even more than now, providing like, rich insights for businesses, it's also helping to create those citations. It's what AI engines use to find out who they can trust to recommend to the, uh, to the consumers who are using it. So it's. So NPS is an interesting one because it's. I think it's declining in terms of the importance that it has had as it sits as a more internal number and the feedback's internal. And sometimes it just doesn't get acted on in the way feedback out in the open really gets, uh, measured and acted on. And so we're seeing a lot of our customers use that as a metric with their C suite. And so they're looking at the trustpilot score. What's their revenue, what's their score, what's their feedback that they're getting? So it's really interesting to watch that
Speaker B: evolution that is interesting. Now I'm curious about something because there's probably a group of people who have more of a propensity to leave reviews or to give reviews. And then there's some people who, uh, have a propensity to not do that. So what are your thoughts about relative to that? Is there a big group of people that were just missing relative to the scoring, for example, because they just don't do reviews?
Speaker C: So I think what we've tried to do, and we advise all of our customers, is really one for us, as a business in the business of reviews is really making it as easy as possible for customers to invite their customers. So QR codes, sms, trying to make sure that we're where their consumers are at, which is I think really important. Secondly, really ensuring that you're at the right all the parts of that customer journey. So we talked about a great business. It's not just one ad that you see, but it's the experience that you have all the way through. So really ensuring that our customers are inviting at all of those different stages, those inflection points, I really get a sense of that experience. It needs to be recent and meaningful. And at the points in which you have feedback, sometimes you'll see from companies that they other review platforms or other companies, they may ask for feedback like the day your product arrives and I don't know, I haven't used it yet. So we always advise and give breast practice to really think about what is that customer journey, what's the buying process, what is that like? What is it like? You might want to, after the order is placed, get feedback on the experience of purchasing. So I think we see great companies doing that and that when it's real and recent, if there is friction, people want to talk about it or if they had a great experience, they want to talk about it. Or you've got the reviewers who want to just kind of give that feedback and then you want to really look at it once it's arrived, but understand at what point if something's arrived, ah, or if it's somebody who took out a loan, ah, at a point in which they can actually comment on the product itself. So we're advising, you know, in that way you really do get and engage people to leave reviews in a meaningful way and making it easy. Right. So we look at the different methods in which to do it, but also the experience. How quickly can they get that reviewed, like updated online and finished is really important as well to make sure those conversion rates of the reviews are strong.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's a great point you make because, you know, sometimes you deal, uh, with a customer service agent or something like that. You've asked them to do something for you. Immediately after that call, you get some requests for feedback and it's like, well,
Speaker C: I don't know, is it done? No, I don't know.
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I don't know the outcome yet. So I can't really answer that question. Right. Or is that a question do you have for me? Because I'm waiting for something to happen. And to make sure that thing has happened correctly, uh, and uh, all of that. So when you think about a scenario where you get feedback from your customers and it points in a direction that conflicts with the business priority, what do you think about that? How do you deal with that?
Speaker C: I always try and make sure when you get the feedback that it's to some level statistically relevant. Sometimes you get sort of anomalies and they're one offs and you want to correct those when they happen immediately. I always try and get to the like the five whys of uh, what's underneath that feedback. So if somebody says like I don't like the price, is it that they don't like the price or they're not getting value for money, is it that the experience didn't match the price that they paid? Or do they just think this is too much for the business that I am in or so really getting down to the like heart of the why. And I spend a lot of time looking at feedback and trying to, or following up um, with users on like what specifically? What did that really mean? Because I think then once you've really got. Because it's easy to write things and you can write things that are maybe not as specifically clear. So trying to like really get into, get a little more detail where you can. Sometimes you see a pattern and it's very clear this is an issue and I know what this is or you want to follow up. And we've got tools like follow up questions and trustpilot to be able to follow up on that feedback. Uh, sometimes you need to make the right call because a customer experience and a good one is always going to sort of yield dividends in your business. Right. And create a better experience. And we always. So for example there are things that we never do which is we never take reviews off the platform because a paying customer or any business customer asks for it. That's just against all of our principles. So our whole business model is sometimes in conflict because we know that the right thing and a sustainable trust pilot and sustainable review ecosystem is one in which we don't remove a review from the platform.
Speaker B: A legit review, I mean like legit.
Speaker C: That's right. Legitimate reviews. Of course, of course if they're, if they're fake or uh, fabricated, of course we remove those. But that's a good example of where we always do the right thing and ah, the heart of our business, you know, is consumer trust. And so we protect that because by protecting that we protect the businesses that have that feedback as well.
Speaker B: You know, a story I've told often is that years ago, I used to get this, uh, product at Costco, is called, uh, Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats. And it was a large bag, it was very good price. And one time they didn't have it, and I thought, well, I'll just buy this out of Amazon. At the time, by the way, I was living in the Seattle area, you know, right near Costco headquarters, store and stuff like that. So, you know, I get some stuff out there. Well, I thought, look, I'm just going to get this on Amazon. So I went to Amazon, I looked at the same item, and it was like $10 more. And I thought, is this the same size I usually get at Costco? Wow. Uh, I'm convincing myself it must be a different size. And I thought, why don't I look at the reviews? So I looked up the reviews, and the first review I saw on Amazon was, don't buy this on Amazon. You can get the same thing at, uh, Costco for 7.99. So I was like, oh, okay. But that comes back to the point that you were making about the whole trust issue, because, you know, people would be tempted to remove that review.
Speaker C: Right.
Speaker B: But they didn't. Right?
Speaker C: Yes.
Speaker B: Um, so. And it said, don't buy here. Go buy it somewhere else. Right. And, um, you know, so that kind of thing is exactly what we're talking about. It would seem to conflict with business priorities. Now, having been on the inside Amazon, I know that doesn't conflict with business priorities, because the perspective there was, if we can't sell it for as good a price as the other people, maybe we don't deserve to sell it. Right. So go figure it out.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: So when you think about dealing with customer data and stuff like that, I mean, what's the most surprising thing you've learned from customer data and how m. Does that change how you guys operate?
Speaker C: Yeah, I think you get to know a business pretty well. You kind of know what the feedback is and where it sits. The data usually helps you to validate it and see it in depth and give you a little more detail. I think for us, where the magic happens is with our customers. And so we have examples of you're getting all of these reviews in real time. And it's helped some of our businesses to really have some very fast insight into product issues where the product isn't working. Where we had a kind of, um, somebody who sold balloons and the sealant on the balloons, you know, people were going to Birthday parties with the balloons. And the balloons weren't, they were leaking. So you imagine you have helium balloons and they're all kind of like fizzling, uh, out. And it turned out what they were able to identify because of the real time reviews that they were getting through was that they'd purchased a sealant for the balloons that was faulty. So that kind of, that's where the magic happens, is in that kind of real time insight that you're getting from customers on the platform, we've got like just so many great examples of kind of products and things that aren't working and the reviews that they're getting in those trends. And so we're able to dissect those. Um, I think that's for me the most interesting.
Speaker B: So let me ask you this. I mean like, do you all see like, um, brewing threats or stuff like that on the platform that you go back and alert the business that customers are talking about or there's a media.
Speaker C: Yeah, we don't get, you know, as a sort of neutral platform, we do not do that. If there's a media storm, for example, or something like that, we might close off for comments. I think similar to other, other platforms, but we don't get involved in the reviews of the customers and those growing storm. But I would argue the customers who are using the product are so deeply engaged in their customer data that they're seeing the insights in real time.
Speaker B: Okay, that's great. So AI is the hottest topic on the planet, right? I mean, uh, so how do you see the role of AI in uh, customer experience? I mean, do you see it as an opportunity, a threat, both? What are your thoughts about that?
Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's amazing to, I think it's all of the above. Uh, there's a change in terms of how you need to think both as a marketer but also as a customer experience leader. In terms of, you know, we're living in a, I wouldn't say quite a parallel world yet. I think, um, agentic commerce and those experiences aren't quite yet fully adopted yet, but I think you're starting to see that kind of get adopted. So, you know, you're trying to build parallel experiences. Those people who are still using, say, SEO search engines like Google Search, the regular version of it, going to a website and buying things, you want to make sure that experience is as good as it ever was and augmented with AI. Right. So using AI tools to identify where the friction is, where are there gaps, can we create agents that maybe help them in a more Seamless way. And then you have people who are searching using AI in the AI engines like ChatGPT or Gemini or you name it. And then it's really about wanting to show up. So that needs to be a great experience. We are very lucky. We're one of the platforms where we help people show up where top five sighted platforms. So that's great. So you know, the AI, I think I mentioned earlier, the AI tools are kind of looking for like rich, meaningful, recent, authentic human voices and data that they can kind of like surface up. And then it's thinking about, well, what does the site need to have on it to really help those, those agents also find the right information and answer questions. And again, it's structured, fresh, detailed information. So marketing, I can say it, I'm a marketer. Fluff doesn't kind of work right. When the agents are searching, they're looking. So if you're looking for a savings account, you want the real time rates, you want to know if there's any exclusions, but the detail of those exclusions. You want to know what kind of customer support. And it can't be just, you know, quote unquote, the best customer support. It needs to be 24 hours or 12 to 12 or whatever it is. So that's changing those experiences and the shopping experiences. And then if you think about another area that I'm responsible for, which is customer support, I'm sure you have been in an infinity loop where you are trying to get help from an agent and it just doesn't send me to a human, please. Send me to a human, please. And so really thinking about how do I create that incredible experience, you know, and what's the right balance between humans and agents and making sure and cutting out those infinity loops. I think those are huge trust busters, right, as you call them on Amazon.
Speaker B: Absolutely.
Speaker C: So it's looking at that and then, you know, I think the other area is like really using AI tools like Claude to identify where in your systems are there gaps in the customer experience and using that to like really quickly, it takes, you can do it more quickly, map those experiences and really understand where's the friction point. And so it's. There's so many interesting areas to develop and create wonderful experiences. And then there's also kind of like pitfalls you can accidentally step into. Like, like I said, there's infinity loops as an example of one. So I think it's at the moment a balancing act for a chief customer officer in terms of, you know, parallel worlds and really making sure. That experiences, however, the consumer, the customer really want to buy or use your services, how you're showing up.
Speaker B: Cool. Well, you know, the time has really flown by. We're almost out of time. Let me run one more question by you. So, you know, what would you say is one of the biggest challenges, ah, facing customer experience leaders now and maybe one that people aren't, uh, talking about enough.
Speaker C: Oh, that's a great question. I think for me, I think it's team adoption of the AI tools and really understanding how you are thinking about your organization and organizations across your business and how they're connected across and those functional silos that are. It's really important. The data layer has probably been the biggest surprise to me. It shouldn't be a surprise after all these years of working in marketing and customer experience, but the data layer, um, and those silos across teams is probably the biggest barrier to creating, like, really, really seamless experiences for customers. And so really looking at data and process as you build this is probably. I'm not sure if that's a surprise for anyone listening, but it's. It's kind of a annoying surprise that keeps, um, coming back. So.
Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. Well, look, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts and spending, uh, the time to, uh, give the audience insight into what it's like being the chief Customer officer at trustpilot and all these different, uh, nuances and aspects of it. M. I think that people have, uh, picked up some things that they can take and use right away in their own journeys to elevate the customer experience in their businesses. So, again, I want to thank you for joining me on the program today. And to our audience, I just want to say thank you for joining us and I want you to come back next time because we're going to have another really exciting guest, another really interesting conversation like this one where you'll be able to pick up things that you can use in your own business to elevate the customer experience. So thanks for joining us today. Come back next time. But for today, that's all, folks.
Speaker A: Thanks for listening to B Customer Led with Marboo Brown. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to Visit us@bcustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about. Until next time, we're out.
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