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Radka Maršálová started out at a time when CX in the Czech Republic was barely a concept. She joined Direct Insurance as an NPS Specialist when almost nobody in the country had heard of the term, with no local resources and no community to lean on. She had to figure it out on her own. And that experience taught her what she considers the most valuable lesson in CX: before you implement anything, you need to truly understand it not from a slide deck, but from practice.
Over more than five years within the Direct group, she progressed from specialist to programme manager to Head of CX and Complaints, building strategies, teams, metrics, and company culture along the way. Then came a new challenge at Direct Fidoo, where she built CX from the ground up for a B2B fintech and contributed to launching a digital bank for the SME segment. Along the way, she also lectured on customer experience at the Prague School of Creative Communication and volunteered with Femme Palette experiencing CX from the other side, as a participant.
Since April 2026, she has been writing a new chapter as CX Manager at MultiSport Benefit. A product people choose not because they have to, but because they want to move. For someone who spent years in insurance, that’s a refreshing change.
In this interview for X Pulse, she shared what CX really is and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.
You’ve described your career in one word: “transformation.” What does that mean to you in a CX context and where has the single biggest transformational moment been, the one that pushed you furthest as a professional?
Transformation in CX isn’t a buzzword for me. It describes what has to happen inside a company before a customer can feel anything on the outside. Renaming a department or introducing a new metric isn’t enough. You have to change the way people think about the customer. It’s slow, sometimes painful work.
The biggest transformational moment for me was joining Direct Insurance as an NPS Specialist. I accepted the offer and only afterwards found out what the acronym actually meant. At the time, almost nobody in the Czech Republic was writing or talking about NPS. No local resources, no community. I had to learn from international sources, experiment a lot, and make a lot of mistakes. But that’s precisely what taught me the most valuable thing in CX: before you implement anything, you need to truly understand it not from a presentation, but from practice.
You’ve worked across B2C and B2B, in insurance and fintech. How different is the underlying philosophy of CX in those worlds and what do you think each can learn from the other?
When I moved between those worlds, I expected a fundamental difference. B2C works with emotion, B2B with rationality and process at least, that’s how the textbooks describe it.
Reality surprised me. At the end of every decision whether it’s an insurance policy or a corporate financial product there’s a person. With the same basic needs: they want to understand what they’re buying, they want to feel they can rely on the other side, and they want communication that makes sense.
The biggest difference I genuinely felt was in the level of expertise required in communication. At Direct Insurance, it was possible to work with relatively accessible language. The products, even when complex, could be explained in human terms. At Direct Fidoo, I encountered a completely different league. Clients were experts who knew exactly what to ask and expected the same level of knowledge on our side. Empathy alone wasn’t enough you needed substance too.
What can these worlds learn from each other? B2C knows how to work with emotion and simplicity. B2B brings depth and credibility. The best CX happens when these approaches borrow from one another.
CX is full of metrics NPS, CES, CSAT. You’ve worked with all three. If you had to pick just one and defend it as “the one,” which would it be and why? And where do you think we let the numbers carry us further than they should?
Which metric is best? It depends. And that’s not a dodge.
It depends on what stage the company is at and what it intends to do with the number. NPS, CES, CSAT each makes sense in a different context. I’ve seen companies with great NPS scores that were still losing customers, because they confused the goal with the tool.
So the first question isn’t “which metric should we use?” It’s “why do we want it, and what will we do with the result?” Only then does it make sense to choose.
Customer journey design always involves balancing what the customer ideally wants against what the business can or must do. Where do you see the biggest points of friction and how do you deal with them?
Customer journey design is always a balancing act. It would be naive to claim the customer always wins. Companies have their constraints regulatory requirements, commercial priorities. That’s reality.
But the biggest friction I repeatedly see isn’t between the customer and the company. It’s inside the company itself when the team can’t agree on what actually matters to the customer.
The most powerful tool is simple: ask. Customer data is an argument that’s very hard to ignore. When ten out of ten customers tell you something isn’t working, it’s difficult to defend the opposite. Data doesn’t make decisions for you, but it gives you the courage to make the right one.
You’ve also taught CX at the Prague School of Creative Communication. What did you enjoy most about teaching and what did students say that stopped you in your tracks and made you think differently?
Teaching taught me something I’d probably underestimated before. CX can’t be taught in isolation. To truly understand customer experience, you need to understand the context around it project management, the financial logic of a business, commercial priorities. Without that, CX remains an abstract concept.
And then there was a recurring moment that made me think. Students very often didn’t distinguish between customer experience and customer service. For many of them, the two were the same thing. And yet they’re fundamentally different disciplines. Customer service deals with a situation that has already occurred. Customer experience works to ensure that situation doesn’t occur in the first place or that the whole journey leading to it is different. I ended up spending far more time on that distinction than I had originally planned.
Some product categories are ones customers don’t seek out with enthusiasm they simply need them. How do you build an emotional connection to a brand in that environment, when the starting point isn’t excitement but necessity?
Insurance is an interesting case. Customers typically show up either when something has gone wrong or because they simply have to. Enthusiasm is hard to find.
But that’s precisely why CX matters so much in this segment. When products are essentially comparable, the way you treat your customer is one of the few places where you can genuinely differentiate. I’ve seen customers call in angry and leave as brand ambassadors not because we solved the problem quickly, but because we took them seriously. That’s the kind of magic no product can deliver on its own.
People don’t remember how much they paid for their policy. They remember how the company treated them when it was hard.
You’ve said that great CX only happens when the whole company is involved from sales to customer support. In practice, that’s one of the hardest things to achieve. What’s the single most effective mechanism or ritual you’ve seen for making CX everyone’s responsibility, not just one department’s?
One mechanism isn’t enough. CX across the whole company is more about layers.
The most fundamental is bringing the customer inside. Through focus groups or interviews, and opening those up to anyone in the company who’s interested. When someone from finance or IT hears a customer directly, their perspective shifts.
One thing that worked particularly well was getting leadership involved in gathering feedback. When a senior leader personally calls customers and asks about their experience, it sends a signal through the organisation that no internal campaign can replicate.
And then there are things that build culture gradually regular open meetings that anyone could join, or a CX Heroes programme where anyone in the company could be nominated. The goal was to show that customer experience isn’t delivered by one department. It’s delivered by everyone.
The SME segment is a relatively underexplored topic in CX. Retail customers bring emotion, enterprise customers bring budget. Where does the SME client actually sit and what makes them distinct from a customer experience perspective?
The SME segment is more complex than it first appears. And that’s precisely why it gets underestimated so often.
One person buys the product, but someone else entirely uses it day to day. And each of them has different needs, different expectations, a different definition of what a good experience means. The person making the purchasing decision is thinking about ROI and implementation. The person using the product every day is thinking about simplicity and reliability.
In practice, this can look like a smooth onboarding, a happy manager and then a month later you discover that frontline users are barely touching the product, because nobody explained to them why they should. That’s not a product problem. It’s a CX problem that stopped at the point of signing the contract.
CX in the SME segment can’t be built around a single persona. You need to understand the whole chain of people inside that business but that’s work many vendors skip. They focus only on whoever signed the agreement.
If you had to place one bet on the single biggest shift in CX over the next two to three years something concrete, not AI as a buzzword what would it be?
I’d bet on personalisation. Not as a buzzword, but as a genuine shift in how companies work with customer data.
Today, most companies know quite a lot about their customers and behave as though they know nothing. They send the same message to everyone, clutter channels the customer doesn’t want, and ignore signals the customer sent a long time ago.
I hope we’ll finally reach a point where personalisation doesn’t mean “we’ll address you by first name in an email.” It will mean that if you prefer to communicate by phone, nobody will message you. That if you need one click, you won’t get a five-step process. That the offer you receive will be relevant, because the company genuinely understands where you are in that journey.
It’s already happening at a global level. In the Czech market, we’re still waiting but I think that shift is coming.
And finally what genuinely frustrates you about the CX industry? What’s the biggest piece of nonsense or cliché that keeps getting recycled at conferences but simply doesn’t hold up in practice?
You know what really gets to me? The entire industry has got used to confusing the tool with the outcome.
At every conference, people talk about metrics, about how to word a survey question, about how to nudge a score up by a few points. And all of it misses the point entirely.
CX isn’t about measurement. It’s about running the business. Customer experience has to be part of the strategy not as a nice add-on, but as the way a company thinks about its direction.
There are plenty of people out there calling themselves CX experts. But when you get into the detail with them, you find they’re focused on survey wording. Not on what to do with the results. Not on how to convince leadership to change. Not on how to actually move the business forward.
We confuse the tool with the outcome. And then wonder why nothing changes.
