CX Innovators

At Kobie Marketing, agents are told not to watch the clock. Eir Welch, Director of Customer Success,  scrapped average handle time and instead tracks whether a positive interaction makes customers spend again. She walks Rob Dague through condensing a tangled knowledge base under a Microsoft Copilot bot, turning QA reviewers into auditors of AI evaluations, and using Six Sigma fishbone diagrams to...

Jose Jordan keeps a simple litmus test for automation. Payments and balance checks belong in self-service, while complex, multifaceted calls go to a human who can audit the account and explain what happened. As more gets automated, the calls that remain demand sharper, more knowledgeable agents. Jose, Director of Customer Service at Curacao , tells Rob Dwyer how mirroring a frustrated caller's...

Deploy AI to solve one problem the wrong way and it can create more problems for your business. Rebecca Holland, Founder at GTM RH Advisory and VP of Global Customer Success at Vimeo , has worked through five acquisitions. She explains what always breaks in customer success during a merger, and why customers do not care that you just got acquired. She makes the case for customer success as a reven...

Drew Candres built support organizations where a single tweet on a Saturday night could move a market 10% and flood your queues while the rest of the world slept. Now as VP of Customer Experience at GameChanger, he's applying those same instincts to a completely different emotional context: parents trying to capture their kids' first home run. The contrast makes for one of the more grounde...

Most CS leaders respond to scale pressure by automating SMB and protecting enterprise. Leana Hart , Director of Customer Success at Axon , thinks that binary is costing companies on both ends — and she's spent her career managing the full spectrum, from SMB through Fortune 500 enterprise, to prove it. In this episode, Leana gets specific: the account tiering logic she actually uses, why she th...

Vishal Anam has spent 20 years helping global organizations close the gap between measuring customer experience and actually acting on it. As Head of CX Consulting, Research and Analytics at Datamatics , he has worked across enough enterprise programs to know exactly where they break down. Most CX programs do not fail because organizations stop caring. They fail because the infrastructure for deci...

Brock Thompson spent 22 years in digital insurance and financial services, starting as a call center agent and eventually becoming VP of Customer Fulfillment at LendingTree, where he oversees inbound and outbound calls, SMS programs, calls technology, and the company's AI voice division. Having sat on both sides of the phone shapes how he thinks about where technology belongs in high-stakes co...

Wes Dudley has spent over 30 years leading CX at scale, including JCPenney, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, and Broad River Retail, the largest licensee of Ashley Furniture. He moved ticket resolution from nine days to eight hours, eliminated 2.7 million inbound calls annually with a single IVR change, and built a 750-seat contact center during COVID while call volume jumped from 16,000 to 115,000 c...

Allan Harari cut Comerica Bank's contact center wait times from 20-40 minutes to under 60 seconds without hiring additional agents. The transformation required rebuilding foundational infrastructure first—workforce management systems providing real-time data instead of monthly reports, quality assurance platforms generating actionable insights, and AI deployed as agent augmentation rather than...

Zach Greco runs a 100-agent fully remote contact center at Floor & Decor with under 10% annual turnover. His operational philosophy starts with one question before deploying any technology: "What's in it for them?" This applies whether rolling out AI knowledge bases, CRM workflow changes, or new telephony systems. By training their chatbot exclusively on indexed website content,...

David Melendez process-mapped Instructure 's entire onboarding flow and realized they were operationally optimized for the wrong outcome: getting customers keys to their purchase rather than setting them up to renew. The team had confused access provisioning with value delivery—a distinction that becomes critical when services drive the onboarding motion for a 50%+ market share LMS provider. David...

Implementing conversational AI revealed an unexpected fault line in their customer base for Laura Turner , Head of CX at S&S Activewear . Despite assumptions about how different customer segments would respond to automation, the split came down to something simpler: some customers want speed through self-service, and others insist on human connection regardless of request complexity. This insi...

AG1 scaled from one SKU to nine in 18 months while maintaining 98-99% CSAT. Leala Francis reveals how she uses conversational AI to spot sentiment shifts before purchasing behavior changes, then adjusts supply forecasts mid-cycle. Her organizational design—consolidating customer happiness, insights, product commercialization, and packaging innovation under one role—creates the speed needed to laun...

Most enterprise CX leaders assume you need a CRM to manage customer relationships at scale. Aurelia Pollet , Director of Customer Experience at CarParts.com , shares a different perspective. Her team handles 43 million annual customers across 1 million SKUs while currently operating without traditional CRM infrastructure, and she explores how this approach might become more common as AI eliminates...

What happens when a telecommunications reseller transforms into a cloud contact center pioneer? Paul Jarman , Founder and ex-CEO at NiceInContact  navigated six major technology waves, from premise to cloud, single-tenant to multi-tenant, voice-only to omnichannel, and traditional analytics to AI-powered automation. Paul has learned why most AI implementations fail the "looks good vs. gets used" t...

What happens when you serve every single customer — from students to enterprise — with the same white-glove experience? At Notion , it created a CX challenge that traditional automation couldn't solve, forcing them to rethink the entire human-AI balance. Emma Auscher , Global Head of CX, tells Ashish how Notion's "no customer left behind" philosophy led to a counterintuitive discovery: implementin...

Shantanu Das , General Manager & Global Head of Customer Service, Primary Sales, and Scam Prevention at Wayfair , manages one of the largest customer service operations in e-commerce — a 3,000-person global team at Wayfair — and his approach to AI implementation challenges conventional wisdom about automation versus human agents. His methodology starts with three distinct value creation modes:...

Managing millions of daily customer interactions at AT&T , Head of Retail Technology, Contact Center Platforms, GenAI Product & Engineering Deepak Sharma , has learned that successful AI transformation requires building AI-ready infrastructure before chasing AI features. His dual-lane framework separates quick wins like agent assist and call summarization from foundational data pipeline wo...

The gap between AI promise and contact center reality is often measured in months of failed adoption and frustrated executives. Tyler Orrell , VP of Contact Center Operations at QuinStreet , tells Ashish how they developed a surgical approach to AI that focuses on business impact over technological sophistication. His framework for identifying the 6-7 behaviors that actually drive outcomes, rather...

As AI automation grows in customer experience, the most forward-thinking organizations aren't replacing humans, they're redefining how humans and AI work together. In this insightful conversation with David DeMarco , SVP of Business Technology at Carta , on AI CX Innovators, Ashish explores why increased automation actually makes quality assurance more crucial and how "white space mining" can unco...

When only 20-25% of customers complete satisfaction surveys — and even those are primarily negative experiences — how can you truly understand your entire customer base? In this episode of AI CX Innovators, Prasanna Chand , Head of Data & Digital Transformation at Wayfair , reveals how they're using AI to predict customer satisfaction scores with 85% correlation to actual survey results, provi...

AI isn't replacing humans in customer experience — it's transforming them. In our very first episode of AI CX Innovators, Ashish Nagar , Founder & CEO of Level AI , dives deep with inaugural guest Andy Yasutake , SVP and Global Head of Strategic Growth & Ventures at Edgevana .  As former architect of customer experience transformations at tech giants eBay, LinkedIn, and Airbnb and with ove...