Interview
The Gist
- Customer experience and marketing collaboration. Trish Wethman and Maureen Connors share how their teams work together to drive a customer-first strategy at Best Egg.
- Data-driven marketing. Insights from customer data influence marketing strategies, with teams regularly collaborating to ensure alignment with customer needs.
- Understanding the limited savings consumer. Best Egg focuses on consumers with limited savings, a significant portion of the U.S. population, and tailors solutions to meet their financial challenges.
In this episode of CMSWire TV's "Beyond the Call" show, Dom Nicastro hosts Trish Wethman, chief customer officer, and Maureen Connors, interim chief marketing officer, of Best Egg.
Together, they explore how customer experience and marketing teams at Best Egg collaborate to ensure customer data drives marketing strategies. Trish shares her focus on collecting customer insights and how her team works with marketing to create data-informed decisions. Maureen provides insights into the importance of performance data in shaping marketing campaigns, ensuring the brand remains relevant to consumers with limited savings.
Editor's note: This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Best Egg's Approach to Customer Experience and Marketing
- Collaboration Between Customer Experience and Marketing
- Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
- Channels and Customer Communication
- Understanding the Limited Savings Consumer
- Challenges Faced by Limited Savings Consumers
- Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing Efforts
- The Rise of Chat as a Key Feedback Source
- Tools and Silos: The Integration Challenge
- Marketing Technology Ecosystem: Challenges for 2025
- The Power of Customer Feedback and Community Engagement
- Customer Interaction in The Nest
- How Customer Feedback Shaped the Home Secured Product
- Collaborating Across Customer Experience and Marketing
- Where to Learn More About Best Egg
Introduction: Best Egg's Approach to Customer Experience and Marketing
Dom Nicastro: Hey, everybody. Dom Nicastro here, editor in chief of CMSWire, ready for today's CMSWire TV's Beyond the Call show. We're excited because we’ve got both a Chief Customer Officer and a Chief Marketing Officer on today. So let’s welcome Trish Wethman, Chief Customer Officer, and Maureen Connors, Interim Chief Marketing Officer of Best Egg. Ladies, welcome to the show!
Trish Wethman: Thank you! We’re excited to be here, Dom.
Dom Nicastro: Absolutely. So let’s start by talking about how customer experience and marketing work together. These are two areas we focus on a lot at CMSWire, and now we have both of you working together in one organization. I love it! Trish, why don’t you kick us off by telling us about Best Egg and your role there?
Trish Wethman: Sure! Best Egg is a FinTech company that provides flexible financial solutions aimed at helping people with limited savings feel more financially confident. My role as Chief Customer Officer is to drive the customer agenda. We ensure we are taking a customer-led approach in all our decision-making. This involves everything from marketing, working closely with Maureen, to credit and operations. Essentially, everything we do at Best Egg is driven by what we know about our customers.
Dom Nicastro: Great! And Maureen, congratulations on your new role as Interim Chief Marketing Officer. Tell us a bit about your journey with Best Egg.
Maureen Connors: Thanks, Dom! I’ve been with Best Egg for three years, and before stepping into the Chief Marketing role, I led brand strategy and existing customer marketing. A big part of my job was collaborating with Trish’s team to make sure that everything we put out there—from product development to marketing campaigns—resonates with our customers. We want our messages to be clear, attractive, and keep our customers coming back.
Collaboration Between Customer Experience and Marketing
Dom Nicastro: You both have mentioned how customer experience and marketing often overlap, but they’re also different in key ways. Do you two meet frequently to align your efforts?
Maureen Connors: Yes, we do. We meet quite often.
Dom Nicastro: Trish, how do you ensure the insights your team gathers from customers translate effectively into marketing strategies for Maureen and her team?
Trish Wethman: It starts with understanding what the business is trying to achieve. From there, Maureen and her team develop marketing strategies that align with those goals. My team, especially our insights business partners, are constantly in touch with Maureen’s team. These insights partners are aligned with different areas of the business, including marketing, so the conversations happen in real time. We work together to gather the necessary data, clarify uncertainties, and create a constant give-and-take that ensures we’re always leveraging customer insights.
Related Article: The Intersections Between Marketing and Customer Experience
Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
Dom Nicastro: Maureen, how does all this data influence your marketing decisions? I imagine your day-to-day is pretty data-heavy.
Maureen Connors: Yes, it’s very data-driven. We look at our performance data to understand what’s working and what’s not. If something isn’t performing as expected, we run it by Trish’s team to figure out why. Sometimes customers don’t understand the product, or the benefit we’re highlighting isn’t resonating with them. We spend a lot of time testing different messages and learning from the data, refining our approach, and then testing again. It’s a continuous cycle of forming hypotheses, testing campaigns and analyzing performance.
Channels and Customer Communication
Dom Nicastro: Maureen, what channels do you find your customers and prospects engaging with the most? You’re a financial company, so I imagine compliance is also a big consideration when communicating with customers.
Maureen Connors: Yes, compliance is always a consideration. In the personal loan business, a lot of our customers come through affiliates like Credit Karma, as they’re typically looking for the best rate. Email is also a significant channel for us, and we’ve found direct mail to be really effective. So, our top three channels are affiliates, email, and direct mail. We do paid search and digital marketing as well, but most customers come through those first three channels.
Understanding the Limited Savings Consumer
Trish Wethman: Both Maureen and I talk a lot about the limited savings consumer, which is a broad concept. At Best Egg, we use a definition from the Financial Health Network: a limited savings consumer is someone with less than two months of living expenses saved.
This is a huge group—about 50% of adults in the U.S. They often don’t have a large safety net, so they’re constantly figuring out how to manage financial disruptions like medical emergencies, car repairs, or even paying for their kids' camp. These are the types of problems we aim to help them solve.
Challenges Faced by Limited Savings Consumers
Dom Nicastro: Losing your job, right? That's another one too. Yep, absolutely. And Trish, with your customer experience team, is there a big contact center, like a support staff, that you oversee? Or is that not part of the equation?
Trish Wethman: We work really closely with our contact center, but that area of the business is actually headed up by our Chief Operating Officer. However, it's a hugely important channel for us. My team is really focused on two main things: the Voice of the Customer, understanding what our current customers are telling us about their experience, what’s working, and where there’s friction.
We’re also focusing on our target consumer, the limited savings consumer, so we're going out and learning as much as we can about them, even if they don’t yet work with us. My team does that research, works internally to understand what the business is trying to drive, and helps develop the learning agenda. We make different types of tests and studies available to the business to help validate hypotheses. As Maureen mentioned earlier, everything we think we know is essentially a hypothesis until we put some data behind it.
The feedback and insights we collect help validate or disprove our assumptions. This is why we’re customer-led—because the customer data tells us whether our assumptions are correct or not.
Related Article: Conquering the Customer Feedback Gap
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Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing Efforts
Dom Nicastro: Are you gleaning insights from, say, contact center calls? Is there a way to glean anything from those calls, chats, or emails to support your marketing efforts?
Maureen Connors: We definitely can. We use the call center all the time, and it’s a great source of feedback. If there’s anything confusing, we’ll get customer calls about it. I can tell you, our operations folks aren’t shy about reaching out and saying, "Hey Maureen, why did you do this?" So, we learn from that feedback.
It’s particularly helpful if customers don’t understand something. It helps us develop better strategies on how we can more effectively explain things upfront before customers get into a situation where they need to make a decision. Most of the operational feedback comes through Trish’s team, but if there’s an influx of calls, we do get feedback and will course correct if necessary, drafting communications that make things clearer for our customers.
The Rise of Chat as a Key Feedback Source
Trish Wethman: And I’ll jump in here, Dom, because you mentioned chats. Before COVID, it wasn’t a large channel for us, but like everyone else, as things went more digital during COVID, chat became our single largest source of customer feedback. A lot of people preferred being served through chat, and those conversations are now being ingested by my team through our text analytics tool.
This is combined with other sources of feedback we receive, such as surveys, online reviews through platforms like Trustpilot, Google, the Better Business Bureau, and even social media feedback. All of that information is processed through our text analytics tool, which powers the insights we serve up to teams like Maureen’s.
Tools and Silos: The Integration Challenge
Dom Nicastro: Does that come with challenges related to tools and silos? You mentioned a text analytics tool—how does that fit into your broader voice of the customer platform? Do you have one vendor that handles it all, or are you finding that no single vendor can do everything you need?
Trish Wethman: We actually do have one platform for Customer Experience Management—Medallia. Over the past few years, we've used them primarily for data collection, and most recently, we unlocked their text analytics capabilities. Before that, we were using a couple of different vendors, but having everything in one application has really made it easier for us to scale as an organization. Medallia handles both the data collection and text analytics, which then feeds into our internal databases and tools. So, while we do have various tools for collecting data, almost all of it funnels through the text analytics tool. Our tool ecosystem is really at the core of how we can scale across multiple parts of the business.
Related Article: What Is Customer Experience Management (CXM)? Definition, Examples & Strategies
Marketing Technology Ecosystem: Challenges for 2025
Dom Nicastro: And what about in your world, Maureen? According to Scott Brinker, there are over 14,000 marketing technology tools out there. What's your tool ecosystem like? Is it similar to Trish’s where you have a central platform, or is it more fragmented?
Maureen Connors: I wish I could say yes! Right now, our martech stack is actually a big project for us in 2025. Currently, we use different platforms for email, SMS, and we’re looking to add push notifications once we launch our mobile app. We’ve been shopping around for a marketing technology vendor that can be a one-stop shop for us—one that allows us to self-serve more efficiently.
That’s really important because we want to put data in the hands of our marketers, so they don’t have to go through our analytics team or manually pull lists. That’s one of our big goals for 2025, trying to get the same level of efficiency that Trish has achieved on the customer side.
The Power of Customer Feedback and Community Engagement
Trish Wethman: I don't want to oversell it. We have a lot of tools. We’ve centralized with Medallia, but we also use agile research tools, such as UserTesting. One of the more unique tools we've really come to rely on internally is our customer community, which we call The Nest. It enables us to collect near real-time feedback from current customers who’ve opted in to be research partners for us.
Dom Nicastro: That's cool. So The Nest is like an actual, literally a community platform?
Maureen Connors: Yes, that's exactly right. As a marketer, I rely on The Nest a lot for rapid-response testing. Whether it's an email concept or naming for a product, we throw it up on The Nest to get feedback. It’s one of the most valuable tools because it connects us with real customers who are invested in our brand and want to help us grow and improve their experience.
Trish Wethman: Building on that, what's unique about The Nest is that it's made up of customers who care about our brand. It's not just a research tool; it's an engagement tool. Many of the participants view it as part of their value proposition with Best Egg. We launched The Nest during COVID in 2020 to better understand what our customers were going through.
Over and over again, we’ve heard that other financial partners didn’t do that. They didn’t reach out and ask for feedback, and they didn’t incentivize their customers to share their experiences with them. With The Nest, we offer incentives, like earning points for participating in research, which has become a way for us to engage with them and learn from their experiences in real-time.
Customer Interaction in The Nest
Dom Nicastro: Maureen, are there many scenarios where customers talk to each other on The Nest, or is it mostly customer-to-company interactions?
Trish Wethman: It’s primarily customer-to-company interactions. We set up activities for them, with a learning agenda based on what the business needs to learn. We work with a partner on this, and we’ll say, “For 50 points, fill out this 20-question survey,” or, “For 50 points, join an executive chat,” where we get folks internally to interact directly with customers. This has been incredibly valuable for customers, as they get to provide their feedback and have a real-time dialogue with us.
Maureen Connors: Just to build on that, having the leaders of the organization join video chats to hear directly from customers is an incredibly valuable tool. It’s not often that customers get to speak with the Chief Product Officer, the Chief Customer Officer, or even the Chief Marketing Officer. It’s really a privilege for us to hear directly from them, and for the customers, it’s a chance to interact with the leaders of an organization.
How Customer Feedback Shaped the Home Secured Product
Trish Wethman: Dom, I think we have a great example to share around how we’ve utilized The Nest to help build and scale one of our current products. Maureen, I’m sure you know what I’m going to say: Home Secured. Why don’t I hand it over to you to explain the product, and we can take it from there?
Maureen Connors: Sure. We have a product, which we currently call “Home Secured” — though the name is still TBD. When we first started using the term “Home Secured,” customers immediately thought it was a home equity line of credit or a home equity loan. They assumed they would have to put their house up as collateral, and if they didn’t pay the loan, there could be repercussions like foreclosure. But it’s actually completely different.
Dom Nicastro: That’s a good start though, right? Like, you know, it’s in the Slack channel, it looks good. You can iterate on that later, right?
Maureen Connors: Exactly. But when we used the term “Home Secured,” we realized it was causing confusion. The way this loan works is that we give you the loan based on the value of your home’s fixtures — things like light fixtures, cabinets, and bathroom vanities — rather than putting your entire home up as collateral. We brought a group of customers together, showed them materials, and got their real feedback. They had concerns like, “If I don’t pay this loan, are you going to come and take my light fixtures out of my home?”
Dom Nicastro: It’s like Rent-A-Center taking your lamp back, right?
Maureen Connors: Exactly. Customers were worried — “Is someone going to come and take out my cabinets?” or “Does someone need to assess the value of my old cabinets?” One customer said, “My home was built in 1987, my cabinets haven’t been updated since then. How could they be worth so much?” The truth is, the loan is based on the equity in your home, and we don’t come and repossess your fixtures or your home.
It’s simply a lien that has to be paid off when you sell or refinance your home. For our target market, this loan is really attractive, but the way we were communicating it was confusing them, to the point where they didn’t feel comfortable taking the loan. We used The Nest for feedback, and I’ll turn it over to Trish to talk about the customer interaction, but the feedback we got really made us pause and rethink how we communicate this product.
Trish Wethman: Yeah, it's one of my favorite stories. I've been with Best Egg for five years, and we've been working on this product for almost that long now. To see where we started to where we've gotten, through the partnership with the business, is incredible because we’ve effectively utilized the insights we’ve gleaned from customers. It’s a great example of what happens when you lead from the customer. To Maureen's point, we’re able to go out and, in near real-time, ask folks to participate in studies and provide feedback.
Often, businesses push back on research, saying it takes too long or is too expensive. But when you have the infrastructure in place, you can literally grab a Word document, put some words on it, and test it with customers, turning around insights in the same day. It really breaks the assumption that research is too slow or costly.
With this product, we’ve tested everything from the value prop to the language, even down to what we’re going to call it. Over and over again, customers have surprised and delighted us with their honest feedback, helping us make the product as successful as it is today. But that success is also driven by leaders like Maureen and our GM of Home Secured, who passionately want to understand what’s important to the customers and integrate that into their strategy.
Maureen Connors: And I'll add one more thing, Dom. One of the biggest aha moments for us with this product, which we’ve translated into our overall channel communication strategy, is that explaining this product using video is extremely effective. It doesn’t need to be long—30 seconds or even 15 seconds—but hearing someone explain it versus reading it really connects with customers. It’s a huge unlock for us. People can read words all day, but when you explain something to them in a video, they immediately get it. So why not create a video that explains it? That’s something we took away from our customer feedback—hearing it made everything click for them.
Dom Nicastro: That’s why we’re on this call, because video rules. I mean, sometimes when I’m editing stories, I think to myself, “This would be so much better as a video.” It comes down to resources, obviously, but what you’re doing here is impressive. You’re actually walking the walk of customer experience, taking customer feedback and turning it into real action. That’s amazing. I know this might seem like an obvious answer, but let me ask you, Maureen: Did customers know their feedback led to positive changes? Did you communicate that back to them, like, “Hey, we listened, and here’s what happened?”
Maureen Connors: Hopefully they see it in our marketing materials, through the presence of video, and in the way we’ve changed our communication strategies. We’ve adapted based on their feedback to be better and clearer for our customers. I don’t know if we’ve circled back explicitly to say, “Hey, you spoke, we listened,” but I’d hope they can see those changes in action.
Trish Wethman: That’s a great area of opportunity for us, Dom. We often gain so much from this research, but I don’t know if we always effectively let our customers know about all the changes we’ve made based on their feedback. I do know that with our Nest community, once a year, we send out a year-end wrap-up where we highlight the things they helped us improve. The other group we need to focus on is our employees, particularly our agents. Building a customer-centric culture means sharing these wins with your employees. When agents know that the feedback they’re hearing and sharing is meaningfully changing strategy and business decisions, there’s no greater feeling. That empowerment goes straight up through the organization, enriching our customer-centric culture.
Dom Nicastro: Those agents—what a thankless job sometimes. They need to know they’re bringing immense value, and showing them how they’re making a difference is really cool.
Maureen Connors: I actually started out as an agent on the phone!
Dom Nicastro: No kidding? So you’ve been on the front lines, and now you're the one driving marketing campaigns from behind the scenes.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah, staging campaigns and presentations now!
Trish Wethman: It often gets called a thankless job, but I always share with our COO—and with our agents—the number one piece of feedback we get from customers is how well our agents handle their experiences. They demonstrate empathy, compassion, and help customers get the answers they need, solving problems quickly. It may be a high-stress job, but we try to ensure that agents know the enormous impact they have on customers every day.
Collaborating Across Customer Experience and Marketing
Dom Nicastro: Well, I knew this conversation would go off script because it’s so much fun talking about these topics, and we’ve touched on so much today. But before we wrap, I want to ask each of you one more question, and we’re going to pretend we’re in therapy for a moment. Trish, what would you like more of from Maureen’s team? And Maureen, what would you like more of from Trish’s team? In all seriousness, where do you see opportunities to improve collaboration going forward? Trish, you go first.
Trish Wethman: Well, Maureen is in a new role now with tons of influence, so I’d say even more partnership and collaboration than we have today. I’d love to see more time spent working consultatively, making sure we’re using the right language and thinking about things from the right customer perspective. So my ask is just more time and partnership.
Dom Nicastro: More time? Wow, Maureen, it sounds like Trish wants to add more meetings on top of the ones you’ve already had today! Go ahead and block off more time with Trish!
Maureen Connors: Definitely not more meetings! But one thing I’d love more of from Trish’s team is more ideas. We have so much information out there on the website, in emails, and in the customer experience. Trish’s team has a ton of knowledge, and great ideas can come from anywhere. We’re collaborative, and we have a robust test-and-learn strategy, so I’d say keep the ideas coming. Challenge us if you think there’s a better way to do something. That kind of partnership will only make us more customer-focused and improve us as a company overall.
Where to Learn More About Best Egg
Dom Nicastro: All right, Trish Wethman and Maureen Connors from Best Egg, customer experience and marketing leaders here on Beyond the Call, we really appreciate you joining us. Maureen, let me give you the last word. Where can folks go to learn more about Best Egg?
Maureen Connors: We do a lot through LinkedIn—about the company, the leadership, and what we’re up to. We also have a strong presence at conferences. So for those interested in leadership and company updates, I’d recommend LinkedIn. For customers interested in our products, head to our website, bestegg.com.
Dom Nicastro: Beautiful. Trish and Maureen, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it!
