Leader Spotlight: Turning delight into tangible impact, with Raed Moukarem
Raed Moukarem is Member Insights and Research Experience Owner at USAA. In his nearly 20 years at USAA, he has served in a variety of member/customer and market insights leadership roles, helping shape the company’s shift from reactive data use to predictive strategies. Earlier in his career, Raed held consulting roles at Ernst & Young, Willistead Group, and TWG Global, guiding projects across financial services, consumer goods, and government.
In our conversation, Raed explains how helping the C-suite remain invested in the voice of the customer creates long-term value, why putting customers first drives sustainability and growth, and how delivering exceptional experiences early turns customers into passionate advocates.
Embedding a customer-first culture
You’ve spent most of your career fiercely advocating for the customer. How do you ensure that VOC isn’t just a report that the Board, CEO, and Executive Council ingests, but is a core part of decision-making?
For Voice of Customer to be a part of the corporation’s culture, it needs to start at the top. It is a belief system that is embedded in leadership. Generally, it starts with the founders, and ideally, that culture permeates throughout the organization over time and growth.
A lot of companies lose that original focus, while others view it as a real competitive advantage. The key is to keep that culture embedded in the purpose of the corporation — understand how it's embedded in the mission, and monitor whether the org is living up to it.
When you speak with executive leadership, you always begin with a reminder of your mission. But it can’t just be on paper. Your mission has to be aligned with what you do daily in your operational piece as well. You maintain that Voice of Customer is present in everyday interactions within the company — from the boardroom to executive council meetings — by providing examples of how customers discuss your company and share their experiences with you. That makes it tangible; it becomes part of the narrative, part of the conversation, and it drives a real connection that is permeable in every interaction you have. That's how you maintain a strong and permanent connection to Voice of Customer: by making sure your culture lives it day-to-day, regardless of what level of the corporation the conversation is taking place.
When a company’s culture isn’t naturally customer-first, how do you guide leaders and teams to embrace and prioritize the customer perspective?
Well, again, it starts with the company living up to the mission it wrote. Companies that focus on their customers have a mission statement that is very clear and not subject to interpretation. So you start there. If everyone agrees to that mission, any deviation from it can be quickly corrected and brought back to that conversation: Are we aligned with the mission? Are we still in agreement that this is what we stand for?
If the answer is yes, then you remind people why the mission exists and how the customer perspective is important in achieving and living up to it. That's how you course-correct. It's about gentle corrections and not letting things stray further than where they are today.
So, if today the company is focused on customer interactions but the conversation shifts completely to profitability, you slowly bring it back by reminding everyone, from frontline customer-facing employees all the way to the executive suite and board of directors, that the mission focuses on the customer. Until a company decides to change that mission, it’s your secret weapon. When you bring customer feedback to those meetings, it reinvigorates the conversation. Very few companies can deny that a poor interaction hurts the reputation or overall performance of a company in the marketplace.
Now, if you’re facing skepticism or having trouble getting buy-in to invest in customer experience, the same approach still applies, but with a focus on longevity. A financially healthy book is evidence that the company is on a good financial footing, and has the ability to invest in research, product, growth, and marketing.
It’s important to continually examine how customer experience drives, supports, or at least mitigates negativity in key metrics, such as financials, customer retention, and customer growth. Those are still crucial metrics that a board of directors very much cares about. So the link between customer experience and long-term business performance becomes very clear.
From reactive to predictive insights
How have you transformed customer insights from reactive measures, like surveys, into predictive insights that inform future strategy?
Many companies still use surveys as a means of understanding customer sentiment, and that's a perfectly good methodology for gaining insight. But surveys are mostly a rearview mirror metric. You may learn that you’ve disappointed a bunch of customers, which is not good. At the same time, I see them as forward-looking: if you’ve disappointed customers, their behavior will change. That's where the predictive element comes in.
It's about understanding what you’ve accomplished from the year-to-date and five-year trends: Is the company improving or deteriorating from the customer’s point of view? In many cases, the customer’s perception is their reality, and if it’s negative, they will start looking for alternatives. So, study your own behavior, what reaction did your behavior as a company drive, and then bring that into a more scientific methodology — like how do the ramifications of negative word-of-mouth impact your growth and future? Who are those customers? How did you react to their feedback, positive or negative? Did you thank the positive, and did you fix the negative? And then, how do you systematically build that into your next step?
The idea here is to bring together operational and behavioral data, along with feedback. If a customer provides a poor assessment, what drove that poor assessment? Is it something that occurred on your end as a service provider, a misunderstanding, or something completely different? Getting to the root cause allows you to size how many times that is occurring. Investing in fixing the defect enables you to say confidently that a defect of this nature impacts X percent of your customer base.
And the impact isn’t always the same. Sometimes, it’s a brief negative experience, and sometimes it’s a prolonged one. For example, did you fail in a moment that really matters, or was it an interaction that you can recover from? In either case, you must address the issue, but the longevity of the impact depends on how you respond today.
When you can size issues, model the investment versus the impact, and project that into the future, you can predict how your customers will behave. That's very important. Often, we overlook the fact that a buildup of failures can lead to a tidal wave of negative feedback, impacting brand, day-to-day operations, and even employee morale. It snowballs. Ensuring that you're listening, taking account, sizing, and fixing, using both feedback and operational data, becomes extremely critical to the longevity of any customer loyalty program.
Can you share an example of how predictive data can be leveraged to course-correct and prevent potential negative sentiment?
There are many things you can monitor, but one specific aspect that stands out, especially if an org is web-based or app-based, is how your customers interact with you on a digital platform. There are several “moments that matter” in that space: being able to log in, access information easily, move through it quickly, and accomplish what you came to do, whether that’s making a purchase or just finding information. Ideally, the customer achieves their goal with just a few clicks.
There are several factors that could hinder a digital platform’s success, and monitoring and understanding these factors becomes critical to its success. Take the example of being able to log in and authenticate. If you create an amazing login authentication experience, it won't necessarily advance loyalty. However, failing to do so is damaging to both the brand and loyalty.
Let’s say you examine the success rates of your customers in login success and observe several failures. If you assess what those numbers mean from the perspective of the experience, you’ll find that failing to login on the first try can have anywhere from a 3–5 percent impact on satisfaction.
Ensuring that information was available and democratized to the people who were in charge of that activity was a critical component of success in that space. We presented it in a way that said, "If you want best-in-class operational capability on a platform, digital or otherwise, authentication needs to be a priority."
When we examined the predictability of growing failures, it became clear that it could be exponential — the more failures, the greater the dissatisfaction in the ecosystem. That, in turn, starts to impact how customers view us as a brand and how they react to us. It also generates a significant increase in calls to the contact center, which is also expensive to operate. So we built a model that said: if you fix it now, here's what the future looks like in terms of cost to the contact center, the ability for customers to buy more products online, and the ability for users to interact with a digital system that allows them to leverage their own time the way they want it. They don't have to wait for the contact center to be available.
All of these became key drivers to say that an investment, even if unplanned, is an important part of future success. We implemented it, presented it to the decision-makers, and they made the investment. It is now helping tremendously in reducing channel switching, keeping customers in a space that’s capable and inexpensive, because they’re able to achieve their goal on the first try. We didn't necessarily lift the brand, but we did save the brand from negative feedback in the marketplace.
Operationalizing customer feedback
Are there any process changes or structural changes you've made or advocate for to enable Voice of Customer insights to continuously influence strategy and become embedded into the customer-first culture?
That word “embedded” is important. When everyone is responsible and accountable for the Voice of Customer, then everyone notices how central it is. Companies approach this in several ways. I'm not sure there's a single “right” answer, but the absolute wrong thing to do is drown out the customer’s voice with only financial numbers as the measure of success.
Financials are critical to the longevity and growth of a company, but they have to go hand-in-hand with how you treat your customer base and how they perceive you. That means you need to embed customer success metrics into your overall success metrics and in how you talk to your board of directors about what you've been able to accomplish. And, some may disagree with me on this point, but I believe you should also include customer success metrics on people’s performance scorecards. Their success should be closely tied to how well their customers feel about them. That's where culture plays a part, because leadership needs to be bought into the narrative that your customers are your lifeblood. How you treat them is how they will treat you back.
Over time, of course, you reach a limit. You can delight some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t delight all of the people all the time. So you need to figure out what the right equation is for your company. How many of your customers need to be delighted, and what is the right target? High-performing companies aim to be as close to 100 percent as possible. You may never get there, but the effort matters. It shapes your goals, investments, strategy, and ultimately, how closely you’re aligned with your customer base. That becomes part of the conversation, part of your culture, and part of your growth strategy.
Beyond scorecards, are there other ways to help leaders or other managers feel accountable in a customer-first culture?
Metrics play a big role here. What you measure and where those metrics reside determine what your success focuses on. When you put all the ingredients together, even the most skeptical leaders start seeing where the value is — not just because they’re being held accountable to it, but because they realize their jobs are easier and more enjoyable when customers are happy. They’re not constantly chasing fire drills. That's important.
In a strong customer-first culture, there are numerous feedback loops, some of which reach the CEO directly. If a customer is complaining and not getting a resolution, the CEO may hear about it. Obviously, you want to minimize how often that happens. But those mechanisms are important. Voice of Customer is powerful because, even when feedback feels unfair, it still reveals your perception. That gives you the chance to respond through communications, advertising, or the frontline. It’s about countering misperceptions and setting expectations, so that when customers actually experience your product or service, it feels better than they anticipated.
Teams can sometimes experience feedback fatigue. How do you manage and prevent that while keeping everyone focused on delighting customers?
As long as you have a strategy that says “customer-first” and “customer with you,” and it's on your scorecard, then feedback isn’t just noise — it’s information that is prudent for teams to take notice of and fix. Employees actually start enjoying their jobs more when they see how delighting customers connects to their own success. That said, there are instances where you can never reach 100 percent. You may get repeated feedback about something you can't fix. A simple example is customers complaining that your app isn’t working when, in reality, the issue is that they haven’t updated their phone or app. That’s behavior on the customer side that you can't really control.
That's where you have to take a target-driven perspective. Aim to satisfy X percent of the customers accessing your app for specific reasons. Make an intelligent decision based on data — what percent of your customer base is likely not to upgrade their application or have a phone that's running a very old application? Build that into your equation, and you make sure you're not penalizing the teams for something they don't have control over.
If you have the right balance and set the right targets, employees won’t be tired of the numbers that they get. So, the old, smart way of setting reasonable targets and expectations is still just as important.
Turning delight into tangible impact and ROI
How do you reframe delighting the customer from being viewed as a soft metric to more of a tangible, measurable growth driver?
Numbers really matter in evidencing what customer loyalty can bring, and I want to be very specific about that — it's not customer satisfaction. Satisfying a customer is great; it's expected. But delighting customers is where the real strategy should be. Delight is doing something unexpected that makes a customer feel, “Wow, that was something unique. I love this company.” The word “love” is used more prominently when customers talk about you.
When your customers love you, several things happen. They don't leave, so your retention rates improve. You track that — where delight is, retention is also present, and you can show that where delight isn't, retention is not great. Then, you look at the next level; delight is a soft metric, but a hard metric to examine is marketing spend and its effectiveness. Your marketing spend is a lot more effective when you have delighted customers because the message you're putting out there is now verbally echoed. Plus, when a company is truly loved, you’ll often see customers step in on social media or forums to defend it, sometimes even offering advice to those who are unhappy. In that sense, your biggest advocates can become passionate defenders of your brand.
I refer to this as building an army of advocates. These are the people who carry your story forward. They discuss you with friends, family, and colleagues every time a need arises. This is where the Net Promoter Score becomes so valuable. It’s not the only metric, but it’s a critical one because it tells you how many customers are true promoters, willing to speak up for you, versus how many are detractors. The more promoters you have, the more their collective voices drown out the detractors.
And that’s the key — when advocacy is strong, every dollar you spend on marketing works ten times harder. But you don’t get there by accident. You get there by investing in delight. When you delight people, they sing your praises, and that’s the kind of song that carries further than any ad campaign.
From there, you look at growth. Customers who express delight not only stay longer, they also buy more. They listen to you, they seek advice from you, and you become a trusted partner in their journey. Depending on your business, that might mean they’re the first to buy your next product, or in financial services, they look to you for advice on their security and growth. When you bring the numbers together, they actually start to evidence that CLTV is much higher for delighted customers than it is for those who aren’t.
What approaches do you take to help quantify the ROI of exceptional experiences in a way that stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds can relate to?
Storytelling is critical, and it begins with ensuring that the customer is present, whether physically or virtually, in the discussion. Starting meetings with a customer story allows you to bring that customer voice into the room early on and allows the customer to live on in the narrative of the culture. At USAA, for example, we have what’s called a mission moment, where a frontline customer representative shares a powerful story about their interaction helping a customer on behalf of the company, and makes sure that that story lives on and everyone emulates it. One I recall was a military member who was in the middle of a firefight and called USAA to confirm their life insurance hadn't lapsed. The customer service representative reassured them immediately that everything was in place and that USAA would take care of them. Stories like that permeate into the narrative of a customer-first, customer-focused culture, and help keep that customer “present” at all times.
Part of this is making sure the people closest to the customer — the representatives — are lifted up. You seek out their stories. You reward them for outstanding wow moments. You make sure their voices are heard, not just in a meeting but throughout the culture of the company. They’re the ones representing you every day, and when you recognize them as heroes and support them in doing an outstanding job, you create a cycle of delight that benefits both the customer and the company.
Another important approach is bringing executives to the front lines and having them shadow front-line representatives. This allows them to see the different aspects of the company they reach out to, understand the contact center strategy, observe how those representatives are trained, and learn how they interact with customers. That’s extremely important in building a mindset that says, “This is where the rubber hits the road, and this is where we can't afford to be anything but flawless.”
Storytelling is part of the broader art of communication, but being able to tell a story that is easy to understand and resonates is becoming a lost art. Storytelling makes complex ideas relatable and helps tie customer experience back to feelings. This is important because feelings are complex and difficult to quantify or predict; it's not as easy as a calculation.
But certain human behaviors are innate. What delights us and what makes us upset is generally universal. As a company, knowing whether your behavior will delight or upset someone should be pretty intuitive. Aim to behave in a way that steers to delight more often than not. Sometimes, you have to make decisions that you know will upset someone; that’s the nature of the world we live in. But as much as possible, even if it's hard, steer towards delight. Strive to be an ethical, relevant company that exists to serve people, not just the bottom line.
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