Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

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.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Rebecca Miller, Senior Product Strategy Manager in the customer service and sales automation division at Pega. Rebecca joined me on the podcast recently to talk about the recently announced Pega Self-Service Agent, the problem with the current solutions in the market, why Pega is taking a fundamentally different approach to self-service and why it’s critical that these types of solutions leverage enterprise workflows. This podcast is sponsored by Pega. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Overcome incrementality by reimagining customer and agent experience – Interview with NiCE’s CEO and Staysure’s COO – and is number 550 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 two interviews. The first is with Scott Russell, CEO at NiCE, a provider of AI-driven customer service software that helps deliver automation & personalized experiences at scale. Scott and I talk about their recent Interactions events in Las Vegas and London, why many organisations are still uncertain about how to best leverage AI and innovation to transform customer experiences, why we should be creating a more human experience and not just automating for efficiency, their 2025 Global Happiness Index, a new report they have produced called The C-Suite Disconnect and, finally, their new campaign about creating a ‘NiCE world’. Following my chat with Scott, I spoke to Alistair Hadfield, the COO of Staysure Group, the UK’s #1 Travel Insurer, about the digital transformation that they are going through, their journey with NiCE and why they chose them and what lessons they have learnt along the way. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Five blind spots that get in the way of customer understanding and growth – Interview with Toni Keskinen of 180ops – and is number 549 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 interview is with Toni Keskinen, who is the Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer & Chairman at 180ops, a revenue intelligence platform built on account-based customer data that empowers B2B businesses to drive revenue growth, optimize operations, and enhance customer lifetime value. Toni joins me today to discuss five different blind spots that he believes many organisations suffer from when it comes to understanding their customers, driving growth, and where they should focus their resources, particularly in sales and account management. This interview follows on from my recent interview – SRM and why it matters to growth and customer experience – Interview with Ryan Hamilton – and is number 548 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.