Today’s interview is with James Lawther, Director at Squawk Point Consulting and Author of ‘Managed by Morons: The Path to a Thriving Organisation’. James joins me today to talk about his new book, why so many organisations are mediocre, what we should be thinking about when it comes to measuring performance, a story about a Unilever soap factory, the signs of a poor culture and what we should doing to not become one of ‘those’ managers or leaders. This interview follows on from my recent...

Today’s interview is with Jamie Smith, who is the Founder and CEO of Customer Futures Ltd, an advisory firm helping businesses seize the opportunity around disruptive and customer-empowering digital propositions, and author of the weekly Customer Futures Newsletter. Jamie joins me today to talk about CustomerTech tools, EmpowermentTech, the emerging Customer Stack, what this all means, the implications of all this for personalisation and privacy and what customer engagement in the near future...

Today’s interview is with David Powers, who is an author, podcast host, Chief Experience Officer at Rooter Hero Plumbing & Air and a true punk. David joins me today to talk about the need for taking a more punk approach to customer experience and the contact center, what that means in practical terms, some of the big changes he’s seen in the contact center space over the last 23 years as well as some of the biggest challenges coming down the pipe and, finally, what it means to create a...

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...

Today’s interview is with the winner of the MyCustomer 2023 CX Leader of the Year competition: Roxie Strohmenger, GSO - VP, CX Strategy at UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group). This interview is slightly different this week as I conduct it with Clare Muscutt, Founder and CEO of Women in CX but follows the same format to the one last year where we interviewed Maneesha Bhusal of JD .ID, the winner of the 2022 CX Leader of the Year. In the interview, we discuss Roxie’s journey to where she is now,...

Today’s interview is with Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Medallia. Joe joins me today to talk about why brands must consider EX in their journey to CX success, his view on the impact Generative AI is having on the world of experience and where he thinks it is heading, personalization and the big challenges that organizations need to tackle in order to fully realise the potential that lies in front of them. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Forget the hype. Here’s what enterprises...

Today’s interview is with Stefano Puntoni, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School and Director of AI at Wharton, and Jeremy Korst, President at GBK Collective. Stefano and Jeremy join me today to talk about a new report called The Rise of Generative AI in the Enterprise that they collaborated on and recently released, some of the biggest emerging applications and use cases for gen AI in the enterprise space coming out of the report, what reservations leaders have about the technology,...

Today’s interview is with Juanita Coley, who is best known as the “Contact Center Whisperer” and is also the CEO and Founder of Solid Rock Consulting, a workforce management consulting firm. Juanita joins me today to talk about the inside track on what customer service agents like or don’t like about their jobs, the implications of those findings, what contact center leaders should be focusing on/doing to help improve their employees’ (agents) experience and why we should be talking about and...

Today’s interview is with Tue Martin Berg, the CEO and part of the founding team at Capturi, Scandinavia's leading software provider for conversation analysis. Tue joins me today to talk about what they are up to, why some Scandinavian organisations who after implementing call/interaction analytics solutions from one of the big US providers, then ripped it out, whether the problem they faced applies to all brands that operate in languages other than English, the impact that has on their...

Today’s interview is with Phil Lewis and Claire Croft of Corporate Punk, an award-winning management consultancy that helps clients innovate and transform their business culture. Phil and Claire join me today to talk about how many change/transformation initiatives suffer because they try to do change to and not with their people, how doing change with and not to people is grounded in both data and dialogue and a framework to help an organisation/department/team determine how change-ready...

Today’s interview is with Debbie Levitt, who is the CXO of Delta CX and the author of Customers Know You Suck. Debbie joins me today to talk about how we are in danger of over-indexing on failure and celebrating failure rather than trying to emulate what makes successful companies successful, how that is manifesting itself, why we talk about Apple and Amazon a lot but often don’t really emulate them, the relationship between failure, speed and quality and what customers actually care...

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...

Today’s interview is with John Devlin, CEO and co-founder of Ascensos, a leading customer management and contact centre solution provider that offers bespoke and innovative solutions for various industries, such as consumer retail, healthcare and insurance. John joins me today to talk about the evolution of the customer service outsourcing space over the last 25+ years, what their Chief Happyologist does, the role and impact of Gen AI in the outsourcing business, how it will affect the...

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...

Today’s interview is with Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner. Juliette is an author, entrepreneur, technologist, and strategist, who works at the intersection of culture, data science, and ethics and Art is a writer, editor, consultant/facilitator and entrepreneur with a background in technology, business culture, scenario thinking and organizational learning. They are both faculty members at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications and Interactive Media Arts program and have...

Today’s interview is with Dr. Peter Kim, Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and author of a newly published book called How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired. Peter joins me today on the podcast to talk about his new book, the different elements of trust, how we think trust operates and how most of us choose to trust in real life, why we're more likely to forgive what we...

Today’s interview is with David Rogers, who is the world’s leading expert on digital transformation, a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School, and the author of five books. He joins me today to talk about his new book, "The Digital Transformation Roadmap”, the reasons behind why 70 percent or more of digital transformations fall short of their objectives or fail to achieve any sustained benefit, the biggest single factor for digital transformation success, Amazon’s press...

Today’s interview is with Nate Sanders, the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the customer experience forecasting company. Nate joins me today to talk about the recent guest post that he wrote for my site called “Obituary: The Survey (1920s – 2023)” [It caused a bit of stir on LinkedIn], where we are at re surveys, VoC, data and insight, why companies don’t necessarily need more insight or customer feedback data and what they should be doing instead. This interview follows on from my recent...

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...

Today’s interview is with Cathrine (Cathy) Jooste, President of the Business Process Outsourcing Division, and John Samuel, EVP and CTO, at CGS, a global provider of applications, enterprise learning, customer experience and outsourcing services. Cathy and John join me today to talk about how the BPO/outsourcing business has changed over the last 40 years, the current challenges that the space is facing, how things are evolving, what are the tech and talent implications of these developments...

Today’s interview is with Micah Peterson, a member of the founding team and the VP of Product Management at ProcedureFlow, the next-generation knowledge management software that is designed to help companies visualize and navigate processes. We talk about two delusions that exist in the service space, particularly at the VP level, why followed procedures reduce AHT, how customer service can often be the dumpster fire of the company, and how text-based knowledge bases tend only to have a...

Today’s interview is like an interview I released a couple of weeks ago and features two, separate interviews that I conducted on a recent trip to Pegaworld iNspire held in Las Vegas. The first interview is with Kerim Akgonul, the Chief Product Officer at Pega. This is swiftly followed by a chat with Dr Peter Van Der Putten, who is assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in The Netherlands and Director of the AI Lab at Pega. I talk to them both about their highlights from the event...

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...

Today’s interview is a bit different as it features two, separate interviews in one episode. It's a two-fer! These interviews were conducted on a recent trip to Pegaworld iNspire held in Las Vegas. The first interview is with James Dodkins, who is the CX Evangelist at Pega. This is swiftly followed by a chat with Tara DeZao, Director of Product Marketing, AdTech and MarTech at Pega. I talk to them both about their highlights from the event and what’s top of mind for them in the service...

Today’s interview is with Jose Herrera, CEO and Co-Founder of Horatio CX, a next generation CX outsourcing firm and the trusted partner of some of the leading and fastest growing ecommerce companies. Jose joins me today to talk about maintaining a human connection when everyone else seems to be talking about how customer service needs to be led by robots, taking an employee-centric approach, achieving an industry-leading attrition rate of only 5% and building a truly inclusive culture. This...