The Gist
- Pinning down purpose. Mandi Fang’s team uses small symbols—like an onboarding pin—to embed a big cultural mission across 2,000 employees.
- Frontline-first innovation. Cox Automotive’s Five-Star program turns contact center insights into company-wide action through ride-alongs and AI analytics.
- Where EX meets CX. From recognition programs to KPI wins, Fang shows how empowering employees directly improves customer satisfaction and efficiency.
In our latest installment of CMSWire TV’s Beyond the Call, Mandi Fang, senior vice president of client operations at Cox Automotive and the recipient of the CMSWire 2025 Impact Award for Customer Experience Leader of the Year, shares the journey behind Cox Automotive’s “Five-Star Service” initiative.
With a team of 2,000 employees across implementation and support roles, Fang explains how symbols, systems and storytelling come together to improve both customer and employee experience. The conversation covers agent empowerment, AI call analytics, frontline advocacy and the measurable impact of culture on KPIs.
Table of Contents
Building the Five-Star Service Framework
Uniting 14 Brands Under One Identity
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Okay, awesome. Well, let’s get into that. You mentioned earlier that Five-Star Service—we know about it. Our judges know about it when they named you Customer Experience Leader of the Year. Congrats again. Let’s get into that. What is that program? How is it embedded into the culture of Cox Automotive? And at the end of the day, what kind of outcomes are you getting there?
Mandi Fang: Yeah, so I started to talk a little bit about the journey. We started with 14 brands that we had. And I think something you might be able to appreciate is just in bringing companies together, there are processes that have driven their business for any number of years. And what I realized is we could spend all of our time bringing processes to be more consistent, trying to understand how to culturally change people and their behaviors and what we want for the customer. We could be doing that work full time—and we were.
And I had this moment, I was really kind of just thinking about the transformation, and I was like, this is the work we will continue to do and it’s important, but we have to have something more. We have to have something that unites all of these team members into something—a common identity, if you will.
Serving 2,000 Employees With Consistency and Care
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Is there roughly 2,000 of them? Distributed employees? Wow.
Mandi Fang: Yeah, yeah, there are. And so, yeah, people always say, isn’t that overwhelming? And I have less than some people, more than others. And for me, I honestly try not to think about that. I try to think about what can I be doing every day that makes their lives easier so that they can serve the client. It’s the greatest privilege. It is the greatest privilege.
Back to what I’ll share with you is—as I’m thinking about these 2,000 team members, I’m thinking about what do we do to unite them? How can we create our own identity that they can adopt and start to ease from what they’ve come from and what they’ve loved into something new? And I was reading this book, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, it’s called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. I’m walking one day—I usually listen when I’m walking—and his book really starts to talk about the difference between service and what I have to do every day to deliver a service.
From Tasks to Hospitality
Mandi Fang: When I answer the phone, I’ve got 10 things I have to do. That’s part of the service I provide my client when I answer the phone. But he also distinguishes this moment of hospitality and how you go about creating these special connections. It really resonated. I thought, I never really considered client operations in hospitality—kind of literally—but the message resonated so much I thought, we have something here that I believe we can build from.
And that’s where Five Star came from. It was this idea that we could create better connections. We could create a framework that had these distinct parts that each meant something and that everything we did would flow through this framework in order to help us grow into that common identity—or a battle cry, however you want to think about it.
Related Article: What’s Behind the Best and Worst Customer Service Strategies?
Turning Culture Into Practice
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I’ve been talking in B2B journalism for years—I’ve been hearing “build a culture, build a culture.” And I just don’t—I think that must be the hardest thing to do in a business. Hardest thing to do.
But you’re building that culture as a foundation for Five-Star Service. So what does that look like in practice? How is this culture embedded among those 2,000 or so employees? And then ultimately, how does that translate into great customer experience?
The Five-Star Framework and Its Pillars
Mandi Fang: Yeah. I’ll say that we recognized that with 2,000 team members, there’s 2,000 opinions, 2,000 ways of doing things, and that the framework would really only get you so far. So let me just tell you the parts of the framework because I think that’ll help us in the conversation. And I have my pin on today—but it’s knowledge…
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Employees get a pin? Employees get a pin?
Mandi Fang: Yeah. So I’ll tell you—knowledge, process, technology…
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Did you get a shirt?
Mandi Fang: I got a shirt. This is simply me. So that’s pretty cool, but I don’t have a pin. Hello? All right—we got one coming for you. We got one coming for you.
Embedding the Program Into Onboarding and Leadership
Mandi Fang: So the five pillars only work because the team member is in the center. And we knew that the center of the star, if you will—or where the people portion lives—would be the anchor. It would be the thing that made it work. And if we could get the right focus and programs in the center, we would have a great start.
The experience that we do today—so when someone is hired, there’s two parts. When someone’s hired, they get a kit and they get their pin. They will go through training, they will talk about the goals with their manager, so that we get everyone aligned as a new hire. And you might say, okay, what about everybody else? Yes, everybody else was indeed just as big of a lift as everyone.
So we did two things for the different groups. We have our people leaders who really have the hard job of promoting it, ingraining the culture within everything they do. So we did brown bag sessions where we gave them training. We taught them how to think about Five-Star ways that maybe they weren’t, and then they brought their own ideas. And so they created this own network of camaraderie around Five Star that allowed them to talk about it and ingrain that culture.
Related Article: Customer Experience Transformation: A Strategic Imperative for Leadership
Creating Advocacy Through the Advisory Board
Mandi Fang: But on the other side, we created a 40-person advisory board. And the reason that we did that—and most of those people are frontline team members—is because the frontline team members are the majority of who serves our clients and make up most of our organization. These 40 team members serve as advocates. They serve as listeners. When they would hear—and we would hear—“I’m already doing this. I already provide great service.” And that is all true. That is all true.
But this advisory board helps us craft the program in a way that listens, reacts to, creates new programs and new talk tracks for everybody to try to find their voice. There’s a lot more we’ll talk about as we get into it, but those are some of the foundations.
Who Are the Frontline Team Members?
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, tell me more about those frontline team members now. What’s the makeup of that crew? Is that like sales reps going out to the field, or is that contact center? Like, how does that look?
Leveraging the Front Line for CX Innovation
Two Core Functions of Client Operations
Mandi Fang: Yeah, so we have kind of two core functions. One is implementation. So if you think about in the dealership when they buy software from Cox Automotive, somebody has to go and turn it on. And that’s configuring it, training it, making sure utilization is where it needs to be. So we are that arm for our organization. And that’s about 800 team members.
And then we have all the people—so once the software is installed, we have all the people that pick the phone up, both for internal team members and our clients, to answer technical questions, how-to questions. And that’s another 800 or so that do that function. So now you might see that these are the people—feet on the street. Feet on the street.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, and those people who handle the calls—that’s a formalized contact center slash call center setup, maybe distributed or work from home. But if you’re envisioning that traditional setup, it’s people handling phones all day. Those people are a gold mine of customer insights. Who knows what’s on the customer’s mind better?
Mandi Fang: All day, all day, every day.
Creating Visibility With Ride-Alongs
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: You must be wanting to leverage their insights day after day. Is there a way to formalize that—whether it’s capturing voice, phone, or text analytics?
Mandi Fang: Yes. So I want to share two things with you that I think might help answer that question. The first one—we developed what we call a ride-along program. We will often get asked, “Hey, I’d like to see what your people do, a day in the life.” And so we had an amazing team put together a ride-along program. Anyone in our company can submit a form to sit with a phone agent and listen to calls.
I did it when we had more of an in-office presence—our call centers are now remote—but I would go down once a month and sit with a team member. I can tell you firsthand, we got on the phone and I was listening to a call. There was a problem I heard the agent mention—“we haven’t solved that yet.” When the call ended, I asked, “Why haven’t we solved that yet?” It was maybe a button that wasn’t working properly on the screen.
I called our product team and said, “Hey, is this on the list anywhere?” And they said, “Coincidentally, it’s been fixed—it just hasn’t been released yet.” So being able to make those connections and take something that the agent was getting calls on, and knowing that help was on the way, allowed us to improve communication between departments. It allowed that team member to know that these are real issues, and we are solving them.
Scaling Innovation Through ICONiC
Mandi Fang: The second thing I’ll share is that we just launched in February a new program called ICONiC—Implementing Client Operations New Ideas Portal. This is a way for our entire organization, at every level, to submit ideas that go through a system by which they are evaluated. They are either moved to activate or—if not feasible—they reach a termination point. Then there’s a third bucket: the “big rocks.” These are ideas so significant they require resources or budget to execute.
We’ve just launched it, and I’m happy to say we already have 170+ ideas from the front line. Those are the ways, Dom, that we’re trying to get that front line closer to everything we do.
Scaling Front-Line Communication and Insights
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: That to me is like in-the-trenches blocking and tackling. That’s like your alignment on a football team, and you’re telling them, “Hey, number 75 is cutting us to the end—we need to shift.” That’s amazing to get those one-on-one insights. And in that anecdote you gave us, it seemed like there was a missed opportunity to communicate back to the frontline that the problem had been fixed.
Mandi Fang: Correct.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: That’s great—the one-on-one sort of intimate interactions. But how do you scale that? Because Mandi Fang would love to sit with all those contact center agents and keep learning, but you can’t do that every day. How do you scale that digitally? Is there a platform that helps you analyze all the calls and relay that back to product teams?
Using AI to Extract and Act on Call Insights
Mandi Fang: Yeah, so we have a system—we have a couple of things. ICONiC is really our mechanism for consistency that we want to put forward and give everyone the opportunity to contribute to. And I get your point—sometimes in the heat of the moment, you really need to get that answer.
So we also have, in our client support organization, a discipline by which the calls are evaluated. We use AI, as many call center leaders do, to look for moments in the calls. Most recently, you might be curious—we looked at tariffs. It’s in the news everywhere, and you can’t really escape hearing about tariffs.
So we were able to look at, for example, how often tariffs are being discussed, what work is associated with tariffs or price changes—like Ford’s employee pricing program. It helps us understand not only what our agents are being asked to do, but also the tools they need to get that done. And that is how we’re using technology to help expedite the things we’re hearing over and over again—and take action on them.
Where AI Helps Most in CX Operations
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Is that your biggest AI use case—where the rubber really hits the road? AI is actually tangibly helping? Because I’m always trying to get with customer support and CX leaders—where is AI helping you the most? Is that the shining star example?
Mandi Fang: It really is what I’ll call table stakes. It’s table stakes. I think we’ve seen more opportunity—or maybe just as much—in another area. Like many other call centers, we started using AI to transcribe calls. When we set out to solve the problem of taking some of the work off the agent at call closeout—summarizing the interaction—we thought transcription would be a game changer.
If the agent’s only real job is to review how well the AI did in the transcription, and determine whether it’s enough for someone to understand the case later, then that’s a win. And we’re doing that. But I’ll be honest—it didn’t hit the business case we thought it would. That was just learning. There’s nothing wrong with it—it was just learning.
But what it really did was build a foundation for us to build on top of. We have a roadmap. And interestingly, one of the things Five Star helped us do was not lead with, “Hey, here’s a bunch of AI, let’s stuff it in.” Instead, with our technology partners, it’s more about identifying problems we need to solve—and then asking whether AI or other tech would be the right solution.
Connecting Employee Experience and Customer Success
Why the Pin Matters
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: When you’re talking about this effort to improve the agent experience, that’s such a big point of discussion in the customer experience world—powering those agents. And it ties back to where employee experience meets customer.
To me, it seems like—and I asked you, how are you building the culture?—and literally, one of the first things you do is give them the pin that you’re wearing right there. It might sound like a small thing, but I think that’s a major thing to literally give them the pin so that, at the very front and center part of their job, right off the bat—day one, day two—they get this and they say, “This is what we stand for.” Because I feel like new employees are in the dark for so many weeks. What is this company really about? Who are these people?
You’re trying to figure it out, but right off the bat you’re like, “This is what we stand for. This is what we want to envision and accomplish.”
Embedding Recognition in the Culture
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Long way to make that question short—how do you see that connection of employee experience and customer experience? Most people just say, “One leads to the other, sure.” But it sounds like you guys are really living that motto.
Mandi Fang: Well, I’ll say thank you for that. When those team members get the pin, I have the privilege of meeting with every new hire we bring into the organization. And that is part of the plan—if they hear me talk about how important Five Star is and understand their learning journey. And we use disciplines like ADCAR to understand our existing team members’ change curve and what they needed to connect to Five Star.
But a couple of things we invested in: after we give the pin and go through the change curves, we put together recognition programs. And last year alone, we had 15,000 employee-to-employee recognitions. That means 15,000 times, a team member recognized the five-star work of another team member. We have a specific emblem that we use for Five Star recognition—15,000 times they told someone, “I see you making a difference in a five-star way.”
And that catches on. When I talk to team members about it, what they say is, “I feel like I’m just doing the right thing.” And you know what, Dom? That is what we want them to do. We want them to feel empowered to do the right thing—and for it to come naturally.
Putting Money Behind Recognition
Mandi Fang: The other thing we did is re-implement a reward system. Team members can nominate, once a quarter, someone who exemplifies Five Star—anywhere on the pin. They submit it, and we pick a number of people. We’ve recently changed the program, but those selected receive a monetary award. We spent $100,000 last year recognizing significant efforts and alignment to Five Star.
In the overall budget, it’s a very small portion. But what we get back is that contagious feeling of wanting to be part of it—when your team members are advocating for it. That translates. It’s the evidence that they’re making a difference with the customer. And when you see that time and time again, it becomes contagious.
Balancing EX and CX Leadership
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: It’s no wonder nearly 100% of your team feels personally motivated by that Five Star Service initiative and culture. Here’s a serious question—if you’re explaining your job… no, better question: do you feel like you’re an employee experience leader or a customer experience leader?
You won Customer Experience Leader of the Year for CMSWire, so we know you play there. But this job is morphing into both, right?
Mandi Fang: You’re right. I believe—and there are other industry leaders who would say something similar—that if you focus on the employee and create the best experience and set them up for success, then you’ve already started to transform the customer experience because they are more engaged.
We have KPIs that show we’re not only bringing a better experience to our team members—our engagement score rose three points over the last 18 months—but also improving customer outcomes.
Driving Customer Ease and Operational Efficiency
Mandi Fang: One key indicator is our ease of doing business score. When we ask customers, “How easy are we to do business with?”—that score rose six percentage points.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Is that technically Customer Effort Score, or do you call it something different?
Mandi Fang: We technically say “ease of doing business” because it’s measured across both functions.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Gotcha.
Mandi Fang: And the third thing I’d add is that we did all of this while revamping our cost structure. We look very closely at cost-to-revenue to stay aligned with our programs. More importantly, we want to ensure we’re looking at the right efficiencies. Efficiency is kind of the wrapper around each part of the star.
We did all three—EX, CX, and cost optimization. When we took a look back, I don’t know that we thought we’d be able to move the needle on all three at once—but we did. And it’s highly rewarding. The numbers are showing us it’s playing out from the customer’s point of view.
The Road Ahead for CX and EX at Cox Automotive
Rebooting Five Star and Unifying Tech
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I love it. Mandi Fang, we could go on for another three or four hours, getting into your world. And for you to open the curtain and tell us about it—especially through the CMSWire Impact Awards and getting in front of our judges who named you Customer Experience Leader of the Year—that was really cool.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Let’s bring it home. What’s the big vision for the next six months to a year? Where do you want to take customer experience and employee experience? What’s something big that you hope to have accomplished if I come back in a year?
Mandi Fang: Yeah, I would say a couple of things. Where we are right now is in a deep reset. We’re kind of rebooting Five Star. It requires constant nurturing. We’ve seen Five Star change over the two and a half years we’ve been doing it—so constant attention and nurturing, continuing to see our adoption levels hit that 90+ percent and strong engagement.
But what we’re going through right now—and what I’d want to talk about if we meet again next year—is seeing our technology changes really start to curve upward. We’re unifying our learning management systems into one single platform. We’ll see AI take a greater role in how we train our team members.
AI in Training and Core Operations
Mandi Fang: I think that’s one of our biggest opportunities. We’re always hiring for client operations roles—those frontline team members. So embedding AI to solve that problem in a more sophisticated and meaningful way is a major focus.
You’ll also see us adopt more AI across our call centers—in functions like quality assurance and workforce management. We’re taking more of a lead there. And with Salesforce, we have a lot of common platforms. We’ve done the work. This next stage is about engaging our teams even more deeply so the team member experience is even better.
Final Thoughts and a Boston Shoutout
Celebrating Wins and Feeling Connected
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I love it. Great vision. I do have one last question. Has anyone from the Boston area won your Five Star Service initiative that you can recall?
Mandi Fang: You know, I would have to look. We’re nationally distributed. It seems likely that someone in Boston has won it too, Dom.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Because I can just envision my brothers and sisters in Boston going up to their parents or spouses and saying, “Hey Ma, I just won the Five Star award.” It’s pretty cool.
Mandi Fang: I will tell you—we do have team members who, when they win, will send me a note. And nothing makes my day more than when I get to talk to them or hear about their experience. So many of them say it was just what they needed—to feel part of something bigger. And I don’t know that it gets better than that.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I think so. Let’s end it there. That’s a great way to end it. She’s Mandi Fang, our CMSWire Impact Awards Customer Experience Leader of the Year and our latest guest on Beyond the Call CMSWire TV. Can’t thank you enough for opening up your world and letting us in.
Mandi Fang: It’s such a pleasure, Dom. Thank you so much. Bye.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: All right. Bye now.
