CX Tech, Personalisation, and Business Impact: Inside Judy Bloch’s Award-Winning Approach
Episode #904 Show Notes:
Clare
Welcome to this special edition of the Inspiring Women in CX podcast! A series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in customer experience and technology.
This season, we’re spotlighting the winners of the Inspiring Women in CX Awards 2025 – trailblazing women transforming customer and employee experience around the globe. Spanning industries, regions, and roles, their stories are powerful proof that when women lead, transformational change happens. You’ll hear firsthand as they share their journeys, insights, and vision for the future of CX.
I’m your host, Clare Muscutt, and today we’re celebrating our Women in CX Tech Award winner and her work driving impactful CX strategies that connect technology, customer insight, and measurable business value.
With a background in process improvement and CX leadership, she’s known for delivering measurable, industry-recognised results.
Today, as VP, Industry Executive Advisor at Medallia, she helps global financial services brands grow and evolve their CX programmes.
Allow me to introduce you to today’s inspiring guest, Judy Bloch!
Clare
Hey Judy!
Judy
Hi Clare, good morning, good afternoon.
Clare
Yeah, so it's a good evening for me, actually. We're on different sides of the Atlantic.
Judy
Good evening.
Clare
But welcome to the Inspiring Women in CX Award winners podcast for 2025. And first, a huge congratulations, Judy. I'm going to start by asking you how did it feel when your name was announced as the winner of the 2025 Women in CX Tech Award?
Judy
Well, I was thrilled, of course, a little bit shocked maybe, but certainly honoured. I was actually travelling for work at the time, and I was preparing to go speak at a conference… I was checking my email and knew the announcements were due. But gosh, I'd been looking at all the amazing women and their accomplishments that were finalists, and there's just such incredible talent that was being recognised. I was obviously looking as I was heading into the conference and saw the great news. I'll tell you, it made it a little bit hard to focus on my talk that day. I felt like I was on cloud nine. I was just so thrilled and honoured.
Clare
It was a really standout set of entries this year, so yes, huge congratulations for coming out on top! The judges really said that your background in engineering stood out, so can you tell us a little bit more about the leap you made from there into CX and what you've carried forward from the process improvement world that's really shaped your approach to CX today?
Judy
Yeah, absolutely. So I have an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering, actually, and my early career was spent doing a lot of Six Sigma process improvement work – that kind of structured problem solving to deliver operations excellence. Early on in my career, I had an opportunity to support a merger, and we were doing a lot of process mapping and having conversations about how to combine the two companies, should we adopt this process or this process.
And through that work, the process maps became journey maps. And we were asked to evaluate not only from an operational perspective, but through a customer lens as well. And for me, Clare, that was sort of it. And the rest of my career, I really focused on customer experience. I loved the ability to deliver meaningful results for the business. Yes, of course, quantifiable impact, right? And knowing we're driving efficiencies, taking costs out, improving revenue, but while doing it for the customer to help improve their experiences was…you know, it sort of became my passion area.
Clare
Love it! So, can you share a little bit about your current role and the skills and behaviours you believe are most important for CX leaders in technology-driven spaces?
Judy
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm currently at Medallia. I spent many years as a CX leader client-side, working primarily in the financial area, for financial institutions, working for a few different banks. I've been at global banks and regional financial institutions as well. But about five years ago, coming up on my five-year anniversary here at Medallia, I moved into advisory services on the vendor side. Which I love, I love being able to work with global clients and helping them evolve their practices. I currently serve as the Vice President Industry Advisor for financial services and insurance, and I love getting to work with all of our various global brands, talking about what “great” looks like, and how to use technology to deliver those business results we were talking about. So that's my current role. I have a lot of fun doing a lot of different thought leadership events, etc, including working with you all a little bit!
So, skills and behaviours that I think are necessary for CX leaders – I think above and beyond, I would say the ability to influence. So often in our roles, we don't necessarily own the ability to make all the changes, drive different policies, procedures, etc. We have to lean into that ability to influence and help create those win-win stories for the business to evolve and advance. I think that'd probably be at the top of my list. But also what goes with that, I don't know, executive presence, right? I would think about organisational agility and structural problem solving – understand the business challenges and how we can go about resolving those and making a measurable impact.
Clare
Do you think working in a tech-driven space makes any difference to that? I suppose, especially as a woman, where we're less of the population when it comes to tech companies?
Judy
Yeah, it's a fair question. I do think the storytelling ability to influence is still super, super relevant. Of course, I think we need to have our examples together and build our business case, and those core fundamentals, I think, still certainly carry on in technology. Obviously, if you're working in the tech space, we need to clearly understand how the technology interacts. But I think that special sauce comes in connecting technology to business results. I think, you know, as women, we're pretty good at storytelling, right? And I feel like certainly men are too. But I feel like we have maybe a little more experience in that area. We do a lot of storytelling and can lean into that strength.
Clare
Yeah, for me, it's that triangle of human-technology-business outcome that is becoming so critical, particularly right now, when so much of experience is being driven by multiple platforms, if I'm completely honest, in the digital space. So, how we can actually bring those three together into a bit more of a Venn diagram rather than different silos, I think is super important. And the judge…
Judy
Absolutely. And we're seeing the client, – I'm sorry, I was just going to add on.
Clare
No, no, carry on!
Judy
We're seeing client expectations really grow in that area too, where they're expecting all three to work together, not in silos. Technology has to work for the customer's needs, right? To help them accomplish whatever it is that they're doing.
Clare
Absolutely. And I've got a little quote here, it's a lovely one. The judges said that you “exemplify CX technology leadership at its most strategic and human and that your work bridges innovation and empathy.” What a great compliment. So how do you personally find and maintain that balance?
Judy
Of course, it’s an incredible compliment. I felt so honoured and validated in my approach, reading the judges' comments there, so it feels amazing, right? To have that recognised by the judges. I really do try throughout my work to bring balance to both the strategic purpose, strategic focus, and that human empathy. I really believe that ultimately maintaining that sort of duality, that balance, is indeed the definition of modern CX leadership.
So I really look to bridge that innovation and empathy in a couple of different areas. I think, as we were just alluding to, it starts with the human first. It's not code first or technology or platform first, but I really think we need to start all the conversations in the customer experience management space with understanding the journey that our clients are on and how our employees support. Something we talk about at the bank a lot of courses, for example, your client doesn't…they're not coming to the bank wanting a mortgage. It's not the mortgage they're after. They want to buy a house, a home. They want to maybe move to a different location, or move across the country or to a different city, or whatever it might be. But there's a very human purpose behind that. The mortgage is just the vehicle for how they get that done. So I think it's really important to keep that in mind, grounding on what's our client trying to accomplish? How do we help make that easy for them? For me, it starts there, right? And then I think there's also a really significant component in leveraging that EX-CX connectivity and really activating your employees to help deliver those experiences.
Clare
Yeah, I think that is an important distinction, particularly from a design point of view. I'm a designer, so I come from that design aspect, but quite often organisations are really focusing on the functional needs, but there are this set of emotional needs. I think that you gave a really great example there - they need a mortgage, but the reason that they're trying to do that is often the bigger picture and how we can understand the needs behind the practical needs to design experiences, marketing campaigns, really fully integrated experiences that meet both sets of needs are often the most successful from an experiential point of view.
Coming back to the point you were talking about earlier, I think this is why you stood out so strongly, like everything was always connected to a commercial outcome. The panel were particularly impressed by how you've connected CX investments directly to business value, and especially in industries like finance. Being regulated, it's often quite difficult to deliver really groundbreaking work in that kind of space. Could you tell us more about that work and the difference it made for the organisations you've supported, please?
Judy
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where, for me, that background in industrial engineering and operations excellence sort of becomes a little bit of a superhero power for me. It's maybe my super strength, if you will.
Clare
Love that!
Judy
But I really do lean into that structured problem-solving and always want to make sure, whether I'm client-side, running my own programs in the past or as I'm consulting and advising with brands here at Medallia, I always want to make sure we understand why, right? Why are we doing this? What is the business challenge here? Is it about driving revenue? Is it about reducing cost? It can be both. But we're going to use a little bit of different tactics depending on the specifics of the problem we're solving.
So for me, it's sort of going back to the fundamentals of what's the problem? How do we define it? How do we know what the opportunity is? How are we going to measure success? And knowing that going into a rule for consulting engagement. And maybe an example I could give is that while I was at the bank, we had a strategy, as many financial institutions do, of course, to improve and deepen relationships with clients. We were measuring that as far as a number of accounts per household, right? Pretty common approach. And so, as the Head of Customer Experience, one of the programs I ran was our Voice of Customer survey program in addition to other listening techniques. And one thing we could control to contribute to this broader strategic initiative was simply asking our promoters: Do you anticipate future banking needs? If yes, we could automate workflow, make sure that we're following up on that lead and helping the client bring that into reality. Get that additional count in so we can quantify the business and that's just a small example of threading the needle and connecting what CX does to the broader business picture.
And I'm happy to share that technique worked incredibly well and we were able to really document and keep track of incremental accounts and revenue into the bank through this particular tactic and ultimately helped fund our whole technology investment and team. And it's sort of being able to articulate that kind of results that makes a big difference in CX leadership today.
Clare
Nice, I love that. I had the pleasure of reading your paper on personalisation and I'd just love to explore your perspective on that a little bit deeper. Can you tell us how you see technology unlocking more human and tailored experiences at scale?
Judy
Yeah, absolutely, so it was maybe last year, I think it was 2024, I did some work with Medallia Marketing Research Team on personalisation. There had been a big research study and effort around how clients perceive personalisation in various areas that they most receive personalisation in. And my work in that was collaborating to develop four different approaches, strategies, if you will, on how brands can deliver on this expectation of personalisation. And we came up with a few different approaches to do that, ranging from responsive, really programmatic, segmented, a little more traditional marketing, situational, which is typically employee-driven, and then, of course, individualised, which is really about one-to-one at scale.
This is about using technology to create those really curated, bespoke type of experiences in real time. And that's really where the technology and human needs in the moment come together to really work together and help make life easier for the customers. The goal, right? Anticipating what's next and bringing that experience... forward, ultimately to improve the relationship with the brand. And really, I think that's part of the future of where we're going with personalisation is not just the days of considering experience personalised just because maybe you included my name in an email or something like that's not it anymore. It's really about in depth at scale individualised interactions that meet your needs, your unique needs in a specific way.
Clare
I'm really starting to see the interlinkages between personalisation, journey management, orchestration coming through in terms of strategic direction. And I'd say the most advanced organisations have these well-established design functions, and ops design functions are really leading the way on that. So looking ahead, where do think CX technology is heading next? What's your thoughts on that?
Judy
So I think this is exactly it. I think it's about creating these individualised curated experiences. I do think the future of CX is more and more about experience design to your point. And I think we'll see an emphasis there. Of course, we couldn't get through a technology and CX conversation without talking about AI. And so obviously that's going to play a big role in our future. I know that certainly anywhere you look or in any prediction, we'll say for next year is going to talk about that having an increased importance. I think CX leaders and professionals are certainly starting to use AI today. We know that that's true for a majority of practitioners, but often it's been somewhat focused on speeding up analysis, research, refining presentations.
Clare
Automation.
Judy
Those are all important. And we want to start using AI to help us drive those proactive experiences.
Clare
So we're almost at the end now, and with this being the Inspiring Women in CX Award Winners podcast, I just wondered if you could share who's inspired you personally, and that can be from the CX community or beyond it. Is there anyone who's particularly influenced your journey?
Judy
Yeah, absolutely. This is the easiest question yet, Clare. I definitely am going to go with Michelle Brigman. She is an amazing example of when a boss turns into a career mentor and that relationship grows into a lasting friendship. Michelle actually nominated me for this award. And I'm so incredibly appreciative of her taking the time and energy to pull that together. She reached out to other peers, clients, colleagues of mine to get the testimonials that she included to help tell my story. And she's had just such a huge influence on my career and helping me to push forward and do new things. I just really appreciate her support, her help, and obviously her taking the time to nominate me for this incredible recognition.
Clare
We love Michelle at Women in CX. She's a really brilliant example of women who supports other women. So nice, I'm sure she'll appreciate the shout-out as well. So finally, what advice would you give to aspiring women leaders who want to make their mark in CX technology?
Judy
Yeah, I think that if I had one piece of advice, it would probably be to not maybe limit yourself to thinking about your role as a CX leader, but truly as a business leader, right? Really leaning into speaking that strategic language, understanding the business and financial acumen. How do decisions get made at your organisation? And really deeply understanding what influences and drives that. Being able to articulate and know the three to five year strategic plan for your organisation and know how your work as a CX leader leans into that. But I think a shift happens in our brains when we think about ourselves as business leaders and don't necessarily box ourselves in, right?
Clare
100% agree, what brilliant advice. So thank you so much for today, Judy.
Judy
Well, it was great to be here.
Clare
We really appreciate you taking the time to share a bit more about your story and how you've got where you are. And clearly, you know, an absolutely exceptional CX leader whose commercial acumen, which you shared a lot in terms of how you do it today, has
been a standout reason for your success. So yeah, really appreciate you. Congratulations again. And yeah, hope to see you entering again next year.
Judy
Amazing. I look forward to it. I would love to do another collaboration in the near future. I hope we get to work together again. And thanks again so much. It truly is such an honour to be recognised with the other incredible women that you all support. And it's such a great community and program that you all have built. I just love the work you're doing.
Clare
Take care, bye for now!
Judy
You too. Talk later. Bye-bye.
Clare
Thanks for listening to the Inspiring Women in CX Award Winners podcast with me, Clare Muscutt.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please leave us a review, share your thoughts, or pass it along to your network – it really helps us grow and amplify the voices of women working in CX and technology.
And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to like and subscribe. The bigger our community, the greater the impact we can make together!
That’s all for now – see you next time!
