Jul 17, 2025
Episode 251: In 2018, Dell set out to do something big: turn customer feedback into a system that could not only provide insights, but help set priorities and run the business.
They had the data. They had the intent. But they made a compromise that many organizations settle on: Rather than enforce one unified approach to customer feedback, they allowed each team to build its own. While this helped with initial adoption and change management, it also led to fragmentation—multiple tools, different methods, no shared truth. And it got worse over time. Real progress ultimately would require centralizing what had become scattered.
When Dell’s Marc Stein appeared on this podcast in 2018 (episode 129), the company had just completed its EMC merger and launched a chief customer office. The ambition: one integrated Net Promoter System to tie sentiment to economics and put the customer at the center of every decision. But good intentions ran into a harsh reality: Every function was listening to customers, but no one was hearing the same thing.
In this episode, Mike Valanzola, Dell’s Senior Director of Voice of Customer and NPS Operations, picks up the story. He explains how misaligned tools, siloed ownership, and governance gaps made customer feedback hard to act on. His team didn’t want to tear down what existed. Instead, they brought it together. Through consolidation, centralization, shared standards, and stronger governance, they transformed scattered signals into an enterprise-wide system of action.
The turning point came with the Customer Experience
Roadmap and Accreditation.
The CXRA gave Dell a framework to drive internal accountability and
rebuild trust in the system. As Mike describes, cross-functional
teams now meet weekly to act on shared signals. Tomorrow's goal?
Make every employee a promoter and make every signal
actionable.
Guest: Mike Valanzola, Senior Director, Voice of Customer and NPS Operations, Dell Technologies
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
Give us feedback: Customer Confidential Podcast Feedback
Send us a note: Contact Rob
Time-Stamped Topics
00:01 - Marc Stein’s 2018
ambition: a unified CX system
03:50 - Why integration faltered: fragmentation, politics, data
overload
06:20 - Mike’s mission: centralize tools,
enforce governance
10:00 - Transforming custom systems to create shared
accountability
13:30 - Early delivery surprises and sentiment gaps
17:10 - Predictive models and operational fixes
21:00 - How Dell built trust in the new NPS engine
27:45 - Weekly action meetings: turning listening into doing
35:30 - Why CXRA certification mattered, internally and
externally
40:00 - Reflections on past company decisions
Notable Quotes
- “ We have a robust partner community that allows us to expand our scale in terms of the customers that we can touch. Each and every one of those folks has some things that are important for us to hear.” [8:00]
- ”We do—and did—as a company, listen regularly, but we didn't always hear. The reason for that came down to every function across the company, ultimately doing their own listening programs, using their own application, governing how they listened, controlling what they got back, and not sharing it.” [18:00]
- ”We had been really in a run-the-business function, really focused on NPS management, really focused on owning that measurement for the company. And now, I was proposing a large-scale, end-to-end corporate transformation that was going to require my own team to think about how we operate, and effectively operate differently.” [28:00]
Additional Resources
- Hear our 2018 podcast with Marc Stein on Dell’s original CX ambition, Bringing Net Promoter to Scale
- Learn more about Bain’s MyCX Roadmap & Accreditation