On this episode of Beyond the Call, host Dom Nicastro sits down with Suzie Dieth, vice president and chief experience officer at NRG and winner of CMSWire's 2026 Impact Awards CX Leader of the Year. Dieth shares how she built NRG's customer experience program from the ground up nearly two decades ago, starting in the contact center with no formal CX discipline, no dedicated team and no customer survey tool. She discusses the deep connection between employee experience and CX, how NRG's culture playbook helped merge two distinct organizational cultures after a major smart home acquisition, and how she balances survey data with behavioral insights to drive change. Dieth also opens up about AI's growing role in the contact center, how NRG built its own internal AI tools, and where she's focused as the company works to integrate its energy and smart home experiences.
Host
Guest
Dom Nicastro
Suzie Dieth
Inside Our Conversation
Table of Contents
- A CX Program Born in the Call Center
- Employee Experience as the Foundation
- Balancing Survey Data With Behavioral Insight
- When the Data Says One Thing and the Process Says Another
- AI in the Contact Center: Mostly Built In-House
The Gist
- A Program Built From Nothing: Suzie Dieth started NRG's CX program in the contact center nearly 21 years ago, before the company had a formal CX discipline, team or customer survey tool.
- Employee Experience Comes First: Dieth built early buy-in through frontline focus groups, using agent insight to shape both action plans and leadership support.
- Data Alone Doesn't Win Arguments: When a billing process tested as "working as designed" despite customer complaints, Dieth changed her approach — and let an internal champion drive the redesign instead.
- AI Is Mostly Homegrown: NRG has invested most heavily in AI tools built in-house, paired with deliberate change management for its roughly 800 contact center agents.
A CX Program Born in the Call Center
Suzie Dieth, vice president and chief experience officer at NRG, has spent nearly 21 years at the consumer energy and smart home solutions company. When she started, customer experience wasn't yet a formal discipline at NRG — there was no dedicated team, no title and no structured way to gather customer feedback.
"We really were so focused on transactions in how we talked in meetings and how we operated as a company," Dieth said. "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."
She started in the contact center, working to evolve conversations beyond scripted transactions into genuine problem-solving with customers navigating bill payments or plan changes. The shift wasn't framed as a new corporate initiative. It was framed as solving real obstacles frontline agents were already facing.
"It wasn't positioned as, there's this whole new CX thing we're introducing, but it was more of really understanding what are those obstacles that the representatives are facing," Dieth said.
Employee Experience as the Foundation
Dieth credits early engagement with frontline employees — through simple focus groups — as critical to both shaping her team's actions and winning over leadership that was hesitant to prioritize CX work.
"If I could come to the table and say, you know, I talked to X number of frontline agents or supervisors and they expressed that this is a pain point and kind of designed this opportunity, then they said, 'OK.'" Dieth said. "It wasn't just me saying it."
That employee-first instinct carried through NRG's 2023 acquisition of a smart home solutions company, which brought two distinct organizational cultures together. NRG built a formal culture playbook to help the combined workforce find common ground and share best practices across the energy and smart home businesses.
Balancing Survey Data With Behavioral Insight
NRG's listening program has scaled to roughly 4.9 million surveys sent and 193,000 responses — a number Dieth said continues to grow. But she said the program has evolved well beyond direct survey feedback alone.
"Now it's much more about using that as one listening component, but also having really robust tools to help us get to the behavioral data using AI," Dieth said. "Not everybody's gonna leave a survey, right?"
Email and text messaging tend to generate richer feedback than in-call surveys, she said, and NRG supplements always-on listening with targeted research and customer communities built around specific issues.
When the Data Says One Thing and the Process Says Another
Dieth described a recurring pattern of customer frustration tied to a specific billing program. When she raised it with the team that owned the process, they investigated and reported back that the process was "working as designed."
"And so I thought, OK, I have to change my approach," Dieth said.
Rather than continuing to push from her own team, Dieth identified an internal champion embedded within the billing organization to carry the customer feedback directly to that team. The approach worked. The champion eventually returned, this time asking to lead a cross-functional redesign.
"That leader ended up coming back to me and saying, 'OK, I now am tired of seeing feedback about this particular process,'" Dieth said. "I'm going to take it back. I'm going to pull a cross-functional team and see what we can do. And they completely redesigned it, renamed it, redesigned it."
The episode reflects a broader theme in Dieth's approach to internal influence: her team is "responsible for everything but we don't own anything," which means building the business case — and the internal coalition — for every change.
"You have to be a huge marketer," Dieth said. "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."
AI in the Contact Center: Mostly Built In-House
With roughly 800 agents across NRG's contact centers, Dieth said the company's biggest AI investment has gone into internally built tools rather than off-the-shelf AI platforms or vendor add-ons — though NRG uses both of those as well.
"I would say it's a little bit of all of those, but I think the biggest effort has been our in-house tools that the organization has invested, dedicated, not only in building those platforms and tools, but in the change management piece as well," Dieth said.
Those tools help surface real-time insights to agents during calls and support root-cause analysis of unstructured customer data. Dieth emphasized that NRG has treated AI rollout as a change management effort, not just a technology deployment.
Looking ahead, Dieth said her focus remains on integrating NRG's energy and smart home experiences into a more seamless offering — giving customers more direct control over their energy usage and bills as the two sides of the business continue to converge.
