Today’s podcast is with Marcel Barrera, Chief Strategy Officer at serviceMob Inc, a customer service enterprise technology company specializing in data ontology driven analytics. Marcel joins me today to talk about why the dominant metrics that are currently being used in customer support are broken, “The ‘Hamster Wheel’ Dilemma,” why AI and human agents are bound to fail without a cohesive, actionable data model and, finally, why churn is customer service’s darkest secret. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The impact of influencer marketing on customer experience – Interview with Daphne Robertson of #paid – and is number 527 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 podcast is with Daphne Robertson, the VP of Customer Experience and Operations at #paid, a creator marketplace where brands and creators connect, collaborate, and measure their creator marketing campaigns. Daphne joins me today to talk about influencer marketing, it’s growth and influence on customer experience and engagement, how to get it right and the impact of generative AI tools on this space. This interview follows on from my recent interview – An eight-step discovery process to help master the customer experience – Interview with Edwin Margulies of Nextiva – and is number 526 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 podcast is with Edwin Margulies, Chief Evangelist at Nextiva, a provider of a unified customer experience management platform. Edwin joins me today to talk about his new book, Mastering the Customer Experience, why it was over twenty-five years in the making, the eight-step discovery model at its heart and how it can help companies execute and deliver better experience outcomes. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Pandemic maths and measuring all of marketing – Interview with Gregory Kennedy of Alembic Technologies – and is number 525 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 podcast is with Gregory Kennedy, VP of Marketing at Alembic Technologies, which provides AI-powered marketing analytics for C-suite executives. We talk about how Alembic is applying mathematics and AI, developed for identifying causes, treatments, and mortality during the pandemic, to tracing the results of marketing initiatives across the board, what that means for marketers and how they ended up with a series of backers, that include NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former 49-ers Quarterback Joe Montana. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Broken funnels, flywheels and human messaging – Key insights from HubSpot executives at GROW Europe 2024 – and is number 524 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 podcast features a series of interviews I conducted with HubSpot executives when I attended HubSpot’s recent GROW Europe 2024 event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. First up is Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot, who I talk to about why the marketing funnel is broken, why we should be thinking about a flywheel instead and having a dedicated space in their CRM platform for customer success professionals and leaders. Following that chat, I spoke to Crevan O’Malley, VP Corporate Sales, EMEA, at HubSpot, about what stood out for him from the panel that he moderated, how human messaging will be the thing that helps scaling brands cut through the noise and what brands should be doing with all of the time that AI tools can help us save. Clue: it’s all about spending more quality time building better connections. Finally, I talked to Lalitha Stables, HubSpot’s new UK GM and Country Manager, about HubSpot’s secret sauce and what stood out for her at the event. This interview follows on from my recent interview – It’s not about the customer’s journey with our platform, it’s about the customer’s journey – Interview with Nadine Macklin of Carto – and is number 523 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. #GROWEurope2024 #hubspotpartner

Today’s interview is with Nadine Macklin, who is the Vice President of Customer Success at CARTO, a leading Location Intelligence platform, that enables organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioural marketing, strategic store placements, and much much more. Nadine joins me today to talk about taking a different approach to customer success, the level of alignment (or lack of alignment) customer success teams often have with other teams like marketing, sales, service, product, support etc, the capability gap within data-driven decision-making and whales! This interview follows on from my recent interview – The third wave of customer support – Interview with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein of Surfboard – and is number 522 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 Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, CEO & Founder of Surfboard, an award-winning workforce management (WFM) software provider. Natasha joins me today to talk about the findings of their recently released 2024 customer service survey: The third wave of customer support, what might be stopping some customer service teams from not investing in AI tools and capabilities, where they are investing, how it is benefitting them and some advice for customer service leaders looking to get the most out of their AI investments. Since this podcast was recorded, Surfboard has been acquired by Dialpad. You can find out more here. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Basketball, false hustle and metrics that matter – Interview with Thomas Laird of Expivia/OttoQA – and is number 521 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 Thomas Laird, founder and CEO of both the Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, a USA BPO omnichannel contact center, and OttoQA, a next-generation solution for automating contact center quality assurance scoring. Thomas is also an author and joins me today to talk about his new book: false hustle: Transforming Customer Experience from Illusion to Impact, what ‘false hustle’ is, how to spot it, the paradox of efficiency and personalization and, if you identify that you have a culture of false hustle, what you should be doing to transform your brand into one that truly values human conversation, insight and connection. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The five promises of personalization – Interview with Mark Abraham and David Edelman – and is number 520 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 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 personalization, the role of AI in all of this, the customer service C-suite loop and some examples of brands who are personalization leaders. This interview follows on from my recent interview – There are major tectonic shifts taking place in the outsourcing space right now – Interview with Craig Crisler of SupportNinja – and is number 519 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 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 future of outsourcing looks like, and what are some of the main challenges ahead. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Within five years, contact center agents will become contact center specialists – Interview with Sam Wilson of 8×8 – and is number 518 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.