The CX Iconoclast

When the customer experience is poor, should the sales team take the blame for failing to consider the long-term health of customer relationships? Not so fast, says our guest Bill Binch, a sales leader at some of the tech industries fast-growing companies. It’s a bit more complicated than that, and if you’re a leader whose role include ensuring that customers either get value from your solution or...

In any successful industry, leaders must answer an existential question: How do you evolve and adapt as the world around you changes? Our guest David Tudehope, CEO of Australia’s Macquarie Telecom Group, looks to customers to as the ultimate guide. In doing so, he takes a very unusual approach in an industry known for its poor customer experience.  David explained that Macquarie Telecom Group stri...

How do you know you’re getting value from your investments in innovation? Our guest Michael Schrage got that same urgent question from his students and clients: In response, he’s become laser focused on measurement, and his thinking has deep applicability to CX. Michael is a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab and a Visiting Fellow in the Imperial College Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. H...

What on earth makes your customers tick? That’s easy, according to our guest Paul Marsden, because it’s the same for everyone. And CX leaders would do well to keep the three core needs of fellow humans. Paul Marsden, CPsycol, is a consumer psychologist who helps businesses understand consumers. The conversation in this episode covered a lot of ground based on his unusual specialization. Paul share...

Does your company mourn the loss of customers as much as it celebrates their acquisition? It should, and it should back up that grief with resources to stop a repeat, says our guest Richard Watts. Richard Watts serves on several boards, including the board of Farmers Insurance, where he’s on the audit committee. It’s a sensible follow-on to his 33 years at Progressive Insurance. From the time Rich...

Feeling threatened by an upstart competitor -- or the looming possibility of one? Don't fight back using the same CX practices that got you where you are, urges our guest Martin White.  Before he founded his consulting firm Blackwood86, Martin White was CMO at MS Amlin, and before that he held executive and leadership roles in the financial services space at Experian, Morgan Stanley, GE Money...

Sometimes, it’s unexpectedly good news for all involved when technology limits the role of people play in the customer experience. But during times of unavoidable glitches in the customer experience, humans are critical, says our guest, Angela Vargo, VP of Marketing at Breeze Airways. Breeze calls itself America’s newest and nicest airline. With a focus on leisure travel, Breeze offers affordable,...

Most companies today don’t have any tangible value, points out our guest Tom Monahan. It’s all concentrated in relationships with customers and the experiences companies provide.  Tom Monahan led CEB for decades, developing a compelling suite of research, benchmarks, and decision-support tools and services and eventually selling the company to Gartner. His work at CEB included the development of t...

Should you be worried about loving your customers? Or working to make your customers love you? Our guest Andy Lark has a simple answer: No. Andy Lark, a CMO and chief customer officer several times over, thinks critically and creatively about brand, customer experience, and the trends affecting business today. Today, Andy is CMO at Dubber, world's leading provider of cloud-based call recordin...

Will AI put CX leaders out of work? Nope, but it should prompt a fundamental reimagining of the discipline, says our guest Erik Brynjolfsson. What’s at stake? “The companies within each industry that are using digital assets effectively are pulling away from their competitors,” he explains.  Erik is a professor at Stanford as well as a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI,...

If you’re exhausted by traditional approaches to CX, impatient with the stunning lack of progress in the field, and done re-hashing the “best practices” that don’t change anything, you’ve found your podcast.   Here’s what we know: Companies gain competitive advantage through exceptional customer experience, and customer insights are the best decision-making tool there is. But traditional CX approa...