Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I had with Miranda Collard, who is the CEO of the Americas at TP (formerly Teleperformance). Miranda and I talk about Miranda’s career journey from employee #27 to now being the CEO of the Americas, how she still takes customer calls, why the future of CX isn’t about bots versus humans, how this technological (r)evolution is changing the role that TP plays with their clients, the lessons that TP have learned about how to drive real results and RoI from working with more than half of the Forbes Top 100, how helping clients succeed is about equipping your people to lead with effective AI implementation that balances both emotional and artificial intelligence and how that focus on the human element is helping TP set themselves apart from their competitors. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Some of the most innovative brands in the world are using AI to create a service dividend – Interview with Tom Eggemeier of Zendesk – and is number 560 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I had with Tom Eggemeier, the Chief Executive Officer of Zendesk, following the conclusion of Zendesk’s recent AI Summit. We talk about the highlights from the event, what’s different from what they announced at Relate back in March, how they now have 20,000 customers using their AI and where they are seeing the fastest and most effective adoption, their recent acquisition of HyperArc and what it will bring to their platform in terms of advanced reporting, analytics and insights, the launch of their voice AI agents and a whole bunch of other things, including an intriguing idea of how for some innovative brabds the application of AI is creating a ‘service dividend.’ This interview follows on from my recent interview – The terms deflection and containment should be banned – Interviews from Cisco’s WebexOne – and is number 559 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is a three-part episode featuring conversations I had with Vinod Muthukrishnan, the VP & COO for the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit at Cisco, Chang Chang, a Senior Director of Product for Cloud CX Solutions at Cisco and a Cisco Webex customer - Patrick Cornish, a Senior Network Engineer specialising in collaboration Architecture and Engineering at BancFirst, while at WebexOne recently in San Diego. We talk about their highlights from the event, what stood out for them from the slew of announcements and their views about some of the big challenges that organisations are facing in trying to improve their customer service and experience, particularly when it comes to harnessing the potential that new AI-powered innovations offer. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The State of Customer Engagement – Interview with Chris Koehler of Twilio – and is number 558 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features Chris Koehler, the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio. We discuss Twilio’s recently published State of Customer Engagement Report, how many brands are using AI to personalise experiences and the impact they are seeing as a result, customer concerns about the use of their data, the rise of first-party data strategies, how increasingly customers want control over their personalisation settings, whether we are witnessing a convergence of marketing, sales, and customer service teams, data sharing and collaboration, and finally, why executives need to step out of their “ivory towers.” This interview follows on from my recent interview – Closing the CX chasm – Interview with Jamie Anderson of UserTesting – and is number 557 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features Jamie Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer of UserTesting. Jamie joins me today to talk music, the mismatch between what companies believe they deliver and what customers actually experience, and how this can be fixed with human-first design. We also explore how AI risks disconnecting teams from real human needs if left unsupervised, why many digital experiences suck and what we should do about it. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Creating a customer service system that scales without losing authenticity – Interview with Ty Givens of CX Collective – and is number 556 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Ty Givens, who is the Founder and CEO of CX Collective, where she partners with ambitious brands to build customer experience programs that don’t just keep up—they lead. Ty joins me today to talk about how emotional labour and systems thinking are missing from leadership, why there is a better way to reduce employee churn and inconsistency rather than chasing tools, burnout for team leads, and how to get fast-growing support teams that are often structurally shaky onto a more steady footing without losing momentum. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Think you know Gen Z? Think again – Interview with Matt Powell of Great State – and is number 555 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Matt Powell, Creative Director at Great State, a digital product and service design agency. Matt joins me today to talk about some research that they recently released called Shifting States, which examines Gen Z behaviours and digital expectations. We explore the implications of this research, what it means for brands, and how they should adjust their thinking and marketing. Additionally, Matt outlines five principles that will help brands build reciprocal loyalty, particularly with their Gen Z customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why most brands build chatbots backwards – Interview with Sophie Cheng of Sinch – and is number 554 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Sophie Cheng, the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Sinch, the global CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) provider. Sophie joins me today to talk about why most brands build chatbots backwards, why success hinges on journey-led design, not tech-first thinking, how to design real conversational experiences and key pitfalls to avoid with AI assistants. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The value of hyperpersonalization and the state of CX – Interview with Greg Kihlström of The Agile Brand – and is number 553 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Greg Kihlström from The Agile Brand. Greg is a best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur, and serves as an advisor and consultant to top companies on marketing technology, marketing operations, and digital transformation initiatives. A couple of months ago, Greg invited me to be a guest on his show, and we took the opportunity to meet up and record the episode while he was in Scotland recently on vacation. We covered a lot of ground, including the state of customer experience, what brands get right and what they don’t and hyper-personalisation. It went so well I thought I’d release it as an episode on the Punk CX podcast too. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Envisioning a personal AI agent for every customer – Interview with Malte Kosub of Parloa – and is number 552 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Malte Kosub, the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a provider of an enterprise-grade AI agent management platform for customer service. Malte joins me today to talk about standing out in an increasingly crowded field, his vision for how customer support will evolve over the coming five years, and what successful companies are doing to allow them to tap into the potential of this new technological wave. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Transforming CX with predictable AI and workflow automation – Interview with Rebecca Miller of Pega – and is number 551 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.