Episode #318: 

Eliana Angelova, Global Chief Revenue Officer at iSON Xperiences, explains why customer obsession has become the defining growth strategy in the AI era. She shares practical lessons on exceeding customer expectations, aligning teams around shared outcomes, and using AI to strengthen customer experiences rather than simply improve efficiency. She also provides a practical framework for building sustainable revenue through customer-first thinking.

“Always have the end customer in mind. If every decision starts there, you’ll make better choices for your business, your people, and your customers.” — Eliana Angelova

Customer expectations are evolving faster than ever, driven by AI, digital transformation, and increasing competition. In this conversation, Eliana shares practical strategies for turning customer obsession into measurable business growth by aligning every department around customer outcomes, using AI to improve experiences rather than simply increase efficiency, and creating organizations that consistently exceed customer expectations while building long-term loyalty and sustainable revenue.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a very special guest, Eliana Angelova. Now, Eliana, you’re the Chief Revenue Officer currently at iSON Xperiences. That is just the start of your background. You have had an incredible journey throughout your career.

[00:00:27] Steve MacDonald: I would call it a true global experience. I counted it. You’ve lived, worked, and studied in seven different countries and cultures, and you’ve worked across multiple industries, B2C and B2B. There’s so much we can learn in B2B from B2C, and from the expectations set there, which are carrying over more directly into the world of B2B every single day. And among all of that, as a global Chief Revenue Officer, you’re also a mom of three young kids, and you’re balancing that every day. You look very calm.

[00:01:12] Eliana Angelova: Thank you.

[00:01:14] Steve MacDonald: If you wouldn’t mind, Eliana, explaining, maybe expanding a little bit more on your background before we get started.

[00:01:20] Eliana Angelova: Yes, absolutely.

[00:01:21] Eliana Angelova: Delighted to be here. So, my background is quite international. I was born and raised in Bulgaria up until I was 18, after which I left and studied in France. From France, I left and studied in the UK. My MBA was completed in the Netherlands and at UC Berkeley in California. After my MBA, I actually moved to Canada to start my investment banking career. After investment banking, during the 2008 financial crisis, I looked back on the entire experience and thought, “What is it that I have really enjoyed over the last 10 years?” It was always the customer interaction and the frontline conversations that we were having with our clients.

[00:02:03] Eliana Angelova: Then I moved into customer-facing revenue roles. I have worked with British Airways and Avios, which is today IAG Loyalty, in the UK. I have worked for Capita, which is a SaaS software. Capita today does quite a bit of consulting as well. My previous job was with Concentrix in the UK. I have now moved to Dubai to start my brand new role. I’m three months into the role of Chief Revenue Officer at iSON Xperiences, where we deliver customer experience management at scale.

[00:02:40] Steve MacDonald: Well, I have to tell you, I want to take all of that experience, and we’re going to be talking today about something that we don’t talk about enough, the revenue logic of customer obsession. Now, every single one of us would raise our hands and say, “Absolutely, we’re a customer-first organization. Absolutely, we’re customer obsessed.” Here’s the thing. Forrester did a customer obsession report two years ago. They determined that only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed. This is not something that we can take for granted.

[00:03:15] Steve MacDonald: This is not something that, through the course of our commercial operations and go-to-market strategies, we can assume is just going to happen. Sure, we’re going to learn about the customer, and that will inform every decision. Then they’re the North Star of our business. We have to be much more proactive than that. Now, the trouble is, how do we tie that to revenue? What is, to you, I guess this is a great way to start out, when we talk about the revenue logic of customer obsession, what does that even mean to you?

[00:03:45] Eliana Angelova: Yeah. So, oh gosh, such a big question to start with. Being customer obsessed, and you said it correctly, I must have read the same Forrester study, because I think that, if we’re referring to the same study, a lot of companies claim that they’re customer obsessed, right? But I think it was only 3, 4, or 5% who actually went and implemented everything their customers wanted. Because I think 96 or 97% of companies today conduct the Voice of the Customer survey. They get the results back, but the real question becomes: now that we have feedback from our client base, what are we going to do with that data, and how quickly are we going to change the areas where we’re falling short of customer expectations?

[00:04:32] Eliana Angelova: That study was quite powerful. Customer obsession really is at the core of everything companies must do today, I feel, to survive in this AI era. I say that because last week I was flying with Emirates, and I’m in no way related to Emirates, right? But this is a company that I believe truly epitomizes customer obsession to a T.

[00:04:57] Eliana Angelova: We were on the flight, and what the Emirates cabin crew were doing was taking photos of all the families and their children on board. They were instantly offering the printed photo to the family, and obviously, as a mom of a two-year-old, you sit there and think, “Gosh, that was such a nice memory.”

[00:05:16] Eliana Angelova: Then you feel so elated and already happy to be on that flight as a customer. So, you go and spend more in the cabin at the duty-free area when they come through, and then you’re going to talk to all your friends about the amazing experience that you had because they made you feel special. They really met the needs of every mom and those families on that flight. I think that the same Forrester study really showed that companies that are customer-obsessed and deliver for their customers generate 80% more revenue overall than companies that are not.

[00:05:53] Eliana Angelova: On the flip side, clients spend 20% to 25% more revenue with those companies. So, I think customer obsession today will probably be the number one thing that drives success going forward for all of these companies, especially in the world of AI. Being customer-obsessed is being people-obsessed, right?

[00:06:17] Eliana Angelova: You have to understand that, from a company perspective, we really care about what our customers do and what they need. One of the questions we ask every single week at iSON Xperiences is: What do clients need? What do our end customers really need? Every decision we make goes through the lens of one question. Does this serve our customer? Whether it’s which AI tool or solution we’re going to implement, the hiring that we’re doing, the strategy, or everything that we’re doing internally, it starts with that question. Does this serve, and how does this serve, the end customer? So yes, you’re absolutely right. I do believe that customer obsession today will be absolutely key for all the companies that make it through and survive the AI wave we’re in.

[00:07:07] Steve MacDonald: So much of what you said there rings so true. It made me think of one of the most customer-obsessed organizations, or at least one that gets credit for it, Amazon. I interviewed an Amazon executive recently and asked about the empty chair policy, in which there was an empty chair at every physical meeting to represent the customer. As if they’re here in this distribution meeting, or this RevOps meeting, or whatever meeting it is, what would we be doing differently if the voice of the customer were here with us, right? They still do that even in virtual meetings today. It’s very much a part of their culture.

[00:07:44] Steve MacDonald: I love how you tied all of this in that study to actual revenue and NRR, right? Loyalty. It’s so, so important. You started out by saying, especially in this world of AI. How has AI affected, or maybe even refocused, how we should think about the customer?

[00:08:06] Eliana Angelova: Oh, it’s so critical. Let’s talk a little bit about AI, right? Because I feel that in every conversation we have today, AI is mentioned, right? I think what we should differentiate between are the AI tools that everybody uses internally today as individual users. These AI tools help us improve our productivity, making us much more efficient with our time. Think ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever platform everybody is using.

[00:08:39] Eliana Angelova: But there are also fully fledged AI solutions, which are automated systems that deliver very complex workflows. These complex workflows are where the real measurable outcomes come from. What percentage of cost reduction are we delivering to the end customer by deploying this AI solution? Or even better, what percentage increase are we delivering to the end customer by deploying that AI solution?

[00:09:05] Eliana Angelova: So, let’s differentiate between AI tools and AI solutions. I feel that’s important because all the executives and peers I’m speaking with today agree that everyone is now using AI tools, but not necessarily deploying AI solutions and systems that run autonomous workflows for the end customer. This is where I think customer obsession comes in.

[00:09:40] Eliana Angelova: In my industry, and in what we’re doing with iSON Xperiences at the moment, we have the AI layer, and we have customer obsession, so we are marrying both. When you marry both, the only question that we have to ask ourselves is this. Does the AI solution we’re deploying for our customer help us serve them better? When you have customer obsession with an underlying layer of a great AI system, revenue is going to explode, right? We’re on the right path for growth and revenue. It’s quite important to differentiate between companies that are doing it and those that are not.

[00:10:25] Eliana Angelova: There’s also, I don’t know what you’ve come across with all of the other guest speakers on your podcast, this immense fear of missing out today with anything to do with AI. Absolutely. Are we doing the right thing? Are we deploying the right solution? Are we going to build it ourselves, or have it built by a vendor? There’s all this panic mode, I think, that set in sometime last year because these AI tools and solutions are being deployed at such a speed that, by the time we deploy something, we don’t know whether it’s going to be relevant for the next six or 12 months or whether we need to readjust.

[00:11:04] Eliana Angelova: The pace of change is incredible. We’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s not only applicable to the BPO industry. I think that this touches every single industry now, and all of my peers and colleagues with whom I’m working. So it’s very important for us to differentiate among these elements. AI and customer obsession are very closely married up. The companies that do both very well will be the ones that really survive this next wave over the next three to five years, where everybody’s thinking, “Gosh, so many jobs are going to disappear. Entire professions are going to disappear.” And then that’s why the whole fear of missing out, the FOMO bit, sweeps in. It’s a very interesting world right now.

[00:11:51] Steve MacDonald: So let me ask you about this. As part of the customer obsession, more and more, I am hearing from C-level executives that the expectations of the customer are changing dramatically in two ways. I want more, that means higher quality, in less time. They know we have AI. They know we can do fantastic things much better and much more quickly. So all of a sudden, something that would’ve been a two- to three-week project, they’re expecting by the end of the week, and they’re expecting the output, the outcome, the value to them, to go from here to here.

[00:12:32] Steve MacDonald: So customer obsession is about understanding our customers. This is one of the most key aspects that I think a lot of companies aren’t looking for, right? They’re looking for product input. They’re looking for the specific challenges you’re facing, your pain points, and how we can address them. But overall, expectations are changing dramatically in the world of AI, and I think that’s a part of customer obsession that we’re missing out on. Are you feeling that from your customers?

[00:13:02] Eliana Angelova: One hundred percent. And I don’t think there’s any company or industry that isn’t feeling that. Yes, we have all of these productivity tools, and yes, we can deploy all of these workflows. And yet, I think I said that in one of my recent posts. It was about a happy customer, not a customer whose expectations were met. A truly happy customer is a customer whose expectations were exceeded. Yes, and this is the difficulty. Yes. Right? So customers already arrive with preset expectations. If we meet those, we’ve just done okay. But if we manage to exceed them, we’re going to delight those customers, and they’re going to become repeat customers and long-term value-creation levers for any company.

[00:13:50] Eliana Angelova: So you’re absolutely right. It’s an extremely difficult era because everybody expects more in less time. In the industry, we’re seeing it as well, and that’s why the outsourcing, offshoring, and BPO industry is changing at such a fast pace because the technology has shifted the entire industry. Then the customer expects more for less, and we’re in the middle of trying to figure out how to restructure our own strategies to meet those expectations. So it’s a very, very exciting time to be leading companies.

[00:14:25] Steve MacDonald: So let me ask you then about how we become customer-obsessed. Because we all say that we are. McKinsey conducted another study and found that only 15% of companies actually use the voice of the customer in their strategic decision-making. So we obviously are falling short. Three percent to five percent, I think that was like the B2C to B2B numbers from the Forrester study, are customer obsessed. So that’s a fact. We’re not, as an industry, customer-obsessed. We need to be customer-obsessed. So we have to be proactive about this. This can’t be one of the things that… and I run into this all the time, and it’s reflected back to me, that because we’re talking about the customer all the time, because we’re in sales conversations, we’re in customer success conversations, we do studies, we have CAB meetings, right? We’re customer obsessed. We get it. We understand.

[00:15:19] Steve MacDonald: But I’m talking to more and more C-suite executives who say, “We’re not in the right rooms asking the right questions at the right time.” And let me give you one example. In the world of B2B, where buyers are waiting longer and longer before even talking to us, they’re making the majority of their decisions before they close the shortlist.

[00:15:39] Steve MacDonald: There’s only a small number of companies that get on, and then the conversations that ensue after that are more validating. They’re confirmation of the decisions that they’ve made. And so we’re learning vital things in those conversations, but they aren’t conversations from when their priorities were forming.

[00:16:00] Steve MacDonald: When they were setting the timelines and the budgets, why do we need to even be thinking about this and working on this now? Given that context, given a world where B2B companies don’t even have a chief customer officer, we don’t have a customer-obsessed framework in place. How do we become truly customer-obsessed?

[00:16:23] Eliana Angelova: Oh my gosh, you’ve touched on so many things, right? Before I answer that question directly, just when you were speaking, I was thinking about how the customer today has so many different touch points, and they’re so different from what they used to be. Before, we knew that if we sent an email or gave the customer a call, that would be a touchpoint that would be registered, and then we could get feedback, et cetera. But today, the customer journey has completely changed. A customer can interact with us via phone, email, LinkedIn, text message, WhatsApp (quite a lot in the Middle East as well as the rest of the world), and then Instagram and Facebook. There are so many channels where we can interact and have touch points with the customers that it’s… I think that it’s impossible for us to measure the customer journey the way that it was measured 10 years ago.

[00:17:14] Eliana Angelova: There’s no way, right? How do we track when the customer made up their mind today to come and interact with us? It’s absolutely an impossible job. So what we have to ensure is that at every single interaction, even if it’s one that we have with the customer, that interaction exceeds the customer’s expectations. That’s it. I think that it’s as simple as that. That means every single person at the company, or at any company, who interacts with their customer base just needs to overdeliver on what the customer needs at any given point in time. Because if that single interaction exceeds the customer’s expectations, it will lead to more touchpoints with the company, and they will hopefully become a very loyal customer in the long term.

[00:18:03] Eliana Angelova: It’s an extremely difficult job to try to capture a customer journey today because it’s all over the place, and we cannot control it. Yeah, it is. You know, I keep telling my teams during our weekly calls and meetings that, in every pitch we go into today, the customer has already pre-vetted us. They have looked us up. They have put our proposal through an AI, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or whatever it is. They have found the flaws in our own pitch, right? So, so we go… Isn’t that great? No, absolutely. I think that it really happens. In real time, it’s quite disarming when you’ve worked so hard, and you go in, and all of a sudden, the questions don’t start from where a normal meeting would.

[00:18:47] Eliana Angelova: But now the questions start, “Oh, we have found A, B, and C in your pitch or in your proposal.” They’re such deep questions that you know that you have been pre-vetted, and it’s all been done with AI. So that’s why, right now, what I’m doing internally for my teams is making sure we do the same. Whenever we go into meetings, we have pre-vetted our clients. We have run it through all our internal AI solutions so that when we turn up for that meeting, no stone is left unturned. But just to go back to your customer obsession, how do we track the customer journey?

[00:19:23] Eliana Angelova: In today’s world, every single interaction matters. That’s it. I think it’s as simple as that, and I think I’ll leave it at that because the world is changing every day. The tools that we are being given to use every day are changing, and I feel that most of us, and most of the companies that we’re interacting with, my peers, colleagues, and people from the industry, are trying to play catch up. And I think that’s the honest truth.

[00:19:50] Steve MacDonald: So, being proactive about this, and I love the workflow that you’ve changed, which is, let’s put our own proposals through AI and ask for the pros, the cons, where we are falling short. Brilliant. If there’s one thing to take away, I hope everybody wrote that down, because that’s absolutely brilliant. It makes so much sense. We’re on AI every day. We should be double-checking our own work.

[00:20:15] Steve MacDonald: But here’s the thing. High-performance companies have high-performance teams. High-performance teams need to work in unison. The number one challenge that B2B companies have is internal alignment. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got together and we did a prep call for this, the first question I asked you was, “What do you see as the top two challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth?”

[00:20:42] Steve MacDonald: Well, I’ve asked that to over 120 different C-suite executives now. By far, I mean by far, the number one challenge is internal alignment. Then I’ve had many different guests on the podcast who are partners, former CROs, and CMOs now in go-to-market advisory companies, and they say, hands down, the number one problem in B2B is just internal alignment.

[00:21:07] Steve MacDonald: But here’s their recommendation: that the voice of the customer is the number one change agent, the number one alignment tool inside the company. Do you agree with that? Like, how do we, first off, just do internal alignment, your thoughts, and then how does customer obsession help that as a potential solution?

[00:21:28] Eliana Angelova: Yeah, I see why everybody agrees that internal alignment is the number one blocker.

[00:21:33] Eliana Angelova: We were chatting earlier, right? And I was sharing that when I was with British Airways or Avios Group, right before it transitioned to IAG Loyalty, I used to spend 60 to 70% of my time in internal meetings. These were meetings where I was aligning pre-sales, technical support, AI solutions, marketing, and PR. It was like, this should not be happening in the 21st century. My team at the time, obviously, the remit was external revenue, so 95% of my time and my team’s time should have been spent, looking back at it in retrospect now, with external clients, and yet it wasn’t.

[00:22:10] Eliana Angelova: That’s a problem that we have today with any big organization because, in Capita and Concentrix, all of the companies that I have been with, you always have different teams. The issue with cross-functional reporting and all these different internal matrices is that everybody has their own approval system. Everybody has a different set of KPIs that they’re measured on. Until you say that all the teams under my remit will be measured against the same outcome, right?

[00:22:42] Eliana Angelova: Departments are always going to fight. And that’s why, absolutely, it’s extremely important. To somehow magically decrease internal misalignment, if we can look back from a customer perspective and say, “Okay, our end customer needs this,” it means the 10 teams that report into this role will be aligned on the same outcome. That means that the sales incentive plan that is put in place, or the incentive policy that’s put in place, is going to measure each one of those teams on the same KPIs. When you align the KPIs and the outcome, basically when your bonus depends on the same thing, then all of these magical issues that we have internally disappear.

[00:23:28] Eliana Angelova: That’s why at iSON Xperiences today, we’re doing that. With my teams now, we’re aligning everybody. First, when we sat down, I asked myself: what right behaviors do we want to drive internally? The second question was: What outcome do we want to deliver for our client? Then the third question was: which teams are involved in delivering that outcome? All of that was packaged up and delivered as a sales incentive plan that now measures everybody on the same outcome. So that was the first part of your question. I think that internal alignment can really get sped up when we remove the internal roadblocks, you know, all the interdepartmental fights, so to speak.

[00:24:12] Eliana Angelova: Where voice of the customer and customer obsession come in to decrease that, is, again, the same thing. The marketing and sales teams should be 100% aligned on what we’re delivering to our clients. Solutions, marketing, pre-sales, tech support, delivery, and ops should all be teams that are measured on one thing. Have we delivered for our clients? The issue is that it doesn’t happen because everyone reports to different internal structures. So until we start, I think, designing organizations that are much flatter than they are today, we’re going to see that quite a bit for some time to come.

[00:24:54] Steve MacDonald: I have to ask you, I don’t have all the right questions to ask about this revenue logic of customer obsession. What haven’t I asked? What area of the revenue logic of customer obsession do you want to make sure that we cover that I haven’t asked about already?

[00:25:12] Eliana Angelova: Oh, good question. We’ve covered quite a lot. I think because we touched on AI, and AI is quite a lot on everybody’s mind, right? When I speak at conferences and we have these discussions with my peers at events, what I see is that everybody’s very concerned that jobs will disappear or, you know, entire industries will change over the next two to three years. But what I guess I don’t hear people talk about is what happens to the people. As leaders, we should be deploying AI so that we are on track and delivering well for our end customer. But we should also be obsessed with our people from now on, if we haven’t already, because these are the same people and teams that have delivered for our clients over the last 10 to 20 years.

[00:26:04] Eliana Angelova: Nobody’s talking about how we’re upskilling the existing teams to make sure that, in two years’ time, these people are not out of a job, right? And are able to find a job or a role in this industry or in any other industry. That’s what I’m not hearing about. That’s a little bit sad. So that’s why I just wanted to bring it up.

[00:26:22] Eliana Angelova: I think that, as leaders, it is our responsibility to identify the people who can really be moved up the value chain so that they can be trained and upskilled, and not just say, you know, it’s easy to say, “AI changed the entire industry,” but have those difficult and uncomfortable conversations from now, and be accountable to the people that have delivered for the clients for the last five years. So upskill the people because, ultimately, customer obsession really is people obsession, right?

[00:26:54] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered so much territory here, Eliana, and so I want to give you one opportunity for anybody who’s going to be consuming this podcast, right? What is the number one thing you want them to take away? If there was one thing that you wanted them to remember and take away from this conversation, what would that be?

[00:27:16] Eliana Angelova: That’s a big question. Because we’re talking about customer obsession, I think every single thing is what we mentioned earlier. Every single thing that you do today, before you do it, ask the simple question, “How does this thing deliver for my end client?” That’s it. If it delivers well for the end customer, go ahead and do it. If it doesn’t, then ask the question again.

[00:27:42] Eliana Angelova: Don’t just be in the rat race of AI because somebody else is doing that thing. Sit down, take time out of your day, do some, you know, strategic thinking to decide whether this is the right thing for my company to deploy or not? But always have the end customer in mind.

[00:28:02] Steve MacDonald: You know, I’ve got to tell you, I love that takeaway. I’m going to give you my one takeaway, too. So much of AI implementation is about becoming more efficient, and it’s a huge benefit area. But when you started talking about running our own proposals through AI and learning and fixing them, it’s a customer-obsession tool, right? It’s a tool that we can’t, as humans, use to understand every insight that we’ve ever learned in any meeting. I call it insight decay. Think about coming out of a customer advisory board meeting, with everybody doing high-fives and belly bumps. We talk about it in our team meeting. It makes it into a deck. It might even make it into a proposal, right? But then a month later, where is it? Where is it archived? And how do we understand it? And how do we use it? How do we never forget it, right? And how do we keep adding to it more and more?

[00:29:00] Steve MacDonald: AI is customer obsession on steroids because it remembers everything and helps us stay customer obsessed. That’s one of the big things that I’m taking away from our conversation.

[00:29:13] Eliana Angelova: Yeah, so much.

[00:29:13] Steve MacDonald: I just wanted to say thank you. This podcast is meant to be a collection of so many different perspectives from C-suite executives all over the world, all in B2B ABM, but from different industries, different backgrounds, and different points of view. If we can all share, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:29:37] Eliana Angelova: Oh, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Steve.