Punk CX with Adrian Swinscoe (Adrian Swinscoe)

Today’s podcast is with Suvi Lindfors, Strategic Business Development, Netigate. Suvi joins me today to talk about why she thinks the contact center is becoming one of the most valuable sources of insight in any organisation, how many brands are actually leveraging these insights, what needs to happen to facilitate this journey in terms of strategy, people, process and technology, what sort of impact will this have on customer centricity and how we are likely to see the contact center emerge as a data and analytics service provider within organisations.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Life Lessons I Learned From Being A Line Cook – Interview with Ari Weinzweig – and is number 532 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit, which is taking place in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. It’s set to be an unforgettable event designed to empower you and your organization in leveraging Experience Management (XM) to enhance customer and employee satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and achieve remarkable breakthroughs. There, you will hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies, including Autodesk, Ford, USAA and Hilton. Find out more and register now at the Qualtrics website.

Today’s podcast is with Sara Richter, CMO at SAP Emarsys, a leading omnichannel customer engagement platform provider. Sara joins me today to talk about customer loyalty, the findings emerging from the 2024 edition of their Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) report, the five different types of loyalty that marketers and CX professionals should be thinking about, and what brands should be doing to engender (true) loyalty with their customers.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Harnessing the contact center’s potential as a real-time data gold mine – Interview with Suvi Lindfors of Netigate – and is number 533 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit, which is taking place in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. It’s set to be an unforgettable event designed to empower you and your organization in leveraging Experience Management (XM) to enhance customer and employee satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and achieve remarkable breakthroughs. There, you will hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies, including Autodesk, Ford, USAA and Hilton. Find out more and register now at the Qualtrics website.

Today’s podcast is with Kenji Hayward, the Senior Director of Customer Support at Front, the all-in-one, AI-powered customer service platform built for collaboration. Kenji joins me today to talk about why email isn’t dead and why Front takes an email-first approach, getting everyone involved in the support queue, including the CEO, and why they made their customer support metrics public. You can check them out here.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Data ontology and rethinking customer support metrics – Interview with Marcel Barrera of serviceMob Inc – and is number 528 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Matthias Murin, Group Manager Customer Service at DocMorris, a Dutch online and mail-order pharmacy that provides medicines primarily to customers in Germany. Matthias joins me today to talk about DocMorris’ approach to customer service, the challenges of delivering a great customer experience over the phone and via email and why they have opted to go down a high-touch, high cost route when the industry wide trend is to try and reduce the cost to serve and increase levels of self service.

How D.O.M.O.R.E. will help you deliver an outstanding customer experience - Interview with Blake Morgan about her new book: More Is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences.

Today’s interview is with Bernadette Jiwa, two time author of #1 Amazon Bestsellers, who agreed to talk to me about her new book (already a #1 Amazon Bestseller): The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 keys to a great brand story and why your business needs one.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Employee engagement and what it takes to be the best – Interview with Ryan Cheyne of Pets at Home – and is number sixty-seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

How your procurement team is impacting both your employee and customer experience - Interview with Todd Olson of Pendo who is co-founder and CEO of Pendo, a product experience platform that helps product teams create software customers love. Todd joins me today to talk about software product experience and how it impacts both the employee and customer experience.

Today’s interview is with Duncan Macdonald, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at UPC Switzerland, which is part of the Liberty Global group. Duncan joins me today to talk about leadership, what it takes to really empower people, his journey to where he is now and how he had to unlearn a lot of things in order to lead the way that he now does.

Thanks go to the folks at Pega who help set this interview up after I saw a video of Duncan talking about his work and leadership style that was featured as part of Pega’s Customer Engagement Summit (CES) online event on April 1st.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customer experience, innovation, artificial intelligence, culture….a look inside Amazon – Interview with Claire Whitaker – and is number 341 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Dr. Jack Lewis, Managing Director and Founder of NeuroFormed and recent author, with best selling author and motivational speaker Adrian Webster, of Sort Your Brain out. Jack joins me today to talk about the book, what neuroscience can teach us about customer service and how customers make decisions.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: The habits of leading customer centric businesses – Interview with Bob Thompson – and is number one-hundred and six in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Jimmy Hosang, C-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at The Modular Analytics Company (TMAC), a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence and machine learning provider that helps people make better decisions faster. Jimmy joins me today to talk about how technology has made things worse, why vanity metrics like NPS don’t make sense, how speech analytics has been miss-sold and why we need to go back to creating the best experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leveraging branded virtual assistants to drive personalisation and innovation – Interview with Eric Turkington of RAIN – and is number 430 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Brian Tuite, the cofounder & CEO of Zenarate, a leader in developing top-performing customer-facing teams through AI Conversation Simulation. Brian joins me today to talk about agent turnover and attrition and how much of that is driven by the level of training, preparation and support that agents receive and how they are leveraging AI and simulation training to help solve this perennial problem and improve outcomes for both customers and employees.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The crucial role of constant storytelling and change management in our transformation – Interview with Nadia Ness of Ikea – and is number 462 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Gopi Polavarapu, Chief Solutions Officer at Kore.ai, a market leader in Conversational AI platform space. Gopi joins me today to talk about two reports that they recently published ( the Agent Experience (AX) Benchmark Report 2024 and the Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark Report 2024), why a bot must emulate a company’s brand and how to keep this authentic to your brand, the importance of building a multilingual bot and the importance of protecting vulnerable customers as the presence of AI in our day-to-day increases.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Brand Connectome™ and why we are doing marketing all wrong – Interview with Leslie Zane – and is number 513 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Today’s interview is with Tiffani Bova, the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Tiffani joins me today to talk about her new book: The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth, what is an Experience Mindset, what’s the best way to adopt one, why it’s important to take a combined customer and employee experience approach, the research that accompanied the development of the book and what’s the payoff to adopting an Experience Mindset.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customer experience (CX) leaders will become the engagement quarterbacks of the future – Interview with Mike Murchison of Ada – and is number 468 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.

This year it will be an in-person event, for the first time in four years, and will bring together experts and industry leaders to demystify technologies like generative AI and intelligent automation

They will also illustrate how enterprises can practically apply these technologies to turbocharge productivity, improve low-code app development, and optimize customer engagement.

Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Today’s interview is with Ray Biggs, Head of Customer Care at John Lewis & Waitrose. Ray joins me today to talk about their customer care programme, their focus on agent/partner well-being, particularly in the face of turnover, attrition and burnout and changing working arrangements, the implementation of well-being time outs, the changing nature of management and leadership, especially in the customer care environment, a quote from Martin Hill Wilson and Kicker shoes no less.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The connection between flight simulators, agent attrition and better outcomes – Interview with Brian Tuite of Zenarate – and is number 463 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at TextExpander for sponsoring this episode of my podcast.

TextExpander is an auto-complete tool that allows your team to eliminate repetitive typing and stay on the same page with just a few keystrokes allowing you to delight more customers in less time.

Click here or on the banner image above to find out more and to get a 20% discount for the first 12 months of TextExpander if you use the code: SWINSCOE

Today’s interview is with Hugh Anderson of Forth Metrics, a software company that is creating new, simple marketing analytics tools. Their first tool, Inkybee, aims to help small businesses and PR agencies to get more out of their blogger outreach by helping discovering blogs, manage the outreach process and measure the results.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Being Likeable, leadership, customer and employee engagement – Interview with Dave Kerpen and is number fifty-four in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

I've written about the work that Hugh is doing before in Word of mouth marketing and how to get bloggers talking about your business.

Today’s interview is with Peter A. Hunter, an author and leading authority on employee engagement. Following an exchange on the Engage For Success LinkedIn group, I arranged to have a chat with Peter about his thoughts on employee engagement and his new book: The Problem With Management - and How to Solve It.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Learning from the university of the customer and the co-worker – Interview with Kevin Kelly - and is number seventy nine in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Charlie Peters, who is Senior Executive Vice President of Emerson, a diversified global manufacturing and technology company that is working to solve the world's most complex engineering challenges. Emerson has a market capitalisation of$45 billion, approximately 135,000 employees and 235 manufacturing locations worldwide.

Charlie is a 40+ year veteran of Emerson and his main responsibility is to develop innovative global business models that build the company’s capabilities and create added value for Emerson’s customers. Commonly known as Emerson’s “innovation guru”, Charlie joins me today to talk about the changing world of B2B customer experience and what future business models might look like.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Behavioural science offers insight how customer experience can be improved – Interview with Prof. Nick Chater – and is number ninety-four in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Customer success needs to be the responsibility of the entire organisation - Interview with Fred Shilmover, the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, a provider of sales intelligence solutions for high-growth technology companies. Fred joins me today to talk about InsightSquared and their journey with implementing a customer success programme and how and why they changed it.

Today’s interview is with Andrea Prazakova, who is Senior Vice President Customer Experience at Mastercard in the UAE and David Boucher, the Chief of Service Excellence at Aster DM Healthcare in Dubai, UAE. Andrea and David join me today as we revisit a panel discussion that we had at the CX NXT Martechvibe event in November 2021. We had a lot of fun talking about customer experience, loyalty, the connection between the two, cultural change and implications for CX leaders.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CRM systems are not designed with users, and particularly sales users, in mind – Interview with Justin Vaillancourt of Dooly – and is number 414 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Andrew Nelstrop, the Managing Director of English Whisky, who are the 1st registered whisky distillery in England in over a century. He shares some insights into his experience over the last 7 years and their plans for the future.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Delivering Effective Social Customer Service – Interview with Carolyn Blunt and Martin Hill-Wilson - and is number seventy six in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today's interview is with Jacob Morgan, the Principal & Co-Founder of Chess Media Group, a management consulting and strategic advisory firm focused on collaboration. He has also authored of The Collaborative Organization, a best-selling book on collaboration strategy.

Increasing collaboration within organisations using social tools like Chatter, Yammer and Jive etc is increasingly becoming an area of focus amongst businesses as they seek to leverage internal social business tools to help improve communication, efficiency, knowledge sharing, employee engagement and other issues.

This interview follows on from my recent interview with Prof. John Seddon on Systems thinking, customer service and unlearning the way we do things and makes up number forty-three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Pierce Buckley who is an automation and CX expert plus the CEO and Co-founder of babelforce. Pierce joins me today to talk contact centres, customer service, customer experience, AI, the schmai-i bit, busting a few myths around the whole tech and service space, no-code platforms, what that really means, what’s the difference between RPA and no-code and how organisations should be approaching and leveraging AI and no-code in their business, particularly when it comes to improving customer service/experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The metric that is more important than NPS and CSAT – Interview with Shep Hyken — and is number 404 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

Today’s interview is with Dana Miller, the SVP of Client Services at Crimson Hexagon, a social media data analytics firm that enables users to listen to and understand the opinions expressed on social media. Dana joins me today to talk about "voice of the customer" (VoC) programmes and how listening in social media can help.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Turning your customers into a horde of zombie loyalists – Interview with Peter Shankman – and is number 137 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Late last month, I wrote a post called Three strategic pillars for 2011, where I explained the different themes I would be pursuing on the blog over the course of the year. One of them - Curate - was about finding and sharing content from different thought leaders, writers and entrepreneurs. I first thought that this would be only be via video interview but as it has turned out it will be via a combination of text, audio podcast and video.

First up in the series is an interview with Grant Leboff, author of Sticky Marketing, that just came out on January 3rd 2011 and is already high in the Amazon charts.

Today’s interview is with Deborah (Deb) Battaglia, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience at Assurant, Inc, a global B2B2C Fortune 300 company that provides risk management and insurance products to leading automotive, housing, and mobile technology companies. Deb joins me today to talk about the ‘why’ & vision for their transformation, how long the programme has been running, what they have achieved in terms of outcomes, how the pandemic impacted things, the outlook for the future and how they aim to leverage new technologies as well as some key learnings & top tips for others on their own journey.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Developing empathy within ourselves and the machines that we build – Interview with Minter Dial – and is number 470 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is something different. Last week I was in Pretoria, South Africa, where I was speaking at the Customer Experience Innovation and Tech Fest conference. On the back on my keynote, Julia Ahlfeldt, one of my fellow speakers, asked if she could interview me for her podcast, Decoding the Customer, which explores business trends and innovation in the field of customer-centricity. I said that I’d be delighted to have a chat and thought I’d record it too and release it as part of my own interview series. In the interview Julia and I talk abut how firms need to tackle the human and tech balance challenge that exists currently customer experience today, how they can go about doing that, what the future holds and what that means for leadership in firms that aspire to be customer experience leaders.

Today’s interview is with Monika Jo, Director Of Communications at Mursion, a virtual reality platform for professionals to practice and master the complex interpersonal skills necessary to be effective in their roles. This blend of technology and human performance creates a highly realistic training environment that mimics the real-world challenges employees face every day. Monika joins me today to talk about the report that they recently published (The Human Edge in an AI World), what we can learn from it, the importance of EQ, building an empathetic musculature and what Mursion do to try help organisations and individuals get better at being more empathetic in their interactions with customers.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Pink Goldfish, standing out, portmanteaus and wabi-sabi – Interview with Stan Phelps and Dave Rendall — and is number 400 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Dave Keeling, who is 6’ 2”, ginger, a professional actor and has been a ‘stand-up’ educationalist for over 10 years. Dave has recently published a book called: The Little Book of Laughter: Using humour as a tool to engage and motivate all learners. Whilst the book is primarily aimed at people in education, I believe there are lessons and parallels for how we build teams, develop them and create engaged employees. I also thought it'd be great to finish the series of interviews this year with a little bit of humour :)

Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to present to you my discussion with Dave, where we talk about why having fun should be in everyone's job description, how we can use humour as a tool to engage and motivate people, how it helps improve communication, learning and engagement in the workplace and why laughter is important to the workplace.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Customer service done different and fast reinvention of a faceless product category – Interview with Craig Dubitsky of hello – and is number eighty six in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Jeremy Waite, Head of Digital Strategy, EMEA @Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He joins me today to talk about his new book: From Survival to Significance.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Copying your way to increased innovation, creativity and competitive advantage – Interview with Mark Earls – and is number 142 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Following on from my recent interview, Customer service in the future will be a company wide mentality and not a department – Interview with Dave Carroll of United Breaks Guitars, today I am pleased to present to you a first: A follow on interview from the one I did with Karl Chapman of Riverview Law back in June.

Karl and his team at Riverview Law were kind enough to invite me along to an event that held recently at Middle Temple in London. The event was discussing the future of the legal industry and included a panel discussion that featured Mitch Kowalski who has just published a book called: Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century - which focuses on the future of the law firm. Following the panel discussion, I caught up with Mitch to talk to him about his new book, the future of the legal industry and the pressures that are forcing law firms to become more client centric.

This interview makes up number thirty-three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses.

Today’s interview is with Dave Kerpen, the cofounder and CEO of Likeable, an award-winning social media and word-of-mouth marketing firm which includes Likeable Media, Likeable Community College, and Likeable Local - a provider of social media solutions for small business using proprietary software.

He is also a New York Times bestselling author and today he joins us to talk about his recent book Likeable Business: Why Today’s Consumers Demand More and How Leaders Can Deliver, which was released in October of last year.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: Doing more to help creative business start ups grow and succeed – Interview with Doug Richard and is number fifty-three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Andy Murray, Founder and Executive Chair, Customer Centric Leadership Initiative at The Sam M. Walton College of Business at The University of Arkansas. Andy joins me today to talk about the aforementioned Customer Centric Leadership Initiative, what customer centricity means, how leadership has been impacted over the last few months, the leader’s experience and what we should be doing to make sure that we deliver a great customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership and how to achieve customer centricity – Interview with Minter Dial – and is number 372 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Understanding a customers context is the key to self-service success - Interview with Bill Colleran, President and Chief Executive Officer of AnswerDash, a predictive and artificial intelligence (AI) powered Q&A Saas platform that facilitates customer service for e-commerce businesses thereby reducing support costs and revealing customer needs.

Today’s interview is with Ari Weinzweig is CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses, a gourmet food business group headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Inc. Magazine described Zingerman's as the "Coolest Small Company in America”. Meanwhile, they have been featured in the Harvard Business Review and on MSNBC for their business practices and Bo Burlingham in his book, Small Giants, cited Zingerman's as a model for organizations that define success more creatively than just "getting as big as we can as fast as we can”. Ari joins me today to talk about what anarchy can teach us about leadership, culture and customer service, Emma Goldman, building a progressive business and what we should be thinking about when it comes to improving customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We are moving from a ticketing age to a conversational age – Interview with Mads Fosselius of Dixa – and is number 336 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

What The Great Escape can teach us about Future Fit leadership - Interview with Mike Perk, Managing Director of WWC, a South African digital transformation advisory firm, that I met at a recent conference in Pretoria. At the conference, Mike described a concept called Future Fit Leadership but he did so in a really engaging way combining World War 2 history and a famous film about the period. As a result, I asked Mike to be a guest on the podcast so he could share this story with you.

Today’s interview is with Lauren Currie OBE, the CEO of Stride. They are on a mission to democratise leadership development. Lauren joins me today to talk about leadership, Stride, the problem with leadership development, what they are trying to do to solve this problem and what we should all be doing to develop their our own leadership skills and experience capabilities.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leading a digital transformation that will never end – Interview with Duncan Macdonald of UPC Switzerland – and is number 342 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

Registration for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems, is free. Find out out more and register at www.pegaworld.com

Understanding consumer behaviour by going to the gemba - Interview with Michael Solomon, PhD who is Professor of Marketing in the Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of one of THE books, if not THE original book, on consumer behaviour.

Today’s interview is with Joan Babinski, founder and vice president of marketing at Brainshark, which helps thousands of companies around the world improve productivity with cloud-based business presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. Joan joins me today to talk about Brainshark and how they built a community of customer advocates that helped them grow their business.

Background: Brainshark has more than 400 champions in its customer champion programme and, since starting it in 2012, has more than quadrupled the number of companies willing to serve as references and more than doubled Twitter activity around the brand. Brainshark also won a Forrester Groundswell Award for it’s programme, which has resulted in amplification of its content, acceleration of the sales cycle and deeper levels of engagement with customers (for example, more customers are enthusiastic about joining beta programs, etc.).

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Great service, great coffee and great people creates loyalty – Interview with Nick Barlow of Small Batch Coffee – and is number one-hundred and eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with PV Kannan, the co-founder and CEO of [24]7, a customer engagement platform which assists several hundred million visitors across all channels, and engages in 1.5 billion conversations annually, most of which are automated. PV joins me today to talk about [24]7, what they are up to, utilising AI and intelligent assistants in the deliver and improvement of customer experience, the balance of tech and the human touch in customer experience and his view on achieving the ‘right’ balance.

Today’s interview is with Rob Siefker, Senior Director of Customer Service Operations at Zappos.com and one of the speakers at Zappos Insights, a team within the Zappos Family of Companies that was created simply to help share the Zappos Culture with the world and to inspire positive change in the workplace. Rob joins me to talk about the School of Wow at Zappos Insight, what Wow service means to them, employee experience and holocracy.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Making customer interactions more human by using analytics, decisioning and artificial intelligence – Interview with Rob Walker of Pega – and is number 185 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Cathy Brown, Exec Director at Engage for Success, a UK-based social movement that is committed to promoting employee engagement as a better way to work that benefits individual employees, teams, and whole organisations. Cathy joins me today to talk all things employee engagement, why it’s important and what firms should be thinking about and what they should be doing if they want to boost their levels of employee engagement.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Great service comes from doing things upside down – Interview with John Timpson – and is number 181 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Dan Frohnen, CMO at Sendoso , a cloud-based direct mail and engagement platform that gives companies the ability to send direct mail, eGifts, wine, company swag, handwritten notes, welcome kits, and custom gifts. Dan joins me today to talk direct mail, why direct mail is not used as much as it could or should be, waste, sustainability and lessons that have emerged in the last few months.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Excellence and extreme humanization are needed more than ever – Interview with Tom Peters – and is number 349 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Shep Hyken, a customer service expert, professional speaker and bestselling author who works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. Shep has just published a new book: Amaze Every Customer, Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering The Most Amazing Customer Service On The Planet and I was really pleased when he agreed to talk to me about the book, his experience and to share some insights.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Smart proactive customer service that delivers results – Interview with Jim Dicso of SundaySky - and is number eighty two in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Angela O’Connell, the Strategy & Marketing Director for MetaPack. Founded in 1999, MetaPack provides a SaaS delivery management system to retailers, third-party logistics companies and carriers enabling better choice and more freedom in delivery options to all consumers, both in B2B and B2C markets. Angela joins me today to talk about recent research about consumer feelings, anxieties and preferences about deliveries following online purchases, the last mile/yard of customer experience and where companies can improve.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Proactive customer service drives customer loyalty – Interview with Stew Bloom of Aspect – and is number 125 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Nick Mehta CEO of Gainsight, a customer success technology provider that helps businesses retain customers and drive company growth. Nick joins me today to talk about his new book, The Customer Success Economy: Why Every Aspect of Your Business Model Needs A Paradigm Shift, what customer success is, why it is going to become increasingly important to organizations given the current climate and pressures that many firms are going to start to face, what are the benefits and what customer experience and success leaders need to be doing to survive and thrive.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Experimentation is what makes Microsoft, Google, Netflix and Booking.com so successful – Interview with Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke – and is number 357 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Anil Kaul who is the CEO and co-founder of Absolutdata, a big data and predictive analytics firm. They describe themselves as decision engineers, where they apply decision sciences to help improve decisions at the world's largest companies. Anil joins me today to talk about what they are up to and how predictive analytics can be used to help solve the problem of silent customer churn.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – How to use data and analytics to improve the 3R’s with your customers – Interview with Evan Carroll – and is number 169 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Stan Phelps an “experience architect”, author, professor and popular keynote speaker. Hat tip for the idea for this interview goes to James Lawther who recently hosted a guest post (5 Easy Ways to Increase Employee Engagement) from Stan on his blog.

Stan recently published a new book: What's Your Green Goldfish?: Beyond Dollars: 15 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement and Reinforce Culture and joins us today to share some insight into the book and the lessons that businesses can draw from it.

This interview follows on the back of last week’s interview: How to be more interesting (and keep customers for longer) – Interview with Jessica Hagy and is number fifty-seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

NOTE: This episode contains some profanity. Not too much but definitely some. You are warned!

Today’s interview is with Borzou Azabdaftari, Boss at The Falcon Lab, a full service marketing agency. Borzou joins me today to talk values, profanity, having profane values, it’s impact on clients and the changing nature of customer experience and what increasingly matters.

Big shout out to Stan Phelps and David Rendall for introducing me to Borzou.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis? – Interview with David Campbell of SugarCRM — and is number 389 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at SugarCRM for sponsoring my podcast this month.

SugarCRM, the provider of the #1 rated Customer Experience platform, is trusted by thousands of companies in over 120 countries to help them achieve high-definition CX. Recently they released their new CRM and Sales Impact Report which surveyed 1,000 sales professionals from around the globe on what’s driving (or stalling) revenue and customer engagement. The report also asks a provocative question: Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis. To find out the answer check out and download the report here.

Today’s interview is with Rob Walker, Vice President Decision Management and Analytics at Pegasystems and is responsible for the company’s suite of predictive decisioning technologies. I had a chat with Rob at Pega's annual customer event: Pegaworld 2016 to find out more about what makes Pega different and a bit more about their analytics and decisioning technology, how it can be applied and how it can improve the customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Most personalisation initiatives fail to improve customer experience – Interview with Jan Jensen of CXense – and is number 184 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Shafqat Islam, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimizely, a digital experience platform software as a service provider. Shafqat joins me today to talk about their recently released Personalised to Personal report, why they think that personalization has officially reached its maximum maturity level, what’s standing in the way of marketers delivering a more personalised experience to customers and their position on marketers gathering zero-party data to further enhance/progress their personalisation efforts amongst some other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Paul Weller, the Scots word ‘gallus’ and their relation to delivering an award-winning customer experience – Interview with John Devlin of Ascensos – and is number 487 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Brian Rafferty, the Global Director of Business Analytics and Insights at Siegel+Gale, a brand strategy, design and experience firm. They also define themselves as a simplicity company and help brands deliver simpler experiences to their customers. Brian joins me today to talk about simplicity and the performance of brands that have simplicity at their heart, how that relates to both customer and employee experience and what they are learning from their research about what we should be doing to improve both customer and employee experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – 140 leaders share the lessons they learned during the pandemic – Interview with Joseph Michelli – and is number 367 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Chris Lewis, CEO of global communications agency, LEWIS. Chris joins me today to talk about his new book: Too Fast to Think: How to Reclaim Your Creativity in a Hyper-connected Work Culture, the idea behind it, what he means by creativity, what are the implications of the hyper connected work culture we live in and what people can do about it.

Today’s interview is with Carey Smith, founder & CEO (Chief Big Ass), and Dave Waltz, Customer Advocate, of Big Ass Fans, a manufacturer of high-volume low-speed fans for industrial, agricultural, commercial and residential use.

Carey and Dave join me today to talk about how their customer service strategy has been central to growing the business from $34 million in revenue in 2009 to a projected $175 million in 2014, what they are doing that’s different, silent complaints, why they hired a full-time customer advocate and what that person (Dave and his team) does and what they are responsible for.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Moving from the era of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to the era of CMR (Customer Managed Relationships) – Interview with Geraldine McBride of MyWave – and is number 122 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing who has recently added Duct Tape Selling to the set of books that he has authored. John joins me today to talk about his new book, how sales in changing and what sales people and businesses can do to adapt to their changing environment to help serve their customers better.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Building valuable customer support communities – Interview with Rob Howard of Zimbra – and is number one-hundred and two in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

How many exposure hours have you had with your customers over the last few months? - Interview with Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting who joins me today to talk about their new research report: The Rise of the Experience Economy - The 2019 CX Industry Report, the work that they do, what the best brands do to understand their clients and what leaders and professionals in the CX space should be doing more of.

Today’s interview is with Eric Turkington, Vice President of Growth at RAIN, a pioneer in voice & conversational AI, that is helping people, brands and businesses do amazing things with voice technology. Eric joins me today to talk about intelligent voice assistants, the state of demand, how both B2C and B2B brands are leveraging Branded Virtual Assistants (BVA’s) to drive personalisation and innovation and lots of other stuff.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Little personal touches can make all the difference – Interview with Jawad Malik of Idrese – and is number 429 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Rob Pace, the founder and CEO of HundredX, a technology platform/app that works with major brands such as professional sports teams, Mary Kay and the University of Notre Dame, to provide listening solutions and collect real-time feedback from customers and employees. Rob joins me today to talk about a number of things including customer feedback, HundredX’s research, listening, outcomes and why they use emojis rather than numerical scales?

Becoming more empathetic can be hard. Pega's new AI-powered Customer Empathy Advisor aims to help - Interview with Rob Walker, Vice President Decision Management and Analytics at Pega. I caught up with Rob at Pega’s recent customer event, Pegaworld, in Las Vegas and we grabbed a few minutes to talk about his keynote presentation, Pega’s upcoming Customer Empathy Advisor, what empathy is and the value of being more empathetic in customer experience.

Today’s interview is with Shep Hyken, who is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Shep joins me today today to talk about his latest book: I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, what an Arnie is, the metric that is more important than NPS and CSAT, the difference between a repeat customer and a loyal customer, where true empathy for the customer starts and if self-service can drive customer loyalty and a whole host of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We need to start talking about experience leadership – Interview with Peter Cross — and is number 403 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

babelforce is the #1 most flexible platform for contact center service. Pierce Buckley, CEO and Co-founder of babelforce, and his team of telecoms veterans have created a powerful cloud communications solution focused on No-Code integration and automation. Their goal is to break down every barrier to great customer experiences by putting intuitive tools in the hands of people who live and breathe CX.

Pierce and Jonathan Baer of Vonage are running a webinar on the 28th October at 11:00am CET and they will be discussing exactly how businesses are getting maximum benefit from WhatsApp, one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service. Follow this link to sign up. You don’t want to miss out as you will get to see a demo of the babelforce platform in action!

Today’s interview is with the winner of the MyCustomer 2020 CX Leader of the Year competition: James Scutt, Head of Customer Experience Strategy and Deployment, Post Office. This interview is slightly different this week as I am conducting it with Chris Ward, Editor of MyCustomer. The original interview can be found here but I thought it would be worth re-publishing here too. In the interview we discuss James’ journey to where he is now, why he applied for the competition, how he felt when he won, the biggest lessons that he has learned along the way and how the pandemic has impacted the business among other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Where the magic happens when it comes to improving customer outcomes – Interview with Stacy Sherman – and is number 374 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Gary Vaynerchuk and follows on from my recent interview: Unruly engagement, creativity and collaboration is built on two things: People and Places - Interview with Sarah Wood of Unruly Media.

If you haven't heard of Gary then suffice it to say he is a successful social media and wine entrepreneur, sought after and entertaining speaker and best-selling author. You can also learn more about him in the bio below.

This interview makes up number forty-seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Also, this interview is part of Gary's #1aDayQandA interview series where he has committed to giving 365 short interviews to different people about different topics over the course of this year…some effort!

Today’s interview is with Jamie Anderson, Global Vice President Product Marketing, Customer Engagement & Commerce at SAP. Jamie joins me today to talk about a concept called brand self-awareness, what we can learn from the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, and what customer engagement really means.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Improve customer experience by surveying your customers quicker – Interview with Mark Smith of ContactEngine – and is number 115 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

The power of social recognition in employee engagement - Interview with Ketti Salemme of TINYpulse, an employee engagement platform that combines pulse surveys, peer recognition, and performance reviews.

Today’s interview is with Jim Dicso, President and Chief Revenue Officer of SundaySky, which has pioneered technology that allows firms to deliver personalised videos to their customers in real-time. This allows firms to lower costs, increase engagement and grow revenues. Jim agreed to talk to me about the cool things that SundaySky are doing with SmartVideo, particularly in the area of proactive customer service.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Doing Well, Doing Good And Learning The Lesson Of The Orangutan – Interview with Ken Olisa of Restoration Partners – and is number eighty one in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with John Huehn, founder, President & CEO of In The Chat, a social media sales and customer service company, that is aiming to make text message and social customer service easy with their software. John joins me today to talk about how text messaging as a customer service channel doesn’t get the press that it deserves but that it can offer great benefits to businesses that implement it as a channel.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Social listening could replace traditional voice of the customer methods – Interview with Dana Miller of Crimson Hexagon – and is number 138 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s podcast is with Gregory Kennedy, VP of Marketing at Alembic Technologies, which provides AI-powered marketing analytics for C-suite executives. We talk about how Alembic is applying mathematics and AI, developed for identifying causes, treatments, and mortality during the pandemic, to tracing the results of marketing initiatives across the board, what that means for marketers and how they ended up with a series of backers, that include NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former 49-ers Quarterback Joe Montana.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Broken funnels, flywheels and human messaging – Key insights from HubSpot executives at GROW Europe 2024 – and is number 524 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Dr. Derek Wang, the founder and CEO of the AI-driven experience analytics platform Stratifyd. Derek joins me today to talk about empowering everyone to understand the hidden stories in their data, a vision of the future that features humans and AI working together to build better experience programs, proving or delivering a ROI for CX initiatives and some practical advice for leaders and practitioners in this space.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Getting closer to customers means connecting with them irrespective of the logistics – Interview with Bansi Mehta of Koru UX Design — and is number 383 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Today’s interview is with Walter Flaat, dentsu Canada’s Chief Data Officer. We talk about a new whitepaper that they’ve just published on the Attention Economy, what drives attention (engagement), what brands should be doing in order to be able to deliver a more thoughtful, empathetic and inclusive experience and what are the implications for experience and digital professionals and leaders.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX in the age of AI: A leading outsourcer’s perspective – Interview with Cathy Jooste and John Samuel of CGS – and is number 480 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at CGS for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

Now, CGS is a company you might not have heard of.

But, they have been delivering brand-building and customer experiences for 40 years for global brands that you will definitely have heard of.

Over that time, they have developed deep expertise in both outsourcing and technology, so you should definitely pay attention to what they have to say.

They’ve recently put together a free ebook and video that I’d like to point you to. It’s called The Transformative Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT and has been authored by CGS’ Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, John Samuel (one of our interviewees today). It’s a really comprehensive guide and is designed to deliver insights, summarize research, and inspire creative problem-solving.

Follow this link to check out the free ebook and video.

Today’s interview is with Jo Taylor, former Director of Talent Management at Talk Talk, a provider of pay TV, telecoms, internet access mobile services to businesses and consumers in the UK. Jo joins me today to talk about what it takes to build a dynamic, responsive and evolving culture.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Building a better place to work helps develop long term customer relationships – Interview with Sebastian Henkes and Claire Clifford of Sabio – and is number 149 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Matt Dixon, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of three of the most important business books of the past decade: The Challenger Sale, The Effortless Experience and The Challenger Customer. Matt joins me today to talk about his new book (The Jolt Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision - co-authored with Ted McKenna), how they conducted their research, what they found out, how indecision is the biggest barrier to sales and decision-making in general and how a JOLT playbook could help.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customer experience isn’t about experience at all. It is about relationships – Interview with James Dodkins of Pega – and is number 442 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Justin Vaillancourt is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Dooly, a CRM automation software provider that is making the use of Salesforce fast and painless. Justin joins me today to talk about the findings from their recent research (Dooly Sales Happiness Index - Key Findings November 2021), what they mean, the problem with most CRM systems and why you should make sure your company culture is product driven.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Introducing Punk XL Part Two – Interview with Karen, Sandra De Z, Richard, Sandra T and Ari – and is number 413 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

How to rapidly scale and still maintain the highest customer service standards - Interview with Ed Ariel, VP of Customer Service at ezCater, the only US-wide marketplace for corporate catering.

Today’s interview is with Michael Sharkey, Co-founder & CEO, and Guy Marion, CMO, of Autopilot, a Saas company that provides easy and visual marketing software for automating the customer journey. Michael and Guy join me today to talk about what they are doing, how they are working on creating customer journeys and creating unique marketing experiences that don’t feel like marketing and the impact of this type of approach on customer engagement and customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – What you do when proactive customer service is in your DNA – Interview with David Politis of BetterCloud – and is number 157 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

NOTE: The audio from Michael and Guy is a little jumpy in places but it is still ok to listen to. The vagaries of technology and telephone line connections! Apologies.

Today’s interview is with Jan Jensen Chief Marketing Officer at Cxense, a software as a service company that is enabling many of the world’s leading media, e-commerce and consumer brands to take control of their audience data to deliver more engaging and personalized user experiences. Jan joins me today to talk about personalisation, why many initiatives in this space fail, what firms can do about it and what role data and privacy concerns play.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Using analytics, decisioning and robotics to improve the employee and customer experience – Interview with Kerim Akgonul of Pega – and is number 183 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with John Marick, the co-founder and CEO of Consumer Cellular, a fast-growing and awarding winning provider of cell (mobile) phones and services in the US. John joins me today to talk about his company, why they are growing so fast, what rules they are breaking and what they are doing differently.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: The art of selling has to change because the art of buying has changed – Interview with John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing – and is number one-hundred and three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Micah Solomon, a renowned expert on customer service, hospitality, and customer experience. Micah joins me today to talk about his new book: Can Your Customer Service Do This?: Create an Anticipatory Customer Experience that Builds Loyalty Forever, why he spends a lot of time wearing a disguise and using a fake name, what Gold Touch Customer Service is, why we should keep technology in customer service/experience “Below Eye Level” and how to innovate in customer service amongst a host of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – How to safely realise the enormous potential of Al – Interview with Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner – and is number 485 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Jay Baer, best-selling author, speaker and President of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm that helps companies through the smart intersection of technology and customer service. Jay joins me today to talk about his new book: Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, why complaints are a key way to help you keep your customers, the different type of complainers that exist and how to deal with them.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Predictive analytics and solving the problem of silent customer churn – Interview with Anil Kaul of Absolutdata – and is number 170 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Joel Bailey, who is a Director at EY Seren, the global design consultancy within EY. Joel is a friend of mine, someone I have worked with and a really interesting thinker when it comes to service. Our conversation was precipitated by the publication of an article he wrote (2020: A new decade of service) earlier this year. So, we set up a time to chat to talk about why we should leave the experience economy behind, that service is the element that connects customer experience and employee experience and the idea that we need to define service anew.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Authentic leadership is just the rebranding of transformational leadership with some of the caffeine taken out – Interview with Professor Dennis Tourish - and is number 339 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Dr Mark Smith who is CEO and co-founder of ContactEngine, a multi-channel, interactive contact engine, whose cloud based software helps their clients improve efficiency, lower costs and drive growth through happier customers. I met Mark at the recent 20:20 Customer Experience Summit in London and he told me about what they were doing, who they were working with and the sort of results that they were helping deliver. So, I invited Mark onto the podcast to tell me a bit more about ContactEngine and some of the fascinating things they are doing to help field service management become a strength for their clients rather than a weakness.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Should ‘Net Easy’ be your new customer service metric – Interview with Nicola Millard of BT – and is number 114 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Damian Thompson, Director of Distribution at Principality Building Society, a Welsh building society founded in 1860 and head-quartered in Cardiff. Principality is the largest building society in Wales and the sixth largest in the United Kingdom. Damian joins me today to talk about how they transformed their customer experience by moving from a performance target culture to a behavioural model and how that has delivered sustained and consistent improvement in their customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Towards a unified view of the customer – Interview with James McGourlay of OpenText – and is number 152 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Great service and why Basecamp only focuses on a couple of channels - Interview with Chase Clemons, a customer support team lead at Basecamp, a provider of project management and team communication software. We talk about Basecamp’s CEO Jason Fried assuming personal responsibility for all customer refunds, what that means in practice, what it’s like to work at Basecamp, what customer service means for them, particularly when they have approx 50 people in 30 different cities around the world and how they deliver great service to their clients.

This is the fifth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the 'customer' space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses.

Previously, I spoke to Scott Gould of Like Minds, Aaron+Gould and Scott Gould & friends about leadership, building communities and the world of social media.

Today, I want to introduce you to Syed Hasan, CEO of ResponseTek, who is leading provider of integrated customer experience solutions focusing on automating and operationalising customer feedback and voice of the customer information within businesses. ResponseTek helps their clients to listen more, learn quicker and spend less on their customer experience programs.

What I like about Syed is that he takes a very straight-forward, pragmatic and back to basics approach to building their business and helping deliver consistent and better customer experiences for their clients.

Today’s interview is with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, CEO & Founder of Surfboard, an award-winning workforce management (WFM) software provider. Natasha joins me today to talk about the findings of their recently released 2024 customer service survey: The third wave of customer support, what might be stopping some customer service teams from not investing in AI tools and capabilities, where they are investing, how it is benefitting them and some advice for customer service leaders looking to get the most out of their AI investments.

Since this podcast was recorded, Surfboard has been acquired by Dialpad. You can find out more here.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Basketball, false hustle and metrics that matter – Interview with Thomas Laird of Expivia/OttoQA – and is number 521 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Ari Weinzweig, the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, a gourmet food business group headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Ari was previously on the podcast back in 2020 and is also one of the contributors to Punk XL. Ari joins me today to talk about business visions, visioning, his new pamphlet on visioning (The Story of Visioning at Zingerman’s: Four Visions, Forty Years, and a Positive Look Towards the Future), how many service and experience initiatives lack a clear vision of what it is they are trying to create and why and how this can leads to the higgledy-piggledy services and experiences that we often encounter.

Note: This podcast is the first in a series of contributions (podcast chats, blogs and mixtapes etc) from the contributors to Punk XL that will appear here over the coming months.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The digitization of the supply chain and it’s impact on customer experience and sustainability – Interview with Sanjay Brahmawar of Software AG – and is number 436 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega. Don joins me today to talk about resiliency, focus, reducing complexity, how tech can help, what lessons he has learned from the pandemic, the upcoming Pegaworld (www.pegaworld.com) and who he is most looking forward to hearing speak.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Busting some CCaaS and CX technology myths – Interview with Vasili Triant of UJET - and is number 425 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

Pega is a low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. It’s scalable architecture helps the world’s leading organizations work smarter, unify experiences, and adapt instantly – so they’re always ready for what’s next.

Check out the latest from Pega at their annual conference, PegaWorld iNspire, which will focus on how to address constantly shifting perspectives in an ever-evolving world, including guidance, strategies, and powerful tools to achieve resiliency in the face of rapid change. Agenda and registration details can be found at pegaworld.com. The event will be held virtually on May 24 from 9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. EDT for the Americas and Europe and again on May 25 from 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. AEST for Asia Pacific.

Today’s interview is with Michael Hinshaw, the founder and president of customer experience consultancy McorpCX. Michael joins me today to talk about the CX value model and why we should be linking experience to business outcomes, some key indicators of a successful customer-centric transformation, why your company might need an experience operating system (the XOS), what it is and what are the benefits.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership lessons from the winner of the 2023 CX Leader of the Year – Interview with Roxie Strohmenger of UKG – and is number 495 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Gender and diversity imbalances will impact your ability to connect with and serve your customers - Interview with Adriana Gascoigne, founder and CEO of Girls in Tech, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization devoted to empowering, educating and engaging women in the tech industry across 43 chapters in 32 countries. Adriana joins me today to talk about Girls In Tech, her new book: Tech Boss Lady: How to Start-Up, Disrupt, and Thrive as a Female Founder and the impact that gender and diversity imbalances have on organizations ability to best serve their customers.

Today’s interview is with Ben Reason, founding partner of Livework, a leading service design firm. They help organisations with customer related challenges and how they affect the business and the organisation. Ben along with Lavrans Løvlie and Melvin Brand Flu, two other Livework partners, has recently published a new book called Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience. Ben joins me today to talk about the book, what they have learnt, service design and how firms can use it to improve their customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why Should Anyone Work Here? – Interview with Gareth Jones – and is number 164 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Today’s interview is with Gerry McGovern who is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords and the author of six books on all things digital, content, transformation and online customer experience. He has just published a new book called: World Wide Waste and joins me today to talk about the book, how it came about, what we can learn from it and why it matters.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Scaling customer support and maintaining employee and customer satisfaction even through a pandemic – Interview with Nick Misewicz of Pura Vida Bracelets – and is number 345 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

While PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems took place earlier this month (June 2nd) you can still view the sessions on-demand so do head over to www.pegaworld.com to check them out.

Today’s interview is with Liz Graham , who is Vice President of Sales and Service at Wayfair, one of the world's largest online destinations for the home. Liz joins me today to talk about a number of things including getting the human and technology balance right when it comes to delivering a great customer experience, innovative recruitment strategies, using predictive analytics and AI to drive proactive service amongst other things.

Today’s interview is with James Dodkins, who is commonly know as the CX Rockstar, is a former rockstar but is now the CX Evangelist at Pegasystems. James joins me today to talk about his journey, why he’s joined Pega, what he’s going to be getting up to, extreme fandoms, hyper-fans and what’s stood out for him regarding customer experience over the last 15 months.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – A good customer experience starts with having the right tools – Interview with Liat Bycel of Airtable — and is number 397 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada, a leading customer service automation provider. Mike joins me today to talk about how the conventional customer experience playbook is outdated, why brands should be talking to their customers more as they grow (not less), a view on the future of customer experience, what service and support teams will do in the future and how CX leaders are likely to be the quarterbacks of the future.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – There’s no point having a fast bike, if you don’t know how to ride it – Interview with Jerry Haywood of Boost.ai – and is number 467 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.

This year it will be an in-person event, for the first time in four years, and will bring together experts and industry leaders to demystify technologies like generative AI and intelligent automation

They will also illustrate how enterprises can practically apply these technologies to turbocharge productivity, improve low-code app development, and optimize customer engagement.

Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Ethics, technology and the impact of our decisions on customers and employees - Interview with Cennydd Bowles, a designer and writer focusing on the ethics of emerging technologies. Cennydd joins me today to talk about ethics, technology, emerging technology, design and the impact of the decisions we make on customers and employees.

Today’s interview revisits and finalises the series of podcast conversations that I had with various folks whilst at Pegaworld earlier this. This episode is a combo affair and features a conversation with Tara DeZao, Director of Product Marketing, AdTech and MarTech, at Pega. It is then swiftly followed by a chat that I had with Simon Thorpe, Director - Global Product Marketing - Customer Service & Sales Automation, at Pega, who is then joined partway through the conversation by James Dodkins, a friend of the podcast and CX Evangelist, at Pega. Fun and games!

Our conversations cover my guests’ highlights from the event, their perspective on the current state of play in marketing, personalization, customer service, customer experience and the impact of Gen AI on all of the above, amongst a bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Print-era thinking is holding personalization efforts back – Interview with Vivek Sharma on Movable Ink – and is number 515 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Disclaimer: I partnered with Pega to conduct interviews and provide my perspective on PegaWorld iNspire 2024.

Today’s interview is with Adrian Collins, the MD of Ziggurat Brands. Adrian joins me today to talk about innovation and a business and set of products (bac<) that they have developed that aims to transform back-care in the UK.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Customer engagement and lessons from the Scottish poet, Robert Burns – Interview with Jamie Anderson of SAP – and is number 116 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Today’s interview is with Carey Smith, who is Founding Contrarian at Unorthodox Ventures. Carey is a returning guest and was first on the podcast back in October 2014, where along with his colleague Dave Waltz, they shared with me the story of how their customer service strategy was central to growing the Big Ass Fans business five-fold over a five year period. That was nine years ago! Nine years! So, I thought it would be great to invite Carey back onto the podcast to find out what happened next.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – New shoes, a surprising but delightful musical collaboration, the autonomous enterprise, gen AI and getting personalisation right – Interview with James Dodkins and Tara DeZao of Pega – and is number 476 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Bruce Poon Tip, founder of G Adventures and the Planeterra foundation. Bruce recently had a book published called Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business, which recounts the story of the founding and development of G Adventures from a garage office start-up into the largest small group adventure travel company in the world and Bruce’s quest to develop a business model that balances karma, community and culture to produce outstanding results.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Improve employee engagement and customer service through the use of humour – Interview with Dave Keeling - and is number eighty seven in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Everyone in an organisation should be a loyalty leader - Interview with Sandy Rogers of FranklinCovey, the co-author of new book: Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion and the leader of FranklinCovey's Loyalty Practice. Sandy joins me today to talk about the new book, how leading companies develop loyalty (Spoiler alert: it’s not about a loyalty programmes), what they do to get in the way of loyalty and how they can put themselves on the right path.

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega. Don joins me today to talk about a new report they have just released called Workforce Trends Report 2022, the headline findings, complexity in the enterprise, how it affects us, the impact and what we should be doing about it.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Unlocking the hidden value of language to drive personalisation – Interview with Assaf Baciu of Persado – and is number 433 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Eetu Raudas, Eemeli Ahonen and Kalle Ek of Gizlo, a software company from Finland that connects retailers and individual shop owners to customers through a platform used for mystery shopping, store audits and consumer surveys by making use of the customers own smartphones. Eetu, Eemeli and Kalle join me today to talk about their application, what they are up to in the voice customer space, success to date in Finland and their plans for taking the UK by storm.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Behavioural science is a gold mine for service design and customer experience – Interview with Nicolae Naumof– and is number 135 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and deliver great service and experience.