When your frontline employees are burned out, your customers feel it long before your performance reports show what’s happening. The stress that accumulates across back-to-back customer interactions does not stay with the employee. It impacts the customer in multiple ways.
I recently spoke to Jennifer Lee, President and Co-CEO of IntraDiem, about why employee well-being is not a parallel initiative to customer experience strategy; It is the foundation of Doing CX Right. We explored why companies stay transactional even when the evidence against it is clear, how technology can detect employee stress signals in real time without ever listening to a call, and what leaders need to do before making any decisions about how frontline employees work. The conversation also covered where AI belongs in a service model that still requires humans at its center, and why deploying technology without a thoughtful escalation plan produces the opposite of the results leaders are looking for.
What You Will Learn by Listening To This Podcast Episode
- Why the emotional state of your frontline employees is the leading indicator of your customer experience quality
- How emotions manifest as agent behaviors that customers detect before supervisors do
- What operational signals predict burnout before it produces attrition or a damaged customer interaction
- How machine learning detects compounding stress in real time without accessing call content
- Why deploying more technology without understanding frontline workload intensifies the problem
- How to orchestrate AI and human service delivery across channels without sacrificing experience quality
- What leaders must do before making any changes to how frontline employees work
Show Timestamps
- 0:00 – Introduction and Welcome
- 1:00 – What Doing CX Right Actually Means
- 2:30 – Why Companies Are Losing Top Talent and Customers
- 4:00 – Emotions in Business: What Skeptical Leaders Need to Hear
- 5:00 – Why Companies Stay Transactional Even When They Know Better
- 7:00 – When a Tech Company Says Too Much Tech Is the Problem
- 9:00 – Data Silos and the 15-Screen Reality
- 11:00 – How IntraDiem Reads Burnout Signals Without Listening to Calls
- 14:00 – Compounding Stress, Micro-Breaks, and Wellness Interventions
- 17:00 – Customer Sentiment and Real-Time AI Assistance for Agents
- 20:00 – The Future of CX: Orchestrating AI and Humans
- 22:00 – Emotional Altitude and Journey Mapping
- 23:00 – Key Takeaway: Go Live a Day in Their World
- 25:00 – Best Leadership Advice: Clarity Is Kindness
- 26:00 – Advice to a 20-Year-Old Self: Keep Learning
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does employee well-being directly affect customer experience?
Emotions produce behaviors, and behaviors produce experiences. When frontline employees carry accumulated stress from back-to-back interactions, that state registers in every customer conversation that follows.
Addressing employee well-being is not a parallel program to customer experience improvement. It is the starting point for it.
What is compounding stress, and why does it matter in contact centers?
Compounding stress is the accumulation of stress across consecutive interactions without a recovery point between them. Each new interaction begins at a higher baseline because stress does not fully dissipate when one call ends.
Inserting a micro-break before stress reaches a critical threshold disrupts that cycle and restores an agent’s capacity to deliver quality service.
How can technology detect frontline burnout without listening to customer calls?
Machine learning models observe operational signals from systems already running in a contact center, the automated call distributor, and the workforce management system. Agent behavior within those systems, combined with queue data such as occupancy rates and call handle times, gives the model enough signal to identify when a critical burnout threshold has been reached.
No call content is accessed. The signal comes entirely from how agents move through the operational environment around them.
What is the right role for AI in customer service?
AI is most effective when deployed with specific channel decisions, clear escalation thresholds, and real-time sentiment detection that identifies when an interaction should transfer to a human agent.
Treating AI as a solution that eliminates the need for human judgment creates the opposite outcome. When customers reach frustration and find no clear path to a human, the experience deteriorates, and the cost falls on the agents handling the escalations that follow.
What should leaders do before changing how frontline employees work?
Spend meaningful time observing the actual work before making any decisions. Sitting with frontline employees for a full shift, experiencing how they navigate real calls, real systems, and real customer situations back to back, produces better decisions than any operational summary can.
Once you understand the conditions your team is working in, involve them in any changes before those changes are deployed.
Final Thoughts
The leaders who treat employee well-being as a separate initiative from customer experience are managing two problems that are actually one. What your frontline employees feel in the moment of service delivery is what your customers remember from that interaction. That is not a soft claim. The data now exists to act on it earlier than most leaders realize.
As I always say, Emotion IS the Experience℠. When you build your service model around that truth, inserting technology where it reduces burden and humans where they create connection, you stop reacting to attrition and customer loss and start designing against them. The tools exist, and using them thoughtfully is a decision every leader can make right now.
If this episode changed how you think about the relationship between your employees and your customers, share it with one leader in your organization who needs to hear it.
Listen to the full conversation on the Doing CX Right℠ podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more leaders find this content.
Read Full Episode Transcript
Stacy Sherman: Hello, Jenn, welcome to the Doing CX Right show.
Jennifer Lee: Thank you, Stacy. It’s great to be here.
Stacy Sherman: I am so honored to have this conversation with you and I also was fortunate enough to speak at your event and get to know you in person and even the company. So let’s start with you. Who are you? What do you do professionally, Jen?
Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so I’m Jen Lee, I’m President and Co-CEO at IntraDiem. We do dynamic workforce orchestration for CX teams across frontlines and back offices. I started my career actually on the frontlines, so I began my career as an agent handling customer service calls, and have lived most of my 25-year career in that space. So it’s very near and dear to me.
Stacy Sherman: I love that you said that because so often people are in roles and they don’t know the other side, and yet they’re expected to lead without having really experienced it.
Jennifer Lee: Right. And particularly those frontline customer service roles, I really think everybody should work in some kind of frontline service role for a period of their career because you just cannot grasp how complex and stressful and difficult it is until you experience it yourself.
Stacy Sherman: Well, speaking of experiences, since this is the Doing CX Right show, what does doing customer experience right mean to you from where you sit and your experiences?
Jennifer Lee: So to me, doing customer experience right really means recognizing that a great customer experience is created by a great employee experience. And I know we talk about the sync between EX and CX quite a bit, but I feel perhaps lately we’re starting to lose sight of that. We’re looking at technology to solve problems and often forgetting the human in the middle of this or on either side of it. And so it’s really about supporting the employee experience in an effective, proactive way so that they can provide the best possible experience to the customer.
Stacy Sherman: So many leaders are saying to me, Stacy, we are losing our top talent. We’re losing customers. Why do you see that happening as a trend right now? What’s the core problem?
Jennifer Lee: So burnout is higher than ever, and particularly in the frontline. There was a study, I think it was UKG, where 75% of frontline workers were reporting extremely elevated levels of burnout, and it jumps up to 83% when you talk about Gen Z, those that are newer to the workforce. So burnout is real and it manifests itself in poor customer experiences and in employee attrition. People are tired and work, particularly frontline work, is more stressful now than it’s ever been.
Stacy Sherman: So you are talking about tired, stressful, emotions. Emotions in business. And I love that you’re bringing this out because I believe that we need to create more positive emotional connections at every interaction, and yet a lot of leaders are saying, emotions, they’re fluffy. What do you say to those skeptics?
Jennifer Lee: So two things. First, at a very human level, as a leader, you absolutely should care about how your employees feel about the work that they’re doing. And from a business perspective, if you don’t care at the human level, emotions manifest as behaviors. When your employee behaviors are reflecting their emotions and those emotions are negative, that’s bleeding into your customer experience, that’s translating to your customers. So those behaviors are actually impacting your business. Everything we do as humans is rooted in our emotions. All of our behavior is based on how we feel. If you’re not addressing that, you’re creating a situation in which negative emotions can manifest as behaviors that translate to poor experiences for your customers and they will impact your business.
Stacy Sherman: So before we get into detecting those signals of negative emotions, why are companies so transactional? Because that is the norm. I’ve lived it. You probably have in your career, and I see it still happening. If you and I both know that emotions matter and belong in business, why is it so transactional?
Jennifer Lee: I think there are two reasons. The first reason is that it’s really hard. It requires more work from you as a leader. Part of the burden of leadership is you carry the weight of the burdens of your team. And in order to be a great leader, you have to be willing to carry that weight. The second reason is that it becomes uncomfortable to address emotions. A lot of us were not raised to be comfortable with our emotions, and so it’s a lot more comfortable for leaders to focus on metrics and KPIs and numbers, which translates to transactional. At my company our philosophy is people first. We stand up in front of our customers and tell them our people are first. We are proving that if you do that, they take care of your customers. And your customers then do business with you and that takes care of your shareholders.
Stacy Sherman: I want to praise you and your team for a second, because I remember before I got on stage at your event, you were talking about the fact that it’s not about throwing so much tech at the solutions, yet you’re a tech company. I really loved the fact that you are walking the talk about human interaction where technology enables and supports.
Jennifer Lee: I know it seems counterintuitive to have a CEO of a tech company saying too much tech is a bad thing, but I really truly do believe that. I was on the frontlines and I remember what it was like when new tools were thrown at us without proper thought or care to the impact, and we were just expected to absorb them. It honestly just became another stressor. Technology has its place and can do incredible things for the industry, but if we believe technology is a panacea that can fix everything and we forget that customer service is fundamentally a human interaction, we’re going to go rapidly downhill.
Stacy Sherman: I remember being in the room with clients and asking everyone, how much technology do you have? Is it three tools, ten tools, fifteen tools? And everybody was laughing because it was like 20, 25 tools. It’s funny, but it’s not, because it’s causing data silos.
Jennifer Lee: That’s such a great point. The more tools you deploy, you unintentionally create silos. Often within one customer interaction you’ve got these different siloed experiences because of different tools, and then there’s still the human on the other side trying to navigate that. They’re bouncing between 15 different screens for one customer interaction trying to solve a problem. It’s incredibly stressful, and when they’re stressed, the customer feels it. So it’s full circle.
Stacy Sherman: You have a way to pick up on those signals so that leaders can actually listen, pay attention, and prevent losing those profitable customers, not just the top talent. Talk about how that works.
Jennifer Lee: So what we do is we observe with machine learning all of what I would call the operational signals that surround a customer service experience. We’re monitoring the behaviors. We don’t even have to listen to the interaction. Our machine learning model can detect when an employee is moving from one level of burnout to another, all the way up to a critical level where we can predict with a minimum of 80% accuracy that if somebody reaches that critical level, they will leave the organization. In real time we’re monitoring these signals from all of those systems. We pull in all of these disparate pieces of data, normalize them, and then analyze them with our machine learning model. We then provide those predictions in real time to supervisors and to the agents themselves so that they can intervene in the compounding stress that leads to burnout.
Stacy Sherman: What is the technology looking for? Is it words? Tone of voice? How does that work?
Jennifer Lee: We don’t even have to hear the tone or the words. With technology today, you can run these models based on signals that don’t require you to listen to the interaction, which is great from a privacy perspective. In a call center, we look at data that comes from the ACD, the automated call distributor, and the WFM system, the workforce management system. We observe the agent’s behavior in those systems. For example, if an agent is incredibly stressed after a number of back-to-back calls, they may take themselves out of the queue so they won’t get another call. If we see an agent doing that over and over, that’s a sign they’re super stressed. The model takes that signal plus others, such as how long calls are lasting and what the occupancy level is. Occupancy is the amount of time a call center agent is spending actually speaking with a customer. If that’s too high and those other behaviors are happening, there’s a very high likelihood of burnout.
Stacy Sherman: And then it becomes the role of human leadership to take that data and do something effective with it.
Jennifer Lee: That’s right. One of the first things we tell our customers is, go talk to that person. Go check in on them, or ping them if you’re remote. There’s neuroscience behind the effects of compounding stress that shows that stress doesn’t just immediately go away. It lives in our bodies and in our nervous systems. The stress of one call plus another call builds and builds. The best thing you can do is insert what’s called a micro-break or a reset in the middle of that compounding stress. It’s like catching a snowball before it rolls downhill and becomes gigantic. We deliver what we call wellness breaks through our platform. We can ping the supervisor and say we think this person needs a wellness break. We deliver a two-minute, five-minute, or ten-minute wellness break. It’s amazing the difference that can make for people to come back recharged.
Stacy Sherman: I love that wellness meets customer experience, like the world is combining. Those are two passions of mine. And it’s not the future. It’s here now and essential. I notice that customer sentiments are also important when it comes to ratings and reviews and social media, and how companies actually respond. People are watching. Are you noticing that technology is amplifying that as much as I see?
Jennifer Lee: I sure do. Sentiment analysis is another great use of the technology. When it first came out, it was helpful but it was post-interaction. You’d get a report from the day before. That’s good, but it doesn’t help the customer that experienced that frustrating moment. What can happen now, and our platform doesn’t do this but there are many great ones that do, is detect that sentiment in real time from the customer and take action by helping the agent, getting assistance from a supervisor. Now you can intervene in the moment and drive a better experience.
Stacy Sherman: I’m encouraging people to spend time listening to other episodes on my show because I have guests that are really exploring how to detect sentiments, because AI is now using that to amplify and recommend within ChatGPT, Gemini, and other channels. Are you seeing that trend as well?
Jennifer Lee: Absolutely. A lot of our customers are focused on what I call the internal-facing AI, much more so than the external-facing. They’re turning on AI assistants for their employees, which can listen and, if done appropriately so that it’s not bombarding the employee with information, can suggest and prompt and direct the employee for how to navigate a frustrated customer situation. I would just say, don’t bombard with it. You can overdo it. It’s about understanding what you really want to address and when you want that intervention, because otherwise you’re hurting your employee experience if you’re bombarding them with information when they’re already trying to do a tough job.
Stacy Sherman: Any other trends you are seeing, predicting, and actions leaders need to take right now to stay competitive?
Jennifer Lee: I do think it’s realistic to believe that the future of CX will be delivered by a combination of AI and humans. Leaders should right now be doing the hard work to understand where and how they should orchestrate work across AI and humans, not just throwing AI into the mix. If you’re going to deploy AI to your customers, then you should really understand at what point there is an escalation to a human. Make sure that point is before the customer reaches a level of frustration. Deploy it with conversational analytics and sentiment analysis so you can really know when to get this customer to a human. Assess the different channels where your customers are interacting with you and figure out which channels make the most sense to deploy that technology and which ones to wait on, because if you get it wrong in one channel, it bleeds over into the other.
Stacy Sherman: And I would add the power of journey mapping so that you can literally design that peak emotion. I call it emotional altitude, and you can measure that across the journey and plan for where to insert human and where to insert AI, from where they learn, buy, get, use, pay, and get help in a very methodical way.
Jennifer Lee: I love emotional altitude. That’s a great way of putting it.
Stacy Sherman: Rapid fire questions. What is the most important key takeaway you want people to go do?
Jennifer Lee: Go live a day in their world before you make any decisions about the changes you want to make in how they work, because it really is wildly different on the frontline than sitting here as leaders observing the metrics and the KPIs. Once you do that, then go find the tools. Then you understand the needs. Then you know what you need to solve for. But if you don’t do the first one first, you’re going to end up falling off the CX cliff, which is technology, technology, technology, innovation, innovation, innovation, meanwhile your customer experience and your employee experience are dropping off of a cliff.
Stacy Sherman: I would add, recognize that your team has fear, real fear of technology and AI for many reasons. And so don’t ignore that. Educate them. Support them. Because the fear is an emotion and we already went into why you have to pay attention.
Jennifer Lee: Yes. Bring them along. Don’t sit in a room and design this without the people that are impacted.
Stacy Sherman: Best leadership advice you’ve ever received or given?
Jennifer Lee: Clarity is kindness. There were times early in my career where I thought I was being kind by not addressing an issue with an employee, and I remember one of my mentors saying, you can be kind and still be clear and provide clarity. It is much better for people to understand when they’re going wrong. It’s your job as a leader to intervene and help them understand than to sit back and let them believe they’re succeeding when they’re not. I call it compassionate candor. You underpin it with empathy and kindness and a true desire to see the other person succeed. You can be direct and compassionate at the same time.
Stacy Sherman: Absolutely both, and not either or. And my last question. I’ve asked over 200 people. If you could go back in time and talk to your younger 20-year-old self, based on what you know now that you didn’t know then, what would you say to the younger Jen?
Jennifer Lee: I would say hang in there. Keep doing what you do, which is learning. I believe my superpower is learning. I love to learn and I’m always focused on learning. Keep that hunger, that curiosity, that desire to learn, and it will come together and make sense for you because 20 years ago I don’t know that I thought I had a path. I certainly didn’t think I had a path to where I am today.
Stacy Sherman: I love that. Thank you so much for being here today. I am grateful for our reconnection, and the audience will want to connect with you, so all the details will be in the show notes. Thank you again very much for being here.
Jennifer Lee: Thank you, Stacy. I really enjoyed it and it’s great to reconnect with you after the event.
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About Jennifer Lee
Jennifer has 20 years of experience in the contact center industry, with more than 15 years as a people leader. Throughout her career, Jennifer has served in a variety of roles in the contact center space, including operations, quality, workforce management, and client services. As President and Co-CEO, Jennifer leads the operations and people management of the organization. Before this role, Jennifer has served as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, and has led the Customer Success organization. Connect on LinkedIn.
About Stacy Sherman:
Stacy Sherman is an award-winning international Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) who has delivered more than 100 standing ovation keynotes and workshops and co-authored best-selling books on Experience Management for sustainable success.
She developed a proprietary framework that enables leaders and teams to enhance revenue and brand reputation. Her proven methodology is based on her MBA degree and 25 years of leadership in sales, marketing, employee, and customer experience across diverse industries, including Verizon, AT&T, Schindler Elevator Corporation, Wilton Brands, Martha Stewart Crafts, and LiveOps, generating $2.4 billion in savings and hundreds of millions in revenue.
Stacy has earned widespread recognition for her award-winning “Doing CX Right” podcast, ranked in the top 2% globally with over 200 episodes, as well as her courses on LinkedIn Learning, which have garnered hundreds of 5-star reviews. A multi-year Global CX Guru awardee and 2026 ICMI Hall of Fame inductee, Stacy’s insights have been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, Yahoo News, and other leading publications.
