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Leadership

CX Teams Move Faster When Customers and Frontline Staff Help Shape Programs From the Start

Wellabe AVP of Customer Experience & Innovation Susan Kelly, a 2026 Top 50 CX honoree, explains how customer panels and frontline agents help insurers get new tools right.

ByCresta News Desk

Oct 29, 2026

CX teams move faster and spend less fixing mistakes when the customers and frontline staff who’ll live with a new program help shape it from the start. Customers can flag which problems matter most before the money’s committed. Agents, who hear the confused calls first, can spot what’ll trip people up before a tool goes live. Bringing both in early means less rework after launch.

Susan Kelly is Assistant Vice President of Customer Experience and Innovation at Wellabe, an insurer whose supplemental health and advance funeral planning coverage serves many older adults. Her work in the field landed her a spot in CX Current’s 2026 Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX, named an "Interpreter" for the leaders who catch the customer signals everyone else misses and turn them into a force for change. We sat down with her to dig into how her team builds CX programs with customers and frontline staff in the room from day one. Kelly came up through service operations and later wrote the strategy that created Wellabe’s first dedicated customer experience team, and those early frontline years still shape how the team decides what to build.

"If we’re building solutions for the end user, we have to start with the end user. Boots on the ground, talk to them, let them have a seat at the table," Kelly says. Customer input carries the most weight while a project’s direction is still open. Kelly puts that into practice at Wellabe, where her team asks customers to weigh in on new programs during planning.

Customers in the room

Internal data often sets the direction for new CX programs. Claims figures and usage reports describe past activity, and they leave open whether customers want what a team is planning. Kelly encourages CX leaders to test that direction by talking with customers first. A standing group of customers makes that check easier to repeat, since teams can return to the same people as a project develops.

At Wellabe, that group is the Be Well Buddies program. It started with 25 customers, each paired with an employee, who met in small monthly video calls. The program has since grown to about 1,000 customers who take part in interviews and digital surveys and get early access to new features. Their input shaped Wellabe Rewards, which gives customers points for health activities such as reading wellness articles or following workout and meditation videos. Buddies helped choose the rewards to offer, then tested the platform over video calls while Kelly’s team watched them navigate it.

Ongoing relationships also surface context that a survey can miss. "Sometimes you’re just having a conversation about their life and the things they go through day to day. It’s been truly eye-opening to build programs and solutions for that audience," Kelly says.

Those conversations carry extra value for employees who rarely hear from customers directly. Developers and data scientists often work behind the scenes, with fewer chances to talk with the people their work serves. "Data scientists don’t always get the frontline experience. It gives them that opportunity to put faces with names behind the work that we’re doing," she notes.

One team from the start

CX projects draw on many skill sets, and those skills usually sit in separate departments. Each handoff between teams adds time, and problems can slip through when no one sees the full picture. A CX team that brings different specialties under one roof can move from plan to finished product with fewer delays. Kelly’s team at Wellabe includes communications staff, developers, data scientists and service operations. With all of those backgrounds working side by side, each group understands how its work connects to the others.

Because the team works together from the start, everyone also helps test what it builds. On one major program, the whole team tested each new release. Communications staff knew exactly what was coming, so they could explain it clearly. Data scientists helped decide how to measure success. "Everybody had a piece of the pie. We win or lose as a team," Kelly says.

Having service operations on the team brings the front line into that process, and the benefit runs both ways. Service agents are the first to hear when something confuses customers, so they can flag likely problems while a tool is still in development. Trainers and other respected agents who sit in on planning also bring what they learn back to their teams, so agents are ready to answer questions on launch day. "They’re the ones on the front line. They should know, and somebody should be at that table saying, 'This is the stuff I’m going to get a call on if you put that out there in front of our customers,'" Kelly notes.

Shared ownership like this works best when the team is made up of people who want that responsibility. Kelly looks for people who adapt quickly to change and want to own the customer experience as much as she does. She also brings her team into hiring. Peers interview candidates before she does, and she asks them whether each person would work well with the group. The people who will work alongside a new hire every day are often the best judges of whether that person will commit to the work. "A resume will tell you a lot. Gut feel will tell you even more," she adds.

Faster release cycles

Long development timelines slow how quickly customer feedback turns into changes people can see. A new app once could take a year to build. Many insurers and CX teams now shorten launch cycles and release updates every few weeks. Each cycle is another chance to fold in what customers and service agents have flagged, so feedback can shape a product at every stage of development. Kelly’s team works on a two-week cycle, and AI-assisted coding helps it keep that pace. "What used to take a developer months, we can get done in a fraction of the time because they’re able to use AI to help them advance their code and get it out the door quicker," she says.

People come to a portal or app with a specific task in mind, and they don’t all look for information the same way. A smooth experience gets them what they came for in a click or two, without scrolling through multiple pages. Getting there means reviewing data on why customers visit and designing around those needs. More insurers are adding UX designers to do that work, and Kelly made the role part of her team early on. That focus guides Wellabe’s new customer portal, which serves a policyholder base Kelly puts at about one million people.

Keeping pace with customers

The work of bringing customers and frontline staff in doesn’t end once a tool goes live. Customer needs keep shifting, and a tool that fits them today may miss the mark a year from now. "Customer demands are ever-changing. You can’t just set it and forget it with digital tools or strategy anymore," Kelly says.

Kelly also looks for ideas beyond insurance. Some start in customer conversations and take shape at healthcare, technology and startup events. At a recent rural healthcare conference, for example, she weighed how an insurer might help customers who live hundreds of miles from the nearest provider. Developments in other industries also raise customer expectations for every service, including insurance. "Our customers today will be different than the customers that exist tomorrow. It’s just constantly evolving," she adds.