The Modern Customer Podcast

This week on The Modern Customer Podcast, Keith Farley, SVP of Individual Voluntary Benefits and Head of Customer Care Centers at Aflac, shares how the company blends AI and empathy to transform customer experience in insurance. Insurance is one of the oldest industries, yet it faces modern pressures of speed, digital expectations, and customer trust. Rather than choosing between technology and humanity, Aflac integrates both—using automation for efficiency and empathy to deepen trust, directly linking CX to growth. 3 Key Takeaways on CX from Aflac Empathy at scale: A dedicated support line for first-time cancer diagnoses ensures compassionate guidance during the toughest calls. AI with guardrails: Automation speeds routine claims, while humans handle complex or denial cases to protect trust. CX as ROI: Simpler processes drive acquisition, while empathy and trust strengthen persistency and long-term value. Tune in to the full episode to hear how Keith Farley makes customer experience a measurable growth strategy at Aflac. Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.   

This week on The Modern Customer Podcast, Dilip Bhatia, Chief Experience Officer at Lenovo, shares how Total Experience drives business outcomes. Lenovo, a $69B company operating in 180 markets, aligns every function around the customer—reducing churn, improving NPS, and embedding accountability. Guided by its vision of “Smarter Technology for All,” the company combines culture, design, and technology to turn experience into growth. Here’s how Total Experience shows up at Lenovo: 👉 Culture & accountability — 95% of employees have a CX KPI tied to their bonus 👉 Inclusive design & testing — accessibility features shaped with input from a school for the blind and ThinkPads tested through 20+ military-grade tests 👉 AI-powered personalization — GenAI accelerates content creation, localized AI safeguards privacy, and sellers are equipped with data for a 360° customer view 🎧 Discover how Lenovo makes CX measurable, accountable, and effortless—building trust and growth. Tune in now! Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.   

AT&T serves more than 100M customers with the support of 140,000 employees. Keeping customer centricity alive at that scale takes real focus. On this week’s Modern Customer Podcast, Jenifer Robertson, EVP & GM of AT&T Mass Markets and Mobility, joins the show. Jenifer was AT&T’s first Chief Customer Officer, launching its customer-centric transformation, and she’s been a champion for the customer voice ever since. Here’s how AT&T is putting the customer at the center at massive scale: ✅ Personalization at scale — AT&T drills down from markets to households so every customer feels seen and heard. ✅ AI in action — improving customer satisfaction, first-call resolution, and containment, while virtual experts begin to support retail. ✅ Omnichannel without friction — creating a single view of the customer across digital, app, retail, and call centers. ✅ Trust as the foundation — with The AT&T Guarantee, the first in the industry to cover both fiber and wireless. Her perspective is clear: great customer experience doesn’t cost more—it costs less. 👉 Get the full story on how AT&T puts customers at the center. Tune in now! Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.   

Missed calls lead to customer frustration and lost revenue. Voice AI changes this. With voice AI, these missed opportunities can be transformed  into meaningful conversations that build loyalty and drive growth. On the latest The Modern Customer Podcast, I had a conversation with @Carson Hostetter, EVP & GM of AI + CX at @RingCentral, about how companies are using voice AI to: ✅ Replace outdated IVR menus with human-like dialogue ✅ Protect revenue by ensuring no call is missed ✅ Turn conversations into proactive customer service and business growth   Carson knows the stakes. As RingCentral’s former CRO, he helped grow ARR from $1.4B to $2.4B and scaled its enterprise business from $5M to $500M. Now, he’s applying that same growth mindset to AI. 👉 Listen to the full episode and discover how companies are already turning calls into ROI with voice AI. This episode of The Modern Customer Podcast is sponsored by RingCentral. 📌 Learn more about RingCentral's AI Receptionist → https://www.ringcentral.com/air?BMID=CMRCXINMBM2025 See how they’re doing it in these customer success stories → https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/casestudies.html?BMID=CMRCXINMBM2025 Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

AI adoption is accelerating — and customer expectations are rising just as fast. Enterprises that lead in customer experience will be the ones that scale agentic AI across voice, video, digital, and chatbot channels — without losing accuracy, compliance, or trust. In this sponsored episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, I speak with Rishi Rana, CEO of Cyara, about how Cyara’s AI-powered customer experience assurance platform helps enterprises continuously test, monitor, and validate every interaction before it reaches the customer. We cover: ✅ How to scale AI without sacrificing trust ✅ Building guardrails for compliance and transparency from day one ✅ Preventing silent failures that cost millions 🎧 Listen now to learn how leading enterprises deploy agentic AI at scale with confidence. Learn more: https://cyara.com/   Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

This week on The Modern Customer Podcast, I sit down with Jeff Gelfuso, Chief Design Officer at Qualtrics, to discuss his People → Purpose → Products framework—a human‑first approach to customer experience that fosters loyalty, trust, and measurable results. Jeff shares how Qualtrics is transforming feedback with AI‑powered conversations that increase response rates by 10% and deliver twice the depth of insight, and why building trust is the foundation for lasting adoption of new technology. 🎧 Tune in for an inspiring conversation on designing experiences your customers will value for years to come. Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

What does it take to build a brand that earns loyalty across generations? Crayola is more than crayons—it’s a creative ecosystem built on emotional insight, personalization, and purposeful storytelling. In this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, Victoria Lozano, Crayola’s Chief Marketing Officer, shares how her team designs meaningful experiences across every touchpoint. 📌 Highlights from the episode: A campaign powered by emotional insight—91% of parents use color to influence their child’s mood Crayola’s award-winning Create and Play app and its role in personalization How the brand connects across generations through in-store, digital, and experiential strategies Why adult creativity and purpose-driven storytelling are key to the future of CX 🎧 Tune in to hear how Crayola transforms emotion into experience—and experience into loyalty.   Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

Verizon’s customer experience transformation started with a clear priority: listen to employees, study the data, and rebuild from the inside out. On this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, I’m joined by Brian Higgins, Chief Customer Experience Officer for Verizon Consumer. With more than two decades at Verizon, Brian has led everything from network operations to product and marketing. Today he’s leading Project 624, the company’s largest customer experience transformation yet. In this episode, we cover: ✔️ Why Verizon focused AI on employee pain points first ✔️ How they analyzed the root causes of churn and sales drop-off ✔️ The strategy behind opening 400+ new retail stores ✔️ Why they created a Customer Champion team to resolve long-tail service issues ✔️ How data, EX, and AI fuel continuous CX transformation This episode is packed with takeaways for CX leaders navigating AI, change management, and complexity at scale. Brian’s approach is smart, grounded, and refreshingly tactical. 🎧 Tune in now and share it with your team!   Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

How do you modernize customer experience in a legacy industry without losing the trust it was built on? That’s the challenge Allison Landers, Chief Experience Officer of Banking and Lending at UBS, is solving every day. In this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, Allison shares how UBS is scaling digital banking while preserving the high-touch service clients expect—and why CX is not just about delight. It’s about protecting relationships and earning loyalty at every step. Inside the episode: Why UBS expanded into credit cards and mortgages How journey mapping helps fix what matters most What it takes to lead CX across legacy systems and siloed teams Why modern CX leaders must be relentless operators—not just visionaries This is a must-listen for CX leaders navigating complexity, scale, and rising expectations. Listen now! Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. 

Canva has over 230 million users. Their AI features? Used more than 16 billion times in the past year. So how does a company at that scale keep customer experience simple, human, and aligned? I sat down with Rob Gilio, Chief Customer Officer at Canva, to unpack how they’re scaling CX, sales, and support—without losing their design-driven soul. We talked about: The “bow tie” framework Canva uses to align teams across the full journey Why background remover became their most-used AI feature—and how business users deploy it at scale How Canva blends product-led growth with real human support across global teams Why CXOs must own post-purchase if they want to unlock enterprise value If you're rethinking how to scale CX with AI, data, and design in a high-growth business—this one’s for you. 🎧 Listen to the episode now!   Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.