CX Decoded Podcast
September 9, 2026
SEASON 5, EPISODE 17
Suzie Dieth, vice president and chief experience officer at NRG and winner of CMSWire's 2026 Impact Awards CX Leader of the Year, joins CX Decoded to trace the origins of NRG's customer experience program. Dieth explains how she built the discipline from the contact center up nearly two decades ago, why employee experience was her starting point rather than an afterthought, and how NRG's culture playbook helped unify two organizations after a major smart home acquisition. She also discusses the limits of survey data, a billing program that tested as "working as designed" despite customer complaints, and how NRG has leaned on internally built AI tools — paired with deliberate change management — to support its roughly 800 contact center agents.
Episode Transcript
Suzie Dieth didn't inherit a CX program at NRG. She built one.
Nearly 21 years ago, before customer experience was a formal discipline at the consumer energy and smart home solutions company, Dieth saw an opportunity in the contact center: shift conversations from pure transactions to genuine relationships. On this episode of CX Decoded, she tells CMSWire how that early, informal effort grew into a company-wide program spanning NRG's energy and smart home businesses.
"There was just this opportunity that stuck out to me to say we really need to shift things from thinking about market transactions and energy ... to there are humans and people behind all of this," Dieth said.
Dieth also discusses a formative moment in her approach to internal influence: a billing program that generated persistent customer complaints even after her team confirmed it was "working as designed." Rather than pushing harder from the outside, she found an internal champion to carry the feedback — a shift that eventually led to a full cross-functional redesign.
"You have to be a huge marketer," Dieth said of her role advocating for customers internally. "Knowing when to pull in data versus when to have employee stories or testimonials, kind of knowing what levers to pull and use in your story."
The conversation also covers how NRG blends nearly 5 million annual customer surveys with behavioral and AI-driven insight, and why the company has invested most heavily in AI tools built in-house to support its roughly 800 contact center agents.