On February 19, UWEBC members gathered to explore a fundamental shift in competitive advantage: sustainable growth no longer comes from product differentiation alone; it comes from customer experience.
Opening the session, Matthew Cone, UWEBC’s Customer Experience & Marketing Practice Director, framed the discussion around a defining reality of experience-led growth: the majority of enterprise value is created by expanding revenue within the existing customer base. In today’s market, service is not simply a support function, but a strategic lever for unlocking that value.
Michele Wingate, Director of Insurance Operations at American Family Insurance, shared how the organization repositioned its Customer Care Centers from a traditional cost center to a revenue-generating growth engine.
Grounded in an operational excellence framework, the transformation focused on standard work, enabling tools, aligned incentives, capability building, and disciplined performance management. By shifting to a service-to-solutions mindset, the organization elevated both efficiency and customer impact.
The results were measurable and immediate. Within the first six weeks, average handle time decreased by two minutes. A clear early indicator that operational rigor and growth strategy can reinforce one another rather than compete. The shift demonstrated that service excellence, when intentionally designed, drives both experience improvement and business performance.
Laura Martin, Director of Customer Care, and Tressa Knutson Bruggink, Director of Global Customer Engagement at Rockwell Automation, offered an enterprise-wide perspective on delivering strategic value through customer experience.
Rockwell aligned its customer care, customer success, and customer engagement teams to deliver a unified “One Rockwell” experience across every touchpoint. By integrating these foundational pillars, the organization ensured consistency in the moments that matter most to customers.
This intentional alignment enabled Rockwell to move beyond transactional interactions and toward creating “WOW” moments, experiences in which customers feel understood, supported, and valued at a personal level. The result is not only improved satisfaction, but stronger long-term relationships and sustained growth.
The session concluded with an interactive Strategic Value Blueprint exercise designed to help participants translate insight into measurable progress. Members developed focused 90-day action plans aimed at proving service-driven revenue within their own organizations. Using a structured framework, participants worked through diagnosing key friction points in their current customer experience, drafting a practical blueprint for change, selecting a focused experiment track, and committing to clear, measurable next steps. The emphasis was not on theory, but on immediate, applied action.
Following the exercise, small-group breakout discussions explored two critical themes: how to prove and communicate service-driven value, and how to align incentives to support shared growth. These conversations surfaced practical strategies for demonstrating measurable impact, even in environments without a direct product to sell, reinforcing the idea that service excellence can be both operationally sound and strategically transformative.
The message throughout the session was clear. Service is no longer a cost to manage. It is a growth engine to activate.
Organizations that operationalize this shift, aligning structure, incentives, and experience delivery, can unlock new revenue without acquiring a single new customer. Members left with practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear roadmap to begin proving the strategic value of service within their own organizations.
Thank you to our members and presenters for contributing to a thoughtful and energizing discussion.