IN THIS EPISODE:

Every organization begins by serving customers. Not all of them get it right — or keep it that way. So where does the customer relationship break down? In this episode, Denise Silber speaks with HBS MBA Caroline Evans de Gantes, a transformation leader who has spent more than two decades helping companies design strategy, culture, and operations around customer love as an organizing principle. Caroline recalls arriving at Harvard Business School in 2008 just as the Lehman Brothers collapse unfolded — an experience that shaped her leadership perspective: progress comes from experimentation, learning quickly, and working closely with frontline teams. Drawing on transformations across industries known for difficult customer relationships, she shares what it takes to reconnect organizations with the people they serve.

From mobile phone insurance and broadband installation to the transformation of leading real-estate marketplace SeLoger within the Aviv Group, the conversation explores how leadership culture, incentives, and technology can be realigned around customers — and how doing so improves business performance. Throughout the discussion, Caroline shows that making customer love an organizing principle starts on Day 1.

GUEST BIO:

Caroline Evans de Gantès, a 2010 MBA graduate of the Harvard Business School, has over 20 years experience transforming offline industries by placing the client front and center. From insurance to telecommunications to real estate, Caroline has deployed this approach to transform culture, product, and strategy, and turn profits around. Most recently, Caroline led a transformation at SeLoger (a 30 year old French real estate marketplace) to 2X the growth rate and a great NPS (Net Promoter Score), through redesigning culture, organisation, and business model. She merged SeLoger, and other real estate companies in France, launched new services to take back market share from rivals and championed a customer-centric culture in France, Belgium, and Germany. The resulting business, Aviv, is the leading European real estate marketplace with 50M monthly active users. Caroline is originally from the State of Mississippi and has fashioned a career as the bridge between people and technology and the US and Europe.