CX Interview Series with Mary Drumond

By
João Alves
Last Updated:
June 25, 2025
Reading time:
22 minutes

We believe that the knowledge you need should find you. Knowing how hard that is to do for ourselves, we ventured out to try to help you with this challenge. When it comes to CX, that means bringing insights from the best and brightest CX professionals around the globe and bringing some of the knowledge they so diligently and admirably have built over the years.

On this episode, we welcome Mary Drumond, CMO of Worthix, who brings her experience as a top CX consultant as well as entrepreneur to debate aggressive (ROI-driven) vs. defensive (efficiency-driven) CX strategies. You won't want to miss this incredible discussion!

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Read the full transcript of the conversation below:

Chattermill: Hi, Mary. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Mary Drumond: I'm going to start off by saying thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure and always a joy to be able to come on and share a little bit of the knowledge that I've accumulated over the years. So I'm really happy to be here. And I hope that I can offer at least a little bit of insight into some of those struggles that people have been facing.

Chattermill: Thank you. So, let's start with the big question straight away. Let's not hold anything back. What does customer centricity mean to you? It's a loaded concept. It's very ambiguous. A lot of the times everyone has a different definition, and we find it fascinating to understand how the experts in the industry think about this concept.

Mary: Sure. It’s interesting that everybody kind of has their own interpretation, but I think that that's because the market is so different around the globe. And when you look at it, it's really hard to give a solid, single definition. You know, the customer experience, professional associations, they have created like some specific standards as to what customer experience and customer centricity is.

But I truly believe that the reason there is so much… not conflict, but so many different versions, so many different explanations as to what it is, is truly because it's a reflection of everyone's particular, specific needs and struggles and barriers that we go through in our specific industries.

So, for me, it means putting the customer first or literally in the center of everything that you do, but that has several nuances. You know, you can look at it as a whole, like you can look at the whole customer journey from beginning to end or the loop of it because it never does really end. You can look at the experiences at a specific moment, but I don't necessarily agree with that.

I feel that the experience is very strongly related to the overall perception. The customers have with them, any interactions with your brand. So, whether it's in pre-purchase or during the purchase throughout their lifespan, or even post-purchase, or once their direct relationship with you is done, there are still ways that you're interacting with that customer. And they're still perceiving the movement that your brand is putting out there. So, it really has to do with the perception, it has to do with the feelings that are created from how they see and interpret what you're putting out there, whether it's through your actions or through your message or through anything else.

Chattermill: Absolutely. It's something that never ends. Great, this kind of connects to the next question, which is the hardship of actually building this customer-centric culture, right? So, how does a company go about it - first building and then maintaining that culture, and hopefully scaling it throughout the years?

Mary: I am not an expert in creating or implementing customer experience programs in organizations. There are close friends of mine who are. I would strongly recommend looking into material and blog and the books of Annette Franz who runs a company called CX Journey. She has worked for 20 years in this industry. And she has it all figured out. So, you know, right there, that's my number one suggestion, go check it out. I've got a certain attachment towards her stuff because she is able to look at things not only from the angle of customer experience, but employee experience as well, which is all part, it composes the entire experience. If you think about it, employees are also somewhat customers of an organization, right? So, including that variable in there, but I would say that one of the first steps that an organization has to do is understand and map out their customer journey. Ian Golding who's based in the UK is a brilliant consultant who is really well known for building customer journey maps inside organizations, he's got a book called Customer What? That book is a blueprint to creating and mapping out your customer's journey. And that is probably the starting point for me.

It's as an organization, getting together to understand everything your customer goes through from pre-purchase all the way into that post-purchase stage when their interactions with you supposedly end and taking that path of empathy where you're truly walking in your customer's shoes, but not only from an inside-out perspective.

The truth is that nobody has a better understanding of their journey than the customer itself. So, bringing the customer in and including the customer in that journey mapping is a really, really important step. So, I would suggest that when mapping out your customer journey, you do your best to create a rough draft, but then bring your customer in whether it's through a qualitative interview, where you sit down and ask them one-on-one questions, or if you don't have the option of bringing your customer in, then sending them a survey to try to understand what their pains are in each stage and each interaction in each touchpoint, because lots of times, as a company, we've got our own biases. We've created those experiences. We've created those touchpoints, and we think we're doing really well.

If you're a global company, you're going to have to do separate journey maps for each separate geography, each separate culture, because this changes the way the customer interacts with.

That leads me to step two, which is designing your personas. You have to have your personas mapped out to build your journey. You might want to do those two steps together, build your personas, understand who your customer is, what their pains are, what their goals are. Most importantly, what their needs are because as an organization, if you want to sell to a customer, then you have to be able to provide the solution to their need. Any purchase journey starts with that need.

Once you've designed the journey and understood all of those pains, then that's a perfect moment to bring in either a really good consultant. Or if you don't have that option in your organization, do a lot of studying into different ways to design your customer's time, and creating experiences that cause a positive, emotional connection with whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's selling a product or providing them with a service. In customer experience that we can get into in a moment, but understanding what sort of services you provide to your customer.

Joe Pine is another author out there and he wrote a book like 20 some years ago now, called The Experience Economy. And this was one of the first things that introduced the concept of customer experience.

Chattermill: What are the issues when building and maintaining a customer centric culture internally? Like within the organization itself or externally via the customers themselves, like getting the necessary insights to build that customer centric culture the right way.

Mary: I think that there are two things that you have to take into consideration. You will always have internal obstacles and being CX means that you're going to have to constantly be champion of the customer inside your organization. That's what your job is. Right. And if you are, you have that job in the first place, it's because at some moment the company understood the importance of having someone in that role.

You have to lean into it. I don't think that in this day and age companies are going to be like, “Oh, let's shut down our customer experience”. Cause that's not important anymore. I don't really think that's the case. So, if you've been given a customer experience role inside an organization and the company knows that you're important, that doesn't mean you're not going to struggle. That doesn't mean you're not going to have to fight for it.

Customer experience professionals, we're fighting so hard to just get the customer to be noticed by the organization. I believe that when we are conducting the right type of voice of customer programs, bringing in the right type of feedback directly from our customer's mouth, we can arm ourselves with the tools necessary in order to fight for projects and programs that make our customers happy. What we can't do any longer is have voice of customer surveys and programs that all they do is get empty information that we already have, or simply present the organization with an empty number. I consider that to be a big mistake.

There are a lot of organizations out there that are guilty of their entire customer experience program boiling down to a number and they end up disregarding the most important moment of the voice of customer survey, which is the feedback itself.

Chattermill: I love the point of feedback as a gift. I think there isn't a better way to describe it, right? So being able to not only be respectful of time, but in that least amount of time extract the most amount of insight is really, really important.

Mary: And then once you have that insight, make sure you use it. I mean, there's nothing more frustrating than giving feedback and then not having to experience change at all. You know, so, and it is wasteful. It's not good for anybody because it's expensive to conduct surveys. It's not cheap. And then you got all that information and you're absolutely sitting on it. But you can't really find anything that's actionable enough to be able to scale up to leadership, to be able to build some sort of strategy on then, then you just wasted all of that feedback. So be intentional about the feedback that you're collecting. Make sure that when you ask customers for their feedback, whether it's in the middle of the transaction, whether it's post-transaction, whether it's in the touchpoints along the way that you're concise, you're precise, you're respectful of their time. And once you collect that insight, make sure you're going to do something about it and you're going to use it to build a better strategy for your customers.

Chattermill: Definitely, I think that's tremendous insight for our audience. Thank you so much, Mary.

Mary: I’m really fascinated with cognitive behavior, consumer behavior. Anything that has to do with the psychological aspect of marketing is fascinating to me. So, a book that I find absolutely amazing is Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely, who is a professor of psychology, wrote an amazing book about understanding customer behavior or human behavior and how that applies to the everyday life of consumers in that marketing angle. And then another book is called Drive by Daniel H Pink. I love Dan Pink. I've seen him speak on multiple occasions. Another book is Hooked.

In conclusion, in the same way that when we produce content, we have to meet customers where they are, we also have to understand how quickly the market changes. If there's anything that 2020 has taught us is that change can happen a lot more quickly than we expect. Keeping your eye on the future and not in the past, and you can do that when collecting feedback as well. If you're able to find a way to listen to the customer on a consistent basis, being respectful of their time, you need to find a way to have your finger on the pulse and constantly be aware of the changes that are happening in their lives because customers see change coming before the company does. Our job is to provide the companies that we work for with insight of where the customer is going and not on where they've been because, in the market we live in today, the past doesn't matter, it's all about the present and the future.