CX Decoded By CMSWire

PayNearMe CMO Anne Hay explains why she judges events by who her team spends time with rather than how many leads they collect, how to earn a spot on a buyer's shortlist and why curiosity is a marketer's most important skill.

Jeremy Cohen, manager of fan development and insights for the Buffalo Sabres, explains how AI analysis of more than 40,000 fan comments, monthly focus groups and street-level listening during a playoff run shaped real investments in the Sabres fan experience.

Suzie Dieth, VP and Chief Experience Officer at NRG and CMSWire's 2026 CX Leader of the Year, joins CX Decoded to trace nearly 21 years of building a CX program from scratch — from contact center roots to AI-driven insight at scale.

Three competing CDP vendors — Tealium, Treasure AI and Databricks — join CX Decoded for an unusually candid panel on real-time activation, the orchestration layer and why trust may be the category's next real fight.

Jorge Camargo, Head of Digital Platforms at Bank of America, joins CX Decoded to discuss the eight-year evolution of Erica, the bank's AI assistant — covering scale, personalization, compliance and what's next as generative AI reshapes client expectations.

Clarks' Mario Protano joins CX Decoded to unpack how AI is reshaping product discovery, why brand mentions are replacing clicks as a success metric, and how the 200-year-old footwear brand is rebuilding its affiliate and attribution strategy around a messier customer journey.

Jessica Herring, VP of Member Experience at Loyalty Credit Union, joins CX Decoded to talk AI chatbot design, member trust, and why she skipped the NPS score entirely.

Justin Racine, chief digital officer at Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply, joins CX Decoded to explain why B2B buyers are more emotional than the industry assumes — and why fixing employee experience matters just as much as fixing the customer journey.

Dexian CMO Kip Havel joins CX Decoded to talk about the expanding scope of the marketing job — from rebrand strategy to AI skepticism to why customer feedback nobody asked for is often the most valuable data a company has.

Brinks Home chief customer officer Veronica Moturi joins CX Decoded host Dom Nicastro to explain how a security and home automation company rebuilt its call center from the ground up. Moturi started as a customer service agent in 2012 and rose through retention and escalations before taking the CCO role. She breaks down why average handle time isn't a KPI, how issue resolution and first call resol...

Sanity CEO and co-founder Magnus Hillestad joins CX Decoded to argue that content management has been solving the wrong problem for years — treating content as a marketing asset instead of core business infrastructure. He explains why real-time, machine-readable content is now a prerequisite for AI agents to build, manage and distribute at scale, what that means for AEO and answer-engine discovery...

Pete & Gerry's Organics CMO Phyllis Rothschild joins Dom Nicastro on the CMO Circle podcast to talk premium egg marketing, brand building and the evolving consumer journey. From a 30-year consulting career at McKinsey to the brand side at the largest premium egg producer in the US, Rothschild shares how her team tracks LLM citation scores, navigates Reddit authentically, deploys an in-house eggflu...

Br ian Mekka spent 15 years managing CX for 60 million Kohl's shoppers. Now he's doing it for 300 steel buyers — and the stakes are completely different. Charter Steel's director of customer experience joins CX Decoded to break down the Compass program, a multi-phase initiative five years in the making, built on VOC data, a McKinsey methodology and a simple premise: B2B customers expect the same e...

Ben Larsen has spent nine years inside a company that built its reputation on something increasingly rare in insurance: actually caring. Wellfleet Insurance — a Berkshire Hathaway company — has answered the phone for college students navigating health insurance for the first time for over three decades, and that white-glove service culture is baked into everything. Now, as Digital Experience Offic...

Hayden Clark went from coaching wide receivers at Vanderbilt and working on Nick Saban's staff at Alabama to VP of Marketing at LGI Homes, where he now leads five in-house teams covering paid media, creative, analytics, local marketing, and digital experience. In this episode of CX Decoded, Clark talks about building a marketing team that prizes curiosity and soft skills over résumé depth, marketi...

Allison Kavanagh didn't come to this conversation to celebrate AI. The CMO of Inflow Health came to interrogate it. Her company exists because follow-up care gaps — the kind where an incidental imaging finding gets lost between a chart, a referring provider and a patient — can turn into a life-threatening failure. That's the standard she holds AI to: not whether it can generate more, but whether i...

Tyler Gardner has been in the contact center world since he was 18, taking calls for DiscoverCard off a paper dial sheet. Today, he runs customer experience for Cuyana, the premium women's clothing and handbag brand — and he's learned one thing that hasn't changed in 25 years: if the fundamentals aren't right, no technology will save you. Before Cuyana rolled out AI-assisted email and voice suppor...

Drupal founder and Acquia executive chairman Dries Buytaert joins CX Decoded fresh off DrupalCon Chicago to break down how AI is disrupting every leg of the open source ecosystem — the platform, the agency world, and the contributor community. Plus: why the current deal between publishers and AI crawlers is broken, and what CX leaders should actually be doing about content discoverability.

In this episode of CX Decoded , Dom Nicastro distills a CMSWire TV conversation with AT&T's John Miller into five essential takeaways on customer obsession. From employee enablement to AI restraint, the discussion breaks down how AT&T turns CX intent into everyday practice at enterprise scale.

CX Decoded dives into how contact centers and digital teams turn customer interactions into real business value. In this episode, host Dom Nicastro sits down with Barry Cooper, president of  NiCE 's CX division, to unpack the company's evolution from workforce management roots to a full-service CX platform — and what that means for agents, leaders and customers. Cooper shares how unified interacti...

In this episode of CX Decoded , Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro sits down with Miranda Collard, Global Chief Client Officer at TP, to explore her remarkable journey from headset-wearing agent to C-suite leader. With over 30 years in the contact center industry, Collard shares hard-earned insights on how frontline experience shapes leadership, why AI's real impact often happens behind the scenes, and...

In this episode of CX Decoded, Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro sits down with CMSWire's VP of Research, Sarah Kimmel, to unpack top findings from two pivotal reports: the 2025 State of the CMO and the 2025 State of Digital Customer Experience . Together, they explore the evolving skill sets required of modern CMOs, the cautious return of marketing budget growth and the ongoing struggle to accurately...

Too many marketers are chasing likes over results. Jim Lecinski, clinical professor of Marketing at Northwestern University and former Google executive, says it's time to reframe the CMO role—from brand builder to growth driver. In this episode, he breaks down how to stay customer-obsessed, navigate AI-driven search and get ready for Gen Alpha before they catch you off guard.

In this episode of "CX Decoded," Michelle Hawley, senior editor at CMSWire, takes a look inside the nuances of brand evolution in today's digital word, featuring Amber Holm, CMO at  Winnebago Industries  and Ranu Coleman, head of marketing at  PatPat . In this episode, both leaders delve into the importance of customer insights in keeping brands relevant — and the challenges that come with reposit...

In this episode of CX Decoded, host Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of  CMSWire , dives into the future of AI in customer service with insights from three leading experts in the field. This episode brings together discussions from two separate CMSWire TV  "Beyond the Call"  interviews, featuring Barry Cooper, president of  NICE 's CX Division; Tom Laird, CEO of  Expivia ; and Keith Farley, SVP of In...