Nidhi Daga, SVP of Marketing, Growth, and Digital Experiences at JPMorgan Chase, explores how customer experience (CX) is becoming the key differentiator for businesses. She shares insights from her journey in engineering, product building, and marketing, highlighting the importance of empathy and curiosity. She also offers a roadmap for leveraging CX to align marketing, product, and customer success for sustained growth.

“I strongly believe CX is paramount for any company to be successful and it has gotten even more interesting because of customers working through omnichannel experiences. Now, you have to connect those experiences in online, in-person, and virtual settings while maintaining a common data layer.” – Nidhi Daga

Nidhi emphasizes the importance of digital-first strategies combined with empathy and personalization to foster meaningful customer relationships. She highlights the CMO’s role in driving customer experience innovation and leading the shift toward customer-first strategies. Embracing customer experience as a dynamic journey ensures lasting business success.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we have a very special guest and a very interesting conversation. We have Nidhi Daga, and Nidhi, you are the Executive Director, Marketing and Growth at JPMorgan in the Commercial Banking Digital Business Unit.

[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: Now, what’s interesting is that not only are you working for one of the world’s largest banks, but you also have a perspective that started in engineering. You’ve been in technology, sales, and marketing, and you understand product development.

[00:00:41] Steve MacDonald: So you’ve got a lot of background to bring to the party here. But on a personal side, what I’d love to highlight is that you are actually an adventure junkie. I’d say you’ve been skydiving this year and are working towards climbing Mount Everest next year. But here’s what I’d love to do: maybe you could just expand a little bit more on your professional background before we dig in.

[00:01:02] Nidhi Daga: For sure. And thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited to have this conversation. Quick disclaimer: this conversation represents my views and not those of my current or previous employers.

What’s my background? I’ve had a very non-traditional and non-linear career path. I’m an engineer who became a product builder, and then I fell in love with go-to-market and marketing.

[00:01:27] Nidhi Daga: I think empathy and curiosity have been the guiding torch throughout my career. I’m passionate about creating long-term value using technology. As you’ve seen, and we’ve talked about, I’ve worked at a three-person startup as well as at a 300,000-employee corporation like JPMorgan Chase.

I’ve enjoyed both settings, and we’ll talk more about how customer experience is crucial for every company, regardless of size. I’m also a two-time founder, so I’m curious and passionate about innovation. And I’m not scared of taking risks. So, that’s a little bit about me.

[00:02:05] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. You know, within that, you brought up the importance of customer experience. This podcast—this whole episode—is about, as a marketing executive, your point of view on how to be digital-first but human always, and how that plays into creating the right customer experience.

[00:02:23] Steve MacDonald: That’s where we want to start because you and I kind of geeked out on a McKinsey study that came out about a year ago. It talked about CX as actually the number one differentiator for businesses today.

With today’s rapid development, technology, and innovation, products and services aren’t long-term sustainable competitive advantages for companies—but CX is. That’s coming from a study of companies with long-term profitable growth.

[00:02:53] Steve MacDonald: So, I wanted to start by asking you: what’s Nidhi’s opinion on CX as the number one competitive advantage for businesses today?

[00:03:03] Nidhi Daga: I think I recall a stat from that McKinsey study we discussed: a 30 to 50 percent revenue increase and a 20 to 50 percent reduction in service costs. Right there—top line, bottom line—that’s your competitive advantage.

[00:03:31] Nidhi Daga: In my mind, CX is paramount. We don’t realize this, but we experience this kind of customer service and experience in our day-to-day activities.

I walked into a coffee shop this morning. I was greeted by my name. It’s a local coffee shop. Your order is remembered. You feel like you’re part of the family. I’m going to go back. You feel like you want to bring your friends. That’s CX—experience through community and personalized service.

[00:03:48] Nidhi Daga: We experience this throughout our daily lives. It’s just that we don’t realize how important it is. From a marketing perspective, CX has become even more interesting because now customers are engaging through omnichannel experiences.

[00:04:00] Nidhi Daga: I can order my coffee online and pick it up in the store. Companies now have to figure out how to connect those online, in-person, and virtual experiences with a common data layer. However, I strongly believe CX is paramount for any company to be successful.

[00:04:22] Steve MacDonald: I love how you connected CX to the experiences in our daily lives—our personal lives—because B2C has now set expectations that we, as B2B buyers, bring with us. For example, if you’re looking to add to your own MarTech stack, you’re a B2B buyer.

[00:04:38] Steve MacDonald: Our expectations of customer experience are now equal and on par with what it is in the B2C world. There are a number of different studies that have shown that as well. But there’s a different set of expectations for a B2B buyer, and that’s meeting a very high bar. How do we do that today?

[00:04:57] Steve MacDonald: How is that something that we need to keep top of mind and make sure that it’s always in what we’re planning?

[00:05:03] Nidhi Daga: Yeah, I think you bring up a great point, and that’s the challenge as well for marketers as we think about designing some of these CX digital-first, human-always experiences. I always say Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, even though they have created a convenient world for us in the B2C space, have set the bar high in B2B.

[00:05:22] Nidhi Daga: What is kind of fundamentally different in these two approaches is that B2B is complex. You have a complex sales cycle, multiple stakeholders, a user, a decision-maker, and influencers influencing decision-makers and users. In B2B, you almost have to think about how to design customer experience throughout this complex stakeholder network. And how do you flex it to create something more versatile, yet make it feel personalized for the end user? I believe data and generative AI can help us get there. It has gotten much easier than it has been in the past to do that. I’ve always been a glass-half-full person.

[00:06:10] Steve MacDonald: I wanna now lead this over to—you’re right, it’s much more complex. It’s much harder. In the world of B2C, you might be making an impulse purchase, and the experience starts right then. Whereas, in the B2B world, that experience starts with the first outreach—the first time a salesperson is in a conversation, the first time one of our campaigns reaches out, somebody downloads an eBook, whatever it is. But we tend to think of customer experience after the purchase.

[00:06:37] Steve MacDonald: When you and I talked before about the complete buyer’s journey, we discussed how we have to be thinking about what we’re designing. I was on with a CRO the other day, and he said, “I used to work at a company, and it was so hard to onboard, even the contract process with us.”

[00:06:54] Steve MacDonald: By the time we started work, the customer was frustrated. Think about all the non-traditional elements in the complexity of B2B. Within that complexity, what’s your definition of and the importance of this digital-first, human-always approach?

[00:07:13] Nidhi Daga: Yeah. It’s very simple in terms of definition. It’s almost like thinking about letting your customers choose their adventure. To your point, they may start their journey without us even knowing—without that first visit to the website. They may have seen an ad somewhere, or maybe you and I are talking, and I bring up a product I think is pretty cool. Your journey has already started.

[00:07:35] Nidhi Daga: So I always think about that. How do you design and define your customer experience adventure? I don’t know if you’ve read those children’s books—I have a 10-year-old who loves reading—and we’ve gotten into these books where you choose your adventure. I love them because my son always feels empowered when he reads them.

[00:07:56] Nidhi Daga: He says, “Mom, I want to understand what happens from here, and I get to decide which page I go to next, depending on the decisions and the choices I’m making.” He feels valued and empowered navigating through that book. I think that’s very similar to how customers operate these days. You and I may talk, and weeks later, when I’m on a similar topic, your conversation pops up, and I think, “Okay, maybe I need to explore further.” I might talk to another friend or peer in marketing.

[00:08:28] Nidhi Daga: So, I’m choosing my adventure instead of going directly to the website. As we define these CX strategies, it’s important to keep your user as the hero of the story. Your decision-makers and influencers are like side actors, and the setting is a real business-life scenario. It needs to be designed with a lot of passion and curation.

[00:08:51] Nidhi Daga: Every touchpoint needs to be thought through. As you mentioned, I’ve seen so many deals fall through just because a customer is frustrated by how long a contract has taken or how long implementation has taken, and it’s not well thought out. The end-to-end journey is critical when thinking about CX.

[00:09:09] Steve MacDonald: I love the analogy of “pick your adventure.” And not just because you’re a skydiver climbing Everest, but it brings such a rich visual to what you’re talking about here. That adventure, by the way, can include hurdles like contracts, IT, and procurement internally.

[00:09:32] Steve MacDonald: We have to think about that adventure. How do we make it easy to navigate? Not just the things that make people go, “Oh, wow, look how great our tech or services are,” but all the elements in that entire journey—turning it into an adventure. Such a great way to look at that.

[00:09:57] Nidhi Daga: I want to bring two quick points. I think a lot of people, customer-centric, always think about customers as internal and external. So I may be thinking about a hero who is my end kind of user and will be using the product. But some of those contracts are also generated internally.

[00:10:12] Nidhi Daga: And that’s a painful process at times for internal teams as well. So as a product builder, I always think about multiple dimensions of a problem and think through all those users, not just focusing on one. At times, I’ve seen that improving an internal experience can provide significant efficiency gains, helping you win the trust of many internal customers you need to drive your agenda forward.

[00:10:41] Nidhi Daga: So that’s one part that came to my mind. And then the second thing I want to mention is this: there’s such a common misnomer, and a lot of companies make this mistake. I have made it in one of my startups. People believe you build a product, and they will come. You don’t know who “they” are, and they never come. I can tell you that.

[00:11:00] Nidhi Daga: One of the lessons I’ve learned, and the reason why I find the go-to-market space so fascinating, is because even before you think of an idea, you need to think about how you’re going to get this technology—how you’re going to get this product—into the hands of your consumers. It has to be that comprehensive experience, not just building a customer-centric product.

[00:11:22] Steve MacDonald: You hit a sore spot in my heart because I’m a former B2B SaaS founder, and I fell into that trap too. Oh gosh, as soon as they understand what this is, they’re just like—the floodgates are going to open up. Oh, that bubble burst very quickly.

[00:11:35] Steve MacDonald: What I want to do is start talking about trust and establishing trust. There was a study I just found out about, published earlier this year, which said that in the world of B2B, 74% of buyers don’t trust the customer evidence we present to them. 74%! That’s amazing. So, take our case studies—take everything we do to prove the ROI, the value, and what we can do for them. They don’t believe it. They don’t trust it. But establishing trust and being that trusted advisor is so important. What’s your perspective on how we create and establish trust in this experience?

[00:12:26] Nidhi Daga: Yeah, that’s such an excellent question, and I don’t think I’ve fully figured it out. But I’ve been experimenting throughout my career and with complex problems I’ve attempted to solve. I think there are a few fundamental things. At the end of the day, you’re selling to a human being.

[00:12:42] Nidhi Daga: How do you continue to be authentic? I continuously struggle with that when I see a lot of buzzwords in marketing, and I’m like, “I’m checked out already.” Talk to me in simple eighth- or fifth-grade English, and I will respond. So, I think that authenticity in brand communication is super critical.

[00:13:02] Nidhi Daga: Another component of trust is that you cannot build it in one touch. That’s why customer experience is important. How do you deliver that curated, deliberate experience throughout all touchpoints? You have to be consistent. That ties back to brand loyalty—how your brand shows up and how customers experience it.

[00:13:26] Nidhi Daga: I believe it’s about speaking authentically, communicating consistently, and delivering results. You may not win their trust on the first or second interaction, but I’m a firm believer that if you keep demonstrating consistent behavior over time, they will start believing.

[00:13:46] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because I wanted your opinion on this. Lots of times, as B2B companies, we lead with big product development or product marketing backgrounds. We tend to be thought leaders about our babies—our technology or services. We can talk about them all day long.

[00:14:03] Steve MacDonald: That is not what sparks conversations, interest, authenticity, or trust. It’s hard because thought leadership means talking about how we relate to the challenges our buyers face. We need to be talking about their challenges, not just our solutions. And that’s hard to do.

[00:14:33] Nidhi Daga: I agree. It’s also hard to justify the ROI. When you are operating at a high level, it’s hard to connect it directly to business outcomes. The results come when you guide them from that high-level perspective down to tangible outcomes. That’s when sales happen or the funnel progresses.

[00:14:50] Nidhi Daga: But I completely agree—it’s a challenge we face as marketers. I flip the narrative by thinking about how we create a surround sound approach, going back to trust. What channels can we leverage?

[00:15:16] Nidhi Daga: I’m a big believer in influencer marketing. I read a stat that said 60% of people will believe and follow a brand if they trust the influencer who shares it. That’s the power of nano-influencers. Their recommendations feel personal, sticking with people more than something they read online from someone they don’t know or trust.

[00:15:36] Nidhi Daga: So, I think using thought leadership and influencers strategically can help drive that message and build trust with the brand.

[00:15:39] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Borrowing trust is always a good thing.
[00:15:42] Steve MacDonald: What I want to do is talk a little bit about the role of marketing in the entire customer journey, because marketing can sometimes be viewed as siloed, as one of the largest cost centers in the organization. But the impact is far greater than just demand gen. How do you think about that when you’re developing your campaigns and then working with all the other departments?

[00:16:06] Nidhi Daga: I want to start with an Adweek study I saw a few weeks ago where the question was, do we even need CMOs? There was so much social media noise around it. But I think there was a fundamental question—one that premise was challenging in my mind: What is the role of marketing, and how is it evolving?

[00:16:25] Nidhi Daga: It’s not just traditional demand gen anymore. Honestly, I think as marketers, we have the hardest job. I don’t think people appreciate it enough. You don’t own anything. The product has products that they own. Engineering has the tech aspect that they own. Customer service and sales have customers and accounts that they own.

[00:16:45] Nidhi Daga: But think about marketing. You’re operating across all those stakeholders, operating with influence. That’s why I firmly believe that as marketing leaders, we can lean into customer experience and own it. We are the only common thread across these stakeholders who can drive that narrative forward and care about the KPIs in the end—brand loyalty, acquisition, and customer lifetime value.

[00:17:13] Nidhi Daga: So, I do think it’s important for marketing to think about how to own this, influence it, and build upon it.

[00:17:21] Steve MacDonald: You know, this plays right into it. We had a three-time B2B CMO on about a month and a half ago. He had a very similar view to yours—that customer experience is the number one competitive advantage. He said, “Steve, here’s how we develop it: If I know my ICP better than my competitors, I can create a better experience for them.” What’s your opinion on that?

[00:17:46] Nidhi Daga: 100 percent agree. It’s so foundational, and I feel like people don’t really appreciate how important it is to get your ideal customer profile right. I would even expand it to include the ecosystem and stakeholders of those customer profiles—users, decision-makers, and influencers.

[00:18:00] Nidhi Daga: That’s the first step before you can even design an experience. You really need to know your customers, win with them, and influence them over time. I’m 100 percent with you on that. A lot of times, companies do basic persona work and think, “Oh, we know our customers, and this is what we’re building from.”

[00:18:23] Nidhi Daga: But I think that can be a myopic view that hampers their go-to-market motion in the future.

[00:18:29] Steve MacDonald: You know, I’ve asked countless CMOs, CROs, and CEOs this question: How do you agree with this statement? “As B2B companies with go-to-market motions, we have a high degree of familiarity with our ICP. We talk about them all day. We track them. We plan for them. They’re in our minds all day long. But that doesn’t mean we deeply know and understand them.”

[00:19:00] Steve MacDonald: Another CRO said, “Here’s the deal: ICP is complex and always changing. All kinds of things happen—disruptions, technology shifts, and challenges that used to exist but don’t anymore, as new ones emerge.”

[00:19:10] Steve MacDonald: So here’s my question to you. Normally, CMOs, when they come into a new position—or SVPs running marketing—what do they do? They start calling customers. It’s not a sales conversation; it’s not encumbered by the shield that needs to be up when being sold to. But then it ends. We’re busy, and that typically only happens at the beginning. Is your opinion that we need to do this a lot more, continually staying in conversation and looking at the data? How do you understand your ICP?

[00:19:46] Nidhi Daga: I agree—it gets busy, and we fall back into old habits. But I think there are ways to tackle this. In my past roles, I’ve set up listening posts and put them in almost autonomous-driving mode.

[00:20:00] Nidhi Daga: For example, you can capture feedback on your website. You can analyze data trends, like how many people are sharing or liking your content. If they share or like it, that’s a signal in my mind about what kind of content resonates with them.

[00:20:15] Nidhi Daga: Similarly, within the product, using features like thumbs up/thumbs down or feedback pop-ups is so important. Those are milestones where you want to collect insights.

[00:20:23] Nidhi Daga: Win-loss reports are another overlooked tool. I’ve conducted win-loss analyses at every company I’ve been with, and I strongly believe I learn more from why we lose deals than why we win them.

[00:20:38] Nidhi Daga: Because winning, at some point, you have that playbook figured out. But it’s the losses that give you those off-kind-of cases that you need to go after and start building in your playbook. I have been fortunate to even start forums like Voice of Client within organizations, where you bring in product perspective and client perspective.

[00:20:58] Nidhi Daga: Support service tickets. That’s another listening post that is so undervalued in my mind. If a customer is calling about similar issues, you need to figure out how to fix it—either through product, customer experience, or marketing. So, I think there are so many of those listening posts that you can create.

[00:21:16] Nidhi Daga: You have these autonomous signals being fed. Kind of relationships and getting out there in the field is also important. Attending events, in my mind, is another key venue to collect some of that feedback. Advisory boards. So, yeah, multiple places and then data. Just look at the consumption data.

[00:21:33] Nidhi Daga: Especially in this day and age, if you’re not doing that, if you’re not looking at your ICP data segmentation, you’re missing the boat.

[00:21:40] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m going to put you on the spot here for a second, all right, because I feel the passion about this understanding of the ICP and how important it is. If I were just going to ask you on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is a deep understanding of your ICP for the overall growth and sustainability of the company? One, not important at all; Ten, it’s critical for the growth and sustainability of the company. Where would you put it on that scale?

[00:22:08] Nidhi Daga: I would say 10. However, I don’t see a lot of companies getting there, and it takes a lot of work. The best companies I have seen, in my experience, have gotten to maybe a 6 or a 7. They have some of those listening posts on, signals, and a lot of good data analytics. But even then, they are at like seven to eight in my mind.

[00:22:32] Nidhi Daga: So, I think there is always room to know your customers better. And it goes back to your point—things are evolving. As human beings, we are complex; things around us in our industries are evolving at a macro level,

[00:22:44] Nidhi Daga: are evolving. I think there are so many dimensions that make this problem space really complex.

[00:22:49] Steve MacDonald: There’s no doubt about that. I think the moment that we think we’ve hit the 10 is the moment you can guarantee you haven’t.

[00:22:55] Steve MacDonald: That’s the moment. So, here’s what I want to do: transition over into, if it’s that important—that if we think we’re at a 10, then we probably sure know that we don’t have a 10 on it. So, is your recommendation that this is a constant, never-ending, always ongoing, always-have-to-do-it part of the role of a CMO? And if so, is this part of what we can own? You talked earlier about how we can own CX. I talked to so many CMOs who struggle with having a seat at the table. And so, what we talk about is one that nobody owns the ICP. No one owns that right now.

[00:23:43] Steve MacDonald: Is it your opinion that ownership of the ICP, and the experience, should be something that the CMO owns today?

[00:23:54] Nidhi Daga: Yes. And that is almost like a ticket to that leadership seat in my mind. I have successfully done that in my past life because everyone wants to hear from customers. They are all looking for those nuggets that can help them shape their next business strategy. You mentioned the whole listening post and building on that ICP.

[00:24:14] Nidhi Daga: It’s a continuous feedback loop. It’s always on—very much like our demand-gen campaigns that are always on. I think of this whole customer feedback, getting to know your customer, as a constant feedback loop that should always be on.

[00:24:29] Steve MacDonald: So, I have just one last question for you—and actually, I have two. What haven’t we covered here today that you think is important in terms of establishing our seat at the table, owning the ICP, owning the customer experience, that digital-first, human-always approach? What haven’t we talked about that we need to cover?

[00:24:52] Nidhi Daga: Oh, we talked a little bit about this, but I think, as CMOs and marketing leaders, like I mentioned, internal change management is also important. I think there’s a transformation you are trying to push towards. A lot of these companies have been product-owned. Now you’re trying and forcing them to reimagine the world as being customer-centric versus product-centric.

[00:25:15] Nidhi Daga: People call it product-led growth, and I’m like, okay, it’s customer-led growth these days because they are in the driver’s seat. And all you are doing is facilitating that journey for them. So, as I think about that, it’s important to bring internal stakeholders along. If your sales team is still going to market in traditional ways, if your customer success team is not on the same wavelength as you are, or if your leaders are prioritizing things differently, your product resources will not get prioritized to support the reimagined journey that you are trying to build.

[00:25:45] Nidhi Daga: So, in my mind, a huge component for CMOs and marketing leaders these days is change management—internal change management.

[00:25:54] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Now, I’m gonna ask an even harder question. If we take everything that we’ve talked about today and you could boil it down into 30 seconds, what’s the one thing you want other executives in the B2B world watching this today to know from our conversation? What would that one thing be?

[00:26:11] Nidhi Daga: This is a tricky one. I would say it goes back to the ICP and the CX. Know your ideal customer profile. Win by your ideal customer profile. And what I mean by that is: learn and listen to these signals, refine your go-to-market motion, and then leverage that to create a growth flywheel.

[00:26:30] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. Words of wisdom. Thank you, Nidhi, so much for coming on today and sharing all of this. And I wouldn’t call it controversial, but I would call it pivotal. It’s almost like we tend to forget. You can be in a lot of organizations, and CX is not talked about in the go-to-market strategy.

[00:26:51] Steve MacDonald: We talk about our marketing, we talk about sales, we talk about product development, we talk about customer success. But the bottom line is this needs to be a priority. And I just love your point of view on earning that seat at the table because the highest authority in any company is the customer—the ICP.

[00:27:11] Nidhi Daga: Totally. And, firstly, thank you for having me on this podcast. I truly enjoyed our conversations. I do want marketing leaders to think about this, and I’m seeing a trend where marketing is not included in the leadership team. You are like level one plus one. And I’ve always been trying to figure out: how do we take that front seat and drive?

[00:27:31] Nidhi Daga: Because I firmly believe that marketing can bring a lot of value. To our conversation, customer experience is the key to that.

[00:27:40] Steve MacDonald: I know people are going to have more questions. Would it be appropriate if we gave a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out to you?

[00:27:47] Nidhi Daga: Yeah. I would love to connect with like-minded people and push this agenda forward in the industry together.

[00:27:53] Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. Thank you for coming on today