What if the biggest obstacle to delivering a world-class customer experience isn’t your technology or your strategy, but the very way your teams are structured and enabled to work?
Agility requires more than just rapid iteration; it demands a deep understanding of the human elements within our systems. It’s about creating an internal environment that can fluidly adapt to—and even anticipate—the needs of the external customer.
Today, we’re going to talk about the often-overlooked foundation of successful business transformation: the human experience. We’ll explore why the employee experience isn’t just an HR initiative but a direct driver of customer outcomes, and how designing systems around the way people actually think—not just how we’re organized on a chart—is critical. We’ll also get into the practical application of a human-centered lens to business processes and why so many large-scale changes fail when they don’t properly connect the dots between people, processes, and technology.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Jennifer Jones, Chief Strategy & Experience Officer at RGP.
About Jennifer Jones
Jennifer Jones is Chief Strategy & Experience Officer at RGP, a global professional services firm, where she leads enterprise strategy and experience end-to-end—aligning go-to-market, customer and employee experience, and operating models to accelerate growth and retention. She is responsible for translating strategy into execution across the business, partnering across sales, delivery, finance, technology, HR, and talent to remove friction, strengthen adoption, and drive measurable outcomes.
Jennifer also leads global marketing and communications, shaping RGP’s market voice, positioning, and demand generation engine. Previously, she served as Chief Marketing Officer, where she unified the company’s brand, go-to-market strategy, and growth programs to support its evolution into a differentiated, execution-focused consulting firm.
With more than 28 years of experience, Jennifer is known for closing the gap between vision and execution. She has led large-scale transformations across brand, customer and employee experience, service design, and AI-enabled operating models—helping Fortune 500 organizations modernize in ways that drive adoption, unlock value, and deliver sustained impact. Her work is grounded in human-centered design, ensuring transformation is not only strategic, but people-focused, actionable and enduring.
Jennifer Jones on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifergardnerjones/
Resources
RGP: https://rgp.com/
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Transcript
Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What if the biggest obstacle to delivering a world-class customer experience isn’t your technology or your strategy, but the very way your teams are structured and enabled to work? Agility requires more than just rapid iteration. It demands a deep understanding of the human elements within your systems. It’s about creating an internal environment that can fluidly adapt to and even anticipate the needs of the external customer.
Today we’re going to talk about the often overlooked foundation of successful business transformation: the human experience. We’re going to explore why the employee experience isn’t just an HR initiative, but a direct driver of customer outcomes, and how designing systems around the way people actually think, not just how we’re organized on a chart, is critical. We’ll also get into the practical application of a human-centered lens to business processes and why so many large-scale changes fail when they don’t properly connect the dots between people, processes, and technology.
Greg Kihlström: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jennifer Jones, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at RGP. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Jones: Oh, I’m excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic. Definitely, um, top of mind for for me, many, many days. Um, before we dive in though, why don’t why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at RGP?
Jennifer Jones: Okay, great. Well, I formally CMO here, um, and recently kind of just expanded my role into Chief Strategy and Experience Officer, which actually makes sense coming from my background, you know, started in agencies, um, doing full-service advertising, creative director, and then moved into, um, founding and building a practice in human-centered design. So doing all of the front-end disciplines of research, strategy, content, design, and development for clients. And, um, you know, I think my my role here is just to really focus on the connection of, you know, I always like to call it the the why and the who to actually figure out the what and the how. And, you know, really bringing kind of full circle my career together in this role. So the advertising part, the digital transformation part, as well as the experience and strategy part of those things.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, love it. Well, yeah, let’s dive in here. And I want to start by talking about the, like I teased up in the intro, the strategic link between the employee experience as as well as the customer experience. And a lot of leaders still view employee experience and customer experience as as separate domains. How do you define the employee experience ecosystem and and, you know, what, you know, what what’s the connection and, you know, what’s the mechanism which those two are are tied?
Jennifer Jones: I mean, they’re two sides of the same coin in my opinion. I think, um, if you think about like the most beloved brands, brands that have just like excellent customer experience, it’s usually because they are have a good employee experience as well. And, you know, having done a lot of transformational type projects and applying it from a service design perspective, you know, you’re you’re not just looking at the end users, you’re looking at all of the constituents in the journey. So, you know, if you think about like a call center, for instance, and you think about like, oh, you know, people are are calling in and they’re having poor experiences, you know, like the call center person doesn’t know, like, you know, the information, they don’t know, you know, or and they’re not getting their questions answered. But then if you look at it from the call center side, it’s like maybe they don’t have tools that are actually giving them the information. You know, they don’t know the first five times somebody has called because it’s not in their call log that they’re seeing. And so often times a lot of those problems are interconnected. And I think like, you know, to be a brand that actually like competes from a customer experience standpoint, you got to compete from an employee experience standpoint. You need to, you know, create dynamics that are going to make people excited to be there, to build a culture that people like actually want to be a part of, and that’s going to come through in, you know, everything that a client touches, whether it be when they talk to somebody on the phone or when they go with a salesperson. I mean, all of those feelings are going to come through. And so I think it’s like critically important. And I think even just like literally, so that’s kind of like the experience side of things, but like I mentioned about that call center example, I mean, most tools, most digital things are so interconnected. And if like an employee can’t actually access the things they need, they’re not going to be able to actually service the journeys in the same way. So I think like, you it doesn’t ever start and stop. It’s one continuous journey.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and and for those, you know, CMOs listening, those marketing leaders listening, and and certainly you’ve you’ve played that role as well. Where does marketing’s responsibility begin and end in in all of this, you know, cuz it it’s it’s surely not a purely an HR or ops function, right? So, you know, what’s what’s the role of marketing in all of this?
Jennifer Jones: Well, I think, you know, I mean, they should be deeply connected. In fact, like we’re working right now, you know, and a lot of marketers do own sort of the intranet or the career site or the employee brand values or the employee brand value framework and, but I think again, to build a solid like successful company, it’s like you have to look at it from both sides. Like, why would people want to buy from you and why would people want to work for you? And I think unless those are both successful journeys, which are interconnected, then you’re not going to have a good brand. And, um, so, you know, from what we do at our organization, it’s really VOE and VOC, like truly understanding, you know, how our employees feel, think, hear, what our customers feel, think, hear, and then tying those insights into how we develop that brand that needs to be true on both sides of the coin.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. I I totally agree. And I mean, it it it makes so much sense. It’s it’s amazing maybe the organizations that either don’t haven’t grasped that or haven’t appeared to grasp. Again, cause intellectually, I don’t think it’s that that complex of a concept. But at the same time, it’s like you you you we’ve all been there. We’ve all seen the employee that’s like completely disengaged and that surely reflects on our experience and our perceptions of the brand, right? So it’s, you know, it’s it it it it’s always kind of shocking when brands don’t take that more seriously, right? So.
Jennifer Jones: It’s not rocket science. Yeah. I think too often maybe they don’t. Like I don’t think people, people, you know, it’s funny. I get asked this a lot, especially when I used to, you know, be more in the consulting side and sell directly to clients. And they would say, you know, what is experience? And I think we often kind of forget about that. And whether you’re talking about employee or customer, you know, I think people often go to it’s one specific thing. Like, oh, it’s a website or it’s a it’s a thing, right? Like it’s a thing. And or they go to like the visual aspects of of a brand. You know, it’s like. But experience is everything. It’s what you touch, feel, see, it’s how we talk, it’s the values we hold, how those values are actually like performed within company communication and the culture. And I, I I don’t I think even the smallest thing is so critical because it’s like, you know, those 20 small things, like maybe somebody having a bad interaction with somebody or maybe having a weird email or, you know, whatever it might be. Those small things add up and I think it really depends, it it defines whether somebody stays a loyal customer.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about, um, human-centered process design and and in practice. And so you’ve talked about designing systems around how people think, not just how companies are organized. You know, I think the classic example is like, I go back to websites that are organized like the org chart, not how a customer actually wants to interact or get a product or service, right? So maybe can you can you walk us through a practical example of, you know, applying that human-centered lens to redesign, you know, business process or or something like that?
Jennifer Jones: Yeah, I mean, well, even just you brought up a really good example. I think having worked in a lot of employee experience and customer experience transformations, when I did work on the client side of things, too often, like internets is a good example. I think, you know, they often are approached how we’re organized versus how does somebody actually think and search for a topic. And so we used to do a lot of taxonomy exercises, which were really focused on helping like HR and IT leaders and all the different leaders in an organization really think about like, people aren’t going to know what that word means. That might be how you’re organized or how you call items. But ultimately, you know, how does somebody actually go and search? And you have to think about globally, that’s going to be different. Those are going to be obviously different considerations. And so in those types of projects, we do a lot of user testing and a lot of, you know, basically research to truly understand, you know, how people actually like search and think about items, that way we can actually create those taxonomies. So that’s more of a tactical item. But kind of going back to your larger question, we do a lot of things from a service design perspective. I mean, which is in my opinion, kind of taking, you know, journey mapping and kind of the typical approach and, you know, really putting it on steroids. But it’s the idea that if you step back and I said this at the top of of the session, you know, I think the biggest thing I’ve seen in my, you know, 28 years of doing this is that most organizations are like rush to the what and the how. So it’s like, you know, what do we need to do? What this this this problem I’m presented with, it’s it’s broken. So let’s go fix it. So how are we going to fix it? Oh, we’re going to go procure technology or we’re going to do this integration or whatever. Really forgetting about the why they’re doing those things or who they’re doing them for. And service design, in my opinion, is like when you talk about process transformation is probably the most human-centered way to focus that. It’s really thinking about it from all constituents point of view. So not just the end user, which obviously journey maps are not necessarily synonymous with just thinking about a net user, but, you know, I think a lot of times when people do those projects, they think, okay, let me just think about end users, which is critically important. But I think if you forget about the constituents that are serving the end users and the owners of those journeys, it kind of goes back to that call center example of like, the things that might be broken in that journey for the customer may never be fixed if you don’t actually understand the other side of the person servicing those different journeys. And so I think when you go through that process, it’s applying all the human-centered design principles and methodologies, you know, doing the testing, doing the ride-alongs is what I like to call them or day in the life of, you know, actually going, doing diary studies, um, doing focus groups, doing workshops and truly understanding like, how is somebody, so from an end user, you know, what are they trying to do? What are the tools, technologies, data, um, processes that they’re touching? And then from an internal employee experience standpoint, that, you know, who’s who is actually involved in servicing that journey? What are the tools they’re using? How are they getting data? Um, you know, how are they interacting? You know, ultimately, what can we learn from that? What’s working, what’s not working? And often times like a broken customer experience is a broken tool and employee journey that when somebody’s actually trying to do their work, they don’t have the right data points. They don’t have the right information to service the customer in the right way.
Greg Kihlström: Do you think some of the the reasons why, I mean, obviously every organization’s a little bit different, um, in in probably many ways, but, um, you know, I feel like a lot of the reasons why these things they get quote unquote solved but not really solved, I guess to to your to your point is I I feel like there’s such a not only there’s there’s a this time constraint of, okay, we’ve just got to solve it, so let’s just slap something on it. And that thing is usually a tool or technology or something. And as anyone that’s ever done process change has comes to realize, it’s the people and and the process part, um, that can often be more difficult. Like, is is it kind of just symptomatic of of that in in most cases or, you know, how how prevalent do you think that is?
Jennifer Jones: Um, I think it’s really prevalent. And I think it is a lot of what you said, but if you think about, and I think, um, it’s crazy that this stat really hasn’t changed in probably 20 years, but the fact that still transformations, digital transformation, 75 to 80 or 70 to 80% fail. And if you look at the reasons why, the ones that are actually catalogued, they’re all people problems. You know, lack of executive buy-in, lack of understanding the the the, you know, the change management and the aptitude of changing, bringing people along that journey, basically not understanding who you’re changing for, so the users involved. I mean, it’s all people problems. And I think that people that organizations, um, and people that are part of transformations to your point, often underestimate the people problem. They think like, we have this problem, so this technology can solve it or this thing can solve it. And I think maybe it can, but often times like if you ignore like the main thing and you don’t make that the main thing, then I think that technology is going to be a more powerful potential inhibitor of change. Meaning now you’ve just paid a lot of money and maybe you got this robust tool, but you still have the same problems persist. In fact, we worked with a Fortune 100, um, technology client and they were doing a finance transformation project. And they were, you know, really going through, um, a large sea change in finance transformation. And generally most of it was going okay or well. And they still had, you know, two constituents that were really struggling, you know, that were putting in all the help desk tickets, you know, like frustrated with the change. And so they were like, what are we doing wrong? You know, like, what is what is the problem here? And so they hired us just to look at the people-centered journey for these two constituents. And I think what we learned from that is that, um, the process that they had gone through and that and the systems and the tools that they had designed still ignored some of the really big issues that those particular, you know, like customers of this journey, um, were struggling with. And so as we then went through and sat with them and did workshops with these personas and said, okay, walk us through. I mean, it was like, it was a little bit like doy, you know, kind of thing. But, but the same turn of the coin, it was really, it was really evident that until you really sit in the chair of whoever that is, you’re not going to understand those little minutiae of like, so they fill out this form, they never got an email confirmation. You know, like things like that. So they were sort of like, well, did I do the right thing? Like, you know, stuff like that. So it’s like, I feel like people like underestimate the the people involved and overestimate the technology and data to support the issue.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and and so for the for those orgs that are successful, you know, the the admittedly low percent, but, you know, the those orgs that are successful and really have adopted a more human-centric design approach. Again, I’m sure, you know, details are are different from org to org, but, you know, what what are some of the themes or overall changes that occur in day-to-day operations to enable that more human-centric design?
Jennifer Jones: Well, I think, I think there’s two things. Um, I think they’re the muscle of of change and the people focus of change is important. And I think some organizations have done a good job of developing that and really understanding, you know, like, hey, I need to take a human-centered design approach. I still think there there’s a lot of people that go through the motions of that, but then when they get the data, they still don’t believe the truth of the data or they’re like, oh, you know, like there’s there’s a reason for that or there’s a reason for this. And it’s like, sure, of course. There’s there’s there’s the realities of everything. But I think like, you know, I think I think feedback and, um, the reality of like a user sitting down or a constituent sitting down and saying, hey, here are the things I I’m struggling with within this journey or within this particular problem is so valuable, you know, and it’s like, and and honestly if if we’re open to that change, I think we can we can really really improve our business just in general. Because it’s also it creates like a a muscle of um, authenticity and believability that people actually like want to hear the feedback and and make changes against it.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, yeah, and that that all goes to, you know, making the the transformation stick as well, right? Is you know, it’s it’s one thing to, well, yeah, I mean, let let’s talk a little bit about that. I mean, you mentioned the, you know, the 70 to 80% failure rate, you know, for those that are successful, you know, beyond just, hey, we’re done and, you know, we um, pop the champagne or whatever. And, you know, what are what are leading indicators that it’s actually working and going to hold as well, you know, as opposed to just a project being done, you know, are there, yeah.
Jennifer Jones: I think that the biggest leading indicator that your project won’t succeed long term is to think it’ll ever be done. I hate to say that. But I think I think that everyone does go into kind of transformation initiatives that it’s like, it’s it’s done. Like, hey, we’re going to hit this target date and it’s done and then we can stop spending money on this. But number one, digital is never done. Like it is a living, breathing thing. And I think especially when I used to do a lot of digital transformation, I think there’s kind of two unfortunate factors that most technology to get to the level of what they show you in a demo requires so much investment, both time, money, and implementation, that I don’t know that it’s ever really like evident in sort of the sales process. So that’s number one. And then number two, I guess really relating to number one is that I think often times people spend money and are like hopeful that like, you know, okay, cool. I’ll get I’ll get this awesome technology. I’m going to implement it. But then it’s like, oh, to do that, I would have had to buy these other three modules and then I would also have to do this and that’s going to take me another year and then I’m going to have to keep doing this. And so I think we underestimate like the level of just long-term capacity that these things take. Number one. And then number two, I think that the generally speaking, because we treat them like projects, we treat them like here’s the requirements and once we fix these requirements, there’s going to be no more problems. So I think it all comes back to number one, right? And I think that to be successful, it’s like think about this like a living, breathing thing. Be open to the fact that you’re going to need to go back to the well and continuing, you’re going to have to have continuous listening, you’re going to have to have continuous feedback, and this is going to have to have continuous probably like development, implementation hours that are constantly improving it versus it just being sort of living. That’s why also a lot of technology and organizations goes so stagnant because they they didn’t plan for, you know, like later, um, continued evolution of the of the of the stuff. I don’t know.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and I mean, you know, I I I do think there’s a there’s a cognitive load aspect to that too of the, you know, the continuous change and and improvement. But I mean, is that is that the mindset shift that is required to do, you know, because I completely agree with you. Like, I think once you start on that path, you’re never done. It’s not it’s not even just that there’s more problems to solve. There’s also new opportun- It’s like once you get to the top of the hill, you see things that you never saw before, right? So there’s new opportunities that you never thought were possible. So, like, what what’s the mindset shift to embrace, again, not only solving the the problems but also embracing the new opportunities that that organizations are going to need?
Jennifer Jones: Well, kind of just hitting on that and it made me think of this and I don’t know if this will like hit, but, you know, it’s like relationships, like could you imagine getting a relationship and assuming that that moment it’s never going to change? You know, you’re pretty much ready for disaster because people evolve, situations evolve, things happen outside of our, you know, realm of possibility. And I think that’s no different than companies, right? Like you go through decline, you go through growth, which obviously require different rigor, different approach, different go to market, um, you have different people, you have different use cases, you have different needs. And so it’s a little, it’s a wild to even think, but we all do it, including myself. Even when I’ve procured technology for my team, it’s like, we all, I think get into the mindset of like, okay, we’re going to get this done and it’ll be done. But it’s kind of wild to think like that because it’s like your company is is living and breathing. So it’s always going to evolve and the use cases are going to, even if nothing else changed.
Greg Kihlström: Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean I think not not to get too psychological, like I think we do all crave some kind of consistency in our lives, right? So it’s like, but uh, you know, let’s I mean, hey, this is The Agile Brand podcast. You know, I’ve I’ve I’ve I’ve come to terms with the fact that.
Jennifer Jones: That’s what you want. I think we just put it into definition, be agile, right? Yes.
Greg Kihlström: Right. Right. Exactly. Well, Jennifer, it’s been great talking with you, um, and thanks for sharing your your insights. Couple last questions as as we wrap up here. First one, you know, if we were having this interview a year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
Jennifer Jones: I would say and something that I think is going to become more in focus is the human aspect of AI. In fact, I plan to do kind of a primary research study on that, but I think that, you know, similar if you if you rewind back 20 years ago with um, experience technologies or early parts of digital transformation, people are struggling with AI in the same way. You know, their data still, you know, not great and the things that are the under technologies are still not well integrated. So all the things that help make that better for an organization still still struggle with what they did 20 years ago. And then I think you have the human aspect of that of like, you know, what does that mean for people’s careers and how we’re going to integrate with technology and how we’re going to make this work. And so I think that’s going to be an ongoing conversation and one to be explored for, you know, how do you have a change mindset in your company towards um, AI, but not just like, hey, adopt it, but like, how do we actually truly integrate it with people workers too?
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, love that. 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?
Jennifer Jones: Oh, that’s a great question. I would say what do I do to stay agile in my role? Well, I’m always learning. Um, I think the, I think the one thing that I love about the job that I chose, like just generally, whether I was, you know, in my past roles or now is that it’s always been, you know, human-centered design. And so I think with that, you’re always talking to people. And so, you know, hearing people’s feedback and opinion, even if it’s about like a project I’m working on, like for a company versus even about something that we’re doing here, you always learn something, you know, And I think like that can just be like the greatest ability for growth is just to hear kind of like, okay, okay, they did these things or this happened or whatever. And then how does that apply to other things that I’m doing that I can apply it to and like learn from. So I don’t know. I take, I think that is the coolest part of my job because it also helps me stay agile and stay like fresh because I have to constantly do research, constantly learn why things fail and then try to make them better. And so that helps me kind of apply that to other areas of the world.
