What happens when you tie a quarter of every employee’s variable compensation not to sales targets, but to customer experience metrics?
Agility requires more than just speed; it demands a shared purpose that translates into a unified system for listening, learning, and acting at an enterprise scale. It’s about connecting every function of the business to the client’s reality in real-time.
Today, we are here at Medallia Experience at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, and we’re going to talk about what it takes to transform a massive organization by moving client experience from a siloed function to the core of the enterprise operating model, tying it directly to employee compensation and billions in revenue growth.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Stephanie Leheta, Sr. Director, Client Experience Strategy at CIBC.
About Stephanie Leheta
Stephanie leads Client Experience Strategy for one of Canada’s ‘big 5’ banks. With over 30 years in financial services, she excels at integrating people, processes, and platforms. Her proven expertise in strategic planning, governance, and leading multimillion dollar projects while navigating complex regulatory environments has enabled client-centric, data-driven solutions that drive meaningful change and measurable business outcomes.
Stephanie Leheta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-leheta-mba-ccmp-pmp-ccxp-435a8113/
Resources
CIBC: https://cibc.com/
Medallia: https://www.medallia.com
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Transcript
[ 0m49s637ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: What happens when you tie almost a quarter of every employee’s variable compensation, not to sales targets, but to key customer experience and business metrics? Agility requires more than just speed. It demands a shared purpose that translates into a unified system for listening, learning, and acting at an enterprise scale. It’s about connecting every function of the business to the client’s reality in real time. Today we’re here at Medallia Experience at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, and we’re going to talk about what it takes to transform a massive organization by moving client experience from a siloed function to the core of the enterprise operating model, tying it directly to employee compensation and billions in revenue growth. Tell me to discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Stephanie Lehata, Senior Director, Client Experience Strategy at CIBC. Stephanie, welcome to the show.
[ 1m37s454ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Thanks for having me, Greg.
[ 1m39s201ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to always always good to do these in person here at events, and looking forward to talking with you. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at CIBC?
[ 1m49s168ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, happy to. So, I lead our Enterprise Client Experience Strategy team and we’re responsible for enabling client-centric data-driven decisioning. But I’m fortunate to wear a few different hats. So, in addition to leading the Enterprise CX Strategic Planning, I also oversee technology and AI enablement for CX, regulatory governance, and I also lead our human-centered design practice.
[ 2m14s35ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Wow, a few things then. Yeah.
[ 2m15s568ms ] Stephanie Lehata: A few things, yes.
[ 2m16s508ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Nice. Uh, and for those that may not be as familiar with what CIBC does, maybe talk tell us a little bit about that, who are your core customers and uh, you know, what does it mean to be a purpose-driven bank focused on making ambition a reality?
[ 2m30s529ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, CIBC is a leading North American financial institution. We have about 15 million clients and about 50,000 employees. We’re considered one of the Big Five banks in Canada, as how we’re referred to. We serve a really diverse client base. Think of individuals saving for their first home to helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses. And we’re guided by a shared purpose as you mentioned, which is to help make our clients’ ambitions real. And for us, being purpose-driven means we strive to understand what matters most to our clients. Uh, banking is heavily regulated, but it’s also deeply personal, dealing with people’s financials. And so we have to be there for our clients, making sure we’re removing friction, making it easy to bank with us, but also making it a meaningful experience. So we focus on being radically simple, but genuinely caring.
[ 3m22s992ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, love it. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in then and want to start at the strategic level and talking about building on what you’re saying just now, building on um, moving from purpose to principles. And and your transformation began by acknowledging that the bank had lost some clarity in its purpose, and moving from that realization to a CEO-sponsored enterprise-wide initiative is a huge leap to say the least, right? How did you make the business case to reset the entire organization around a new purpose and what was the key to getting leadership to see it as a strategic imperative rather than just a marketing refresh?
[ 4m3s629ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, great question. I’m going to say it started about a decade ago. We realized that we had lost sight of our core purpose. Our brand felt pretty outdated. Our infrastructure wasn’t keeping up, and when we looked at our client experience, we were actually lagging our peers, the other four big banks. And so, everything felt a bit fragmented and we knew that wasn’t going to be sustainable to drive growth. And so, you mentioned our CEO, he truly was the champion and the catalyst. And he set a bold new ambition and wanted to transform our organization into what we call a modern relationship-oriented bank. And that’s a big shift not only in strategy, but in how we operate day-to-day. And that started with grounding ourselves in why we exist. And that’s that purpose of making our clients’ ambitions real. And so, he rallied the senior leadership team around that and started to act. It did start with a brand refresh, but it also involved investing heavily in both front-end and back-end infrastructure. We had to evolve our our CX listen, learn and act operating model to make sure that we understood what our clients were telling us to be able to help truly bring this purpose to life. I think one of the big game-changers for us in rallying the organization around this was implementing our CX Index. And tying this to variable compensation for every single employee from front line right up to the CEO. And that I think rallying and the rebranding and the operational maturity, all of that together is really what helped drive the transformation, the meaningful change and the strong results we’re seeing now.
[ 5m46s701ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I do want to get to the tying it to compensation in a little bit, we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But I think to to start, you know, I also think it’s really powerful when, I mean this stuff has to start with leadership and leadership has to lead by example as well. And so I think it’s always it’s always great when things go beyond just words on a wall, right? So, um, you know, your the the purpose uh got translated into three experience principles. Always professional, radically simple and genuinely caring. As I said, you know, sometimes these just become a poster on a wall and people kind of, you know, walk by and read or maybe roll their eyes or something like that. But, you know, to meaningfully embed these into the operational DNA of the bank is another is is a whole other thing. So, you know, how how did this work and how how have they become something that act as a decision filter for everything from product development to call center scripts? [ 6m45s492ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yep, another great question. You’re right, we did have to weave this into everything we do. So think people process tech. It all needed to be synergistic in order to support this. Um, one of the first things we did was we built CX right into our enterprise delivery framework. What that means is day one, for every new client-facing project, CX gets involved. And so we’re there to help influence and shape the design, leveraging that outside in view of the client to be able to help inform the right experiences, the right journeys, the right products. Um, and we made it a requirement for funding. It’s a formal gate. And so that builds that consistency and that accountability right into the process. And making sure we’re keeping the client at the center of all of our strategic decisions. We also embedded these principles within our CX index that I talked about, which has about 20 metrics and we look across, of course, client experience or brand perception, but we also look deeper than that. And so when we’re looking at radically simple, we’ll measure ease of use, for example, or effort scores. We’ll look at our ability to reduce friction, right? That helps contribute or identify the impact we’re having on being radically simple. For genuinely caring, we’re looking across client sentiment and we’re interpreting, what are they, how are they feeling about us as a brand, as a product, as an organization? And then for always professional, service consistency is is key. Think across digital experience, contact centers, banking centers, but also being heavily regulated, we need to look at things like compliance and trust and so on. So we’re looking across all of that and baking that into our CX index that we’re measured on. So it’s pretty powerful.
[ 8m40s262ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, building building on that, building on the the leadership support, building on making those principles really operationalizing those those principles. Another key component is connecting the all the data, all the signals that you have and all of those touchpoints into action. So you mentioned the the listen, learn, act model. I mean there’s just an incredible volume of data, I would imagine in, you know, from call transcripts, NPS surveys, all all types of interactions. So that act part is often the the hardest part for any organization, right? So, can you walk us through a concrete example of how an insight discovered in Medallia, perhaps a recurring point of friction in call transcripts or or something like that, how that made its way through your governance model to become a tangible process change that improved the client experience?
[ 9m34s775ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, happy to. Let me start just by telling you how our listen, learn and act model actually evolved. So about four years ago, we actually partnered with Medallia to help understand our CX maturity. And from that, we knew where we were strong, we knew where there were gaps. And we actually built a enterprise strategy and roadmap specifically around our CX maturity to help evolve that and really amplify our ability to listen, our skills and experience in being able to interpret that, and then put it in an actionable way that then we could work with the different lines of business to act on it. And so we built a very robust client sentiment data ecosystem within Medallia. And as you you’ve talked about, having tons of data, we’re ingesting, you know, 20 million plus call transcripts a year, all of our complaints, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of surveys, digital interaction, experience, uh metrics. So it is a very robust data ecosystem. But how do you extract the so what out of that to act on? So an integral step for us was stitching systems together. And so we’ve built connectors between Medallia and our CRM tools, between Medallia and our data lakes. And that really unleashes the power of being able to take those insights and act on them in a dynamic way, whether it’s knowing which client outreach to prioritize first, whether it’s which leads to go after first, or even strategically, maybe where to suppress an offer because you’ve not earned the right to try to sell or offer something to a client because they’ve just recently had a poor experience, and it’s more important to take time to repair that relationship than it is time to try to cross-sell. So I think that’s what really brought our agility to be able to act is in taking this data, transforming it into an actionable way and then bringing it either to the front line or to our marketing partners or our digital partners to be able to to bring it to life.
[ 11m44s195ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, removing those those data silos are are so key to not only understanding the whole experience but also enabling all of the other, you know, technologies and and and opportunities.
[ 12m1s648ms ] Stephanie Lehata: So as our analysts were actually using the power of this infrastructure and so on, we noticed that there was a significant volume of complaints coming from younger clients, which was interesting. And so digging into that, we realized it was very nuanced. They were complaining about not having to have fee waivers and and so we were trying to understand what this was about. It ended up that when the youth were transitioning into student, once they turned 18, they were aging out from the youth account and we were automatically applying a fee. But many of these were students and they were like, well, aren’t you waiving this for students? Like I’m still a student, I’m going to Uni, like help me out folks, right? If you want to be the bank of choice for the rest of my life. And so obviously looking at client lifetime value, big picture, we actually worked together with our product partners, our tech teams and we actually developed a new product, which was the smart start account. And what it facilitated was that transition from youth to student at that age out of 18, but we facilitated it in such a way that we made it a seamless journey and a seamless experience and we eliminated the fee and built a lot of education into, here’s what you have now as a student versus when you were a youth. So we followed our human-centered design practice to be able to bring that to life. So my team does the detailed journey mapping, we put together a 360 view and we’re making sure that we’re building that being informed. So we’ll bring the front line teams to help inform the journey design and so on. And when we implemented that, we saw immediately complaints dropped 25%, but even more importantly, I would say, growth grew 40%. And so that is a really good like living example of the power of that entire listen, learn and act operating model.
[ 13m57s446ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, because I mean that that takes a nuanced understanding of a specific segment of an audience at a specific time in a client journey, right? So yeah, absolutely.
[ 14m14s365ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: So, you know, connecting all these dots, definitely, you know, a critical part of this, yet, you as you mentioned, you’re in a uh highly regulated industry, just in general, there’s a lot of sensitivity around data privacy and and things. So from a data governance and privacy perspective, you know, what considerations did you need to have as you, you know, stitched together data from all those different sources and, you know, making sure that you’re able to get the right insights and yet respect customer privacy, all those kind of things.
[ 14m45s265ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, you’re you’re bang on. We had to navigate, I’ll say both technical complexity and trust. So there was the regulatory side of things, but there’s also the buy-in across the enterprise. A lot of different teams believe they own the client or they own the client data, right? And so as we were trying to build this data ecosystem, we really had to bring to life how it would be used, why it would be used, the value that it would contribute. So, data fragmentation obviously and, you know, having disparate data in different systems. Bringing that together required that real surgical nuance of how do we harmonize the data? How do we make sure that it’s interpreted the right way and that it’s uniform and so on. So I would say that that was a technical hurdle, but one that we were able to overcome. From a system integration perspective, yeah, we had to build APIs and pipelines and so on, which, you know, is done every single day. But we wanted to make sure that we built it in a way that it was going to be self-sustaining and that it could be easily operationalized. So once the data and how you transform that data and explain its utility. So really getting crystal clear on what is the utility, what is the use case, what is the purpose, under which conditions would it be used? How would it be prioritized vis-a-vis other data sets and that? So, again, not insurmountable, but it was a lot of work. The most critical was absolutely the responsible data governance and client privacy. And we worked with our partners across the enterprise, following our enterprise risk assessment. So we had compliance, regulatory teams, legal, anti-money laundering teams, privacy, everybody at the table just to make sure that we were appropriately using the data and informing our clients where appropriate of as to how we were going to use that data, giving them the options to opt in and out, giving them consent opportunities and so on. So really it’s about building that practice of that thorough evaluation and and that that really led to the trust and in our ability to to bring this to life.
[ 16m53s532ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about um, the compensation part of the, you know, we touched on this briefly at the beginning, but um, you know, tying almost a quarter of variable compensation for 48,000 employees to an enterprise CX index is a a bold move, what’s just let’s say. Um, how did you design that index to be both fair and resistant to gaming the numbers as, you know, can happen in in some cases? Um, you know, ensuring that it drives genuine long-term improvements rather than just short-term fixes.
[ 17m24s427ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yep, you’re right. It was a team effort, it was an enterprise uh initiative. And every line of business is represented on that CX index. So you’ve got about 20 metrics. We include everything from NPS to market share, brand consideration, and of course, other external rankings and business performance. And we wanted to make sure fairness and accountability. So they’re meaningful, also achievable, but there’s some stretch built in as well. So that we’re not gaming it and that we’re just going to sandbag and and put in a number that we know is easily attainable by the third quarter, for example. So there’s definitely a stretch component. It goes directly to our board every year. We set new targets based on the macroeconomic environment, based on the conditions of each team. It gets approved at that level. So it it’s quite a quite a thorough and rigorous process. And we do revisit the targets, the weighting of the targets, every single year, because it it needs to remain relevant, but it needs to adapt as well to any of the changing conditions. And, of course, it’s aligned with all of our strategic objectives, which fundamentally is is founded in our purpose, which is about making our clients’ ambitions real. So, yes, we need to be a strong bank, you know, in terms of our performance, but we’re it really does all it’s all about the client.
[ 18m49s852ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and and speaking of the the performance, you’ve definitely reported some impressive outcomes. So 2.3 billion in year-over-year revenue growth, a massive reduction in client churn. So, you know, no no small no small feats there. When you’re in the boardroom, how do you defend the attribution of those financial gains directly to your CX initiatives, maybe separating them from things like market conditions and and other kind of business drivers?
[ 19m18s172ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, you’re right. Attribution is challenging, especially in a large, multifaceted organization. And it’s tough to isolate the performance of one thing and normalize for all other conditions, right? Like I think that’s imperfect in in any industry and any organization. But we do follow a data-driven approach as best as we can when we’re making the connections between CX initiatives, CX improvements and and business outcomes. One of the first things we do is we do manage near real-time dashboards. And we dive deep into the analytics and can see those emerging trends, those emerging patterns. And we can compare pre and post performance. So we do a lot of benchmarking beforehand, executing something, measuring post. And so we’ll work with our analytics team. In fact, I fund an analyst, a data scientist within our analytics team. They’re dedicated to CX, but I thought it was really critical that we fund them but have them sit in the area where they have access to all of the enterprise data. It also builds the credibility of the numbers right into it. Let’s face it. Not every organization is going to look at a CX team and and think of us as the numbers people or the right? And so having an analyst, I now partner with them. They poke holes, they’ll challenge me. They’ll say you can’t do it that way. And so we’ve built in an enhanced rigor simply by having that analyst there. We’ve also built a financial linkage model. So we’ve actually modeled out the value of a promoter versus a detractor versus a passive. And then we’ve got some sensitivity models. In fact, at Medallia, later tomorrow, there is a session that my team member is going to be presenting on quantifying the ROI of NPS. And so uh, I’d encourage anybody who can to uh to catch that. But that that is a really great way to be able to truly connect the dots on the value of NPS and the value of different CX initiatives. One of the other things we do is I’ll also do retrospective analysis and we’ll we’ll test our hypotheses with past campaign results or past performance results to try to see what the implication would have been. And so I think it’s the combination of all of those things that demonstrates that rigor that improves the sense of credibility and the buy-in, um, and the yeah, just the buy-in overall in the numbers.
[ 21m52s892ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Stephanie, thanks so much for for joining today. Lots of great uh, lots of great things to share here and certainly an inspirational case study. Couple questions uh quickly before we wrap up here. What has been a highlight of Medallia Experience for you so far?
[ 22m9s702ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the um, Executive Leadership Forum and it was incredible to be able to sit next to and listen to other heads of CX. And it’s it’s so it’s refreshing to know we share the same challenges and so on and we were really able to share a lot of ideas and I got so much learning out of it. But I’m excited to learn more about Medallia’s Gen AI capabilities that we just heard from the keynote this morning. And I can’t wait to dig in and figure out how I’m going to operationalize them to help create more value.
[ 22m43s862ms ] Greg Kihlstrom: Love it. Love it. Love it. Um, and last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[ 22m51s332ms ] Stephanie Lehata: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think we’re all lifelong learners, aren’t we? It’s about adapting and evolving. I love that jumping between generalist and specialist, sometimes doing deep dives and some, you know, but connecting the dots at that 10,000 foot view to figure out how best to to bring things to life in an organization. But I follow microlearning. As I get older, our schedules are always so busy to try to dive deep into a book or read a book from beginning to end is probably not realistic for me anyway. And so microlearning, I love listening to short podcasts, reading quick bursts of ideas. But then I’d say sharing with people, just like at the leadership forum yesterday. Learning from others really helps me to to stay relevant and curious and excited and agile.
