Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s interview is with Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder & CEO of PolyAI , a leading supplier of Conversational AI for automated customer service. We talk about some recent research of theirs that finds that the phone still reigns in customer service, making the contact center into a ‘command center,’ why voice channels aren’t relics of the past but are, in fact, essential infrastructure, that cust...

Today’s interview is with Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia , a leading provider of customer and employee experience management solutions. I first talked to Sid 11 years ago on this podcast when he was Founder & CEO at Clarabridge . This time around, we talk about what has happened in those intervening years, what brought him out of ‘retirement’, how to balance the human touch a...

Today’s interview is with Marcelo Calbucci , an entrepreneur, innovator, technologist, and author. Marcelo joins me today to talk about his new book: The PRFAQ Framework: Adapting Amazon’s Innovation Framework to Work for You , why Amazon uses it, the five principles of the PRFAQ, where and how it can be applied and what to expect when you are creating your first one. This interview follows on fro...

Today’s interview is with Naomi Rankin, the Manager of Global Customer Care at Lush , the British cosmetics retailer. I spoke to Naomi when I attended Zendesk ’s recent Relate event, which took place in Las Vegas on March 25th-27th. We talk about her highlights from the event, what customer care means to Lush, their approach to AI and her journey with Lush from starting work in one of their shops...

Today’s interview is with Gaurav Passi, Founder & CEO of Zingly . He joins me today to talk about some research that they have recently conducted about FORO (the Fear of Reaching Out), the Great CX Paradox, why Omnichannel was a myth and how ‘Rooms’ could be the answer. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why businesses need to invest in both brand and customer experience – In...

Today’s interview is with Martin Gill, VP, Research Director at Forrester . Martin joins me today to talk about their upcoming CX Summit EMEA that will be taking place in London (and digitally) from June 2–4, 2025. We explore the major themes of the event, including why businesses need to invest in both brand and customer experience to maximise growth, what practitioners should be keeping in mind...

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO at Pegasystems , an industry-leading low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. Don joins me today to talk about the upcoming PegaWorld 2025 (PegaWorld is taking place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas from June 1st to the 3rd), Agentic AI (obvs.), how some organizations are implementing agentic solutions and it is causing cha...

Today’s podcast is a two-parter and features interviews with Tom Eggemeier, Adrian McDermott and Matthias Göhler, which took place at Zendesk ’s recent Relate event, which took place in Las Vegas on March 25th-27th. Tom Eggemeier is the Chief Executive Officer of Zendesk, Adrian McDermott is the Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk, and Matthias Göhler is EMEA Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk. W...

Today’s podcast is with Vivek Pandya, Director, Adobe Digital Insights at Adobe . I recently caught up with Vivek at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas to talk about some new research that Adobe just published called AI to Cart , which highlights the impact that Generative AI-powered chat interfaces are having on consumers, how that is changing their search and shopping behaviours, what brands should be do...

Today’s podcast is a three-parter and features interviews with Zig Serafin, Brad Anderson and Isabelle Zdatny that I conducted at Qualtrics ’ recent X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit , which took place in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. Zig Serafin is the Chief Executive Officer of Qualtrics, Brad Anderson is the President of Products, UX and Engineering at Qualtrics, and Isabelle Zdatn...

Today’s podcast is with Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizely , who joins me to talk about a new research report they have just published called Tested to Perfection , experimentation, personalization, privacy and all things in between, including the key things that marketers should be doing more of to better engage their customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – There are f...

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 enge...

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 im...

Today’s podcast is with Ari Weinzweig, the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses , a much-admired gourmet food business group headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Ari is a friend, a veteran of the podcast and was also one of the contributors to Punk XL . Ari joins me today to talk about his latest missive - a chapbook entitled Life Lessons I Learned From Being A...

Today’s podcast is with Alex Levin, the Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io , that provides high-touch contact center software (CCaaS) that enhances sales, support, and customer retention with the help of AI agents and automated personalization. Alex joins me today to talk about the rise of voice AI agents and how they are likely to transform contact centers helping to automate the majority of contact...

Today’s podcast is with Martin Teasdale, host of Get out of Wrap , a contact centre focused podcast, and Ed Creasey, Global VP of Solutions Engineering at Calabrio , a workforce performance suite provider. Martin recently collaborated with Ed and the team at Calabrio on a new piece of research called Voice of the Agent . Martin and Ed join me today on the podcast to talk about some of the main fin...

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...

Today’s podcast is with Marcel Barrera, Chief Strategy Officer at serviceMob Inc , a customer service enterprise technology company specializing in data ontology driven analytics. Marcel joins me today to talk about why the dominant metrics that are currently being used in customer support are broken, “The ‘Hamster Wheel’ Dilemma,” why AI and human agents are bound to fail without a cohesive, acti...

Today’s podcast is with Daphne Robertson, the VP of Customer Experience and Operations at #paid , a creator marketplace where brands and creators connect, collaborate, and measure their creator marketing campaigns. Daphne joins me today to talk about influencer marketing, it’s growth and influence on customer experience and engagement, how to get it right and the impact of generative AI tools on t...

Today’s podcast is with Edwin Margulies, Chief Evangelist at Nextiva , a provider of a unified customer experience management platform. Edwin joins me today to talk about his new book, Mastering the Customer Experience , why it was over twenty-five years in the making, the eight-step discovery model at its heart and how it can help companies execute and deliver better experience outcomes. This int...

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...

Today’s podcast features a series of interviews I conducted with HubSpot executives when I attended HubSpot’s recent GROW Europe 2024 event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. First up is Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot , who I talk to about why the marketing funnel is broken, why we should be thinking about a flywheel instead and having a dedicated space in t...

Today’s interview is with Nadine Macklin, who is the Vice President of Customer Success at CARTO , a leading Location Intelligence platform, that enables organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioural marketing, strategic store placements, and much much more. Nadine joins me today to talk about taking a different approach to customer success,...

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...

Today’s interview is with Thomas Laird, founder and CEO of both the Expivia Interaction Marketing Group , a USA BPO omnichannel contact center, and OttoQA , a next-generation solution for automating contact center quality assurance scoring. Thomas is also an author and joins me today to talk about his new book: false hustle: Transforming Customer Experience from Illusion to Impact , what ‘false hu...