Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s interview is with Boston Consulting Group Senior Partner Mark F. Abraham and Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer David C. Edelman. They join me today to talk about their new book: PERSONALIZED: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI , defining personalization, the equation P=n×v2, the five promises of personalization, the technology that brands need to embrace to deliver true personalizati...

Today’s interview is with Craig Crisler, CEO at SupportNinja , a modern provider of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. Amidst lots of research reporting that despite all the investment in new tech, customer satisfaction is at an all-time low, I talk to Craig about where folks are going wrong with their investments, what’s going on in the BPO space, what shifts are happening, what the fut...

Today’s interview is with Sam Wilson, the CEO of 8x8 , a provider of a unified cloud platform for contact center, business phone, video, chat, and APIs that helps companies of any size deliver differentiated customer experiences. I’ve spoken to Sam a couple of times, and every time, we have great conversations where we rummage around some of the big issues that organizations are facing when it com...

Today’s interview is with Conny Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance . Conny joins me today to talk about her ambitions for Zurich to become the “Apple of Insurance”, her guiding philosophy around customer retention and revenue, how they are building customer loyalty and a human connection in an increasingly competitive landscape and some of the big trends and technologies tha...

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...

Today’s interview is with Vivek Sharma, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Movable Ink , which empowers marketers with scalable, omnichannel personalization through data activation and AI decisioning. Vivek joins me today to talk about their recent 2024 Audience of One research report , content creation as a key bottleneck in personalisation efforts, how automation through the increased u...

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 bran...

Today’s interview is with Leslie Zane, who is the Founder and CEO of Triggers, a brand consulting firm, and an authority on harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Leslie joins me today to talk about her new book, THE POWER OF INSTINCT: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life , why she thinks we have entered the age of instinct, being 10-15 years ahead of...

Today’s interview is with Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot . Daphne joins me today to talk about customer success, why the customer isn’t always right, how siloed systems inhibit the delivery of tailored experiences, and what brands should be doing more of to drive customer-led growth. This interview follows on from my recent interview – There needs to be a really...

Today’s interview is with Cale Urwin, Director, Data, Digital & Marketing Health Services at Bupa . I caught up with Cale recently at PegaWorld in Las Vegas to talk about what stood for him at the event and how Bupa has evolved its customer engagement story and Customer Decision Hub capabilities in Australia from outbound to digital management and surprise & delight strategies. This interv...

Today’s interview is with Simon Morris, the Area Vice President of Solution Consulting at ServiceNow . Simon joins me today to talk about ServiceNow’s new Consumer Voice Report 2024, the ongoing decline of brand loyalty, what’s driving it, why “The future of customer experience is high-tech meets high-touch” and some of the biggest lessons coming out of the report. This interview follows on from m...

Today’s interview is with Dr Peter van der Putten, who is Director of the AI Lab at Pega and assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in The Netherlands. I caught up with Peter at the recent PegaWorld to talk about his highlights from the event, how to think about AI using a left/right brain thinking metaphor and what’s coming next in the enterprise AI space. This interview follows on from m...

Today’s interview is a combo podcast in which I interview (separately) Ron Secrist , Managing Director, Head of Client Experience at Citi , and Christina Sansone , Vice President of CX Transformation at Dish . I met both of them when I attended Qualtrics ’ X4 Summit in Salt Lake City last month and talked to them about their Qualtrics journey, what they are doing with AI and what listening and tak...

Today’s interview is with Prashaant Huria, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Unilever’s Digital Distributive Trade business. Prashaant and I connected after he spoke at Adobe’s Global Summit in Las Vegas back in late March . We talked about how they got 2.7mln ‘Mom & Pop’ stores to adopt a new distributive trade platform that Prashaant and his team at Unilever have developed, what it can...

Today’s interview is with Jeff Comstock, CVP of Dynamics 365 Customer Service at Microsoft . Jeff joins me today to talk about Co-Pilot for Service, the impact it is having on the agent experience and also customer/business outcomes, their experience trialling it extensively with their own customer service engineers, how their early adopter clients are leveraging Co-Pilot in Service , what they ha...

Today’s interview is with Emma Springham, Chief Marketing Officer at TSB , a British retail and commercial bank. I met Emma at Adobe’s Global Summit in Las Vegas after she spoke on the Main Stage. Emma and I talk about the importance of your personal brand in marketing and CX leadership, the pink elephant in the room, what personalisation means for TSB, what they have done to deliver that, what im...

Today’s interview is with David McIntosh, who is VP and GM of Connected Stores at Instacart . David joins me today to talk about innovation in the retail space, why and how they are reaching into the physical retail domain, what they are up to, the benefits for both the customer and business and a look into the future of retail. This interview follows on from my recent interview – If you aren’t fi...

Today’s interview is with Zig Serafin, CEO at Qualtrics , the leading Experience Management software provider. I spoke to Zig at Qualtrics’ recent X4 event in Salt Lake City. We talked about Qualtrics’ vision, the highlights from the event, the XM Operating system, Qualtrics AI and the hundred different AI models that they have built, how they are empowering 43 out of 50 of the world’s largest bra...

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Pegasystems . Don joins me today to talk about the upcoming PegaWorld iNspire 2024 (PegaWorld is taking place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas from June 9th to the 11th and there is a money back guarantee!), what he’s most looking forward to at the event, the good and bad about the tech offerings...

In today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast, there is no interview. Why? Because today, I am celebrating the 500th edition of the podcast! Woop! Woop! Now, I thought long and hard about how to commemorate the occasion and how I might be able to use an interview format to do so. I did toy with the idea of having someone interview me but then didn’t get myself organised enough to arrange that. So, you...

Today’s interview is with Gareth Higgins , who writes and speaks about the power of storytelling to shape our lives and world, peace and justice, and how to take life seriously without believing your own propaganda. Gareth joins me today to talk about what makes a good story, whether good/effective storytelling be learnt, how people can start a journey towards being a better storyteller, what they...

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 d...

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 implic...

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 wel...

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 b...