Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Sharath Keshava Narayana, CEO and Co-Founder of Sanas, which provides a real-time speech understanding platform with accent translation, noise cancellation and now real-time speech translation technology. Sharath and I talk about the challenges with current translation methods, what they are doing with regards to real-time speech translation, the possibilities that this type of technology offers for customer service and experience and the exciting fact that Douglas Adams’ Babelfish application/device that featured in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is getting much closer. We also finish off with Sharath’s best advice, his Punk CX brand and his very own good news story. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Twilio’s secret sauce and CarFinance247’s road to success – Interviews from Twilio SIGNAL London 2025 – and is number 566 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 two-parter that I recorded while attending the Twilio SIGNAL event in London on November 19th. My first guest is Peter Bell, VP of EMEA Marketing at Twilio. Peter and I talk about his highlights from the event, what he is seeing companies do well/right to help them harness the obvious potential of all of the new technology that is emerging, as well as some examples of brands that they are working with, what they are doing, what challenges they are overcoming and what outcomes they are driving. Following my chat with Peter, I spoke to Michael Binks and his colleague Paul Mawson, who are Director of Technology and Head of Product, respectively, at CarFinance247, the UK’s leading digital car finance platform. We talk about their motivations for attending the event, what they spoke about in their breakout session, their journey with Twilio and some advice/lessons learned along the way. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Are machines making marketers more human? – Interview with Elizabeth Maxson of Contentful – and is number 565 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.

Elizabeth Maxson, CMO at Contentful, dives into how AI is reshaping marketing. With a rich background from Salesforce and Tableau, she discusses their research on whether AI makes marketers more human. Topics include the migration from AI experimentation to implementation and the challenge of managing an ever-growing toolkit. Elizabeth emphasizes the importance of emotional resonance in AI-generated content and how personalization can enhance customer experiences without feeling invasive. She also contrasts marketing strategies between Europe and the U.S., urging teams to prioritize human connections.

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a discussion I recently had with Ray Gerber and Mark Smith, Co-Founders of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM). We talk about customer journeys, where most people go wrong with them, some examples of customer journeys done right, where AI fits into all of this, the backstory to the Institute for Journey Management, the problem they are trying to solve, and their plans for the coming year. Disclosure: I’ve known Mark and Ray for sometime now and have a huge amount of respect for what they have achieved in the past and what they are aiming to do with the I4JM. As they were setting up the I4JM, they invited me to become a Founding Member. I accepted. This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX is reaching a tipping point – Interview with Jonathan Rosenberg of Five9 – and is number 563 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 discussion I recently had with Jonathan Rosenberg, who is the Chief Technology Officer and head of AI at Five9. Jonathan and I talk about why he believes CX is reaching a tipping point and what’s driving that, how things are likely to change for customers, agents, and businesses, what he’s seeing companies do well/right, as well as what to avoid in order to better harness the obvious potential of AI. This interview follows on from my recent interview – How Vodafone, Rabobank and others are driving meaningful results with AI – Interview with Matt Healy of Pega – and is number 562 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 recently had with Matt Healy, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega, where we talk about legacy transformation, how big some of the legacy challenges facing firms are, how Pega is responding, why it’s important for organisations to have a real strategy with respect to AI agents in order to get meaningful results rather than just applying a bunch of agents and hoping for the best and some lessons from the most successful companies who are managing to scale their AI projects, generate meaningful commercial returns and drive improvements in customer-related outcomes. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Equip people with AI to enable them to lead with emotional intelligence – Interview with Miranda Collard of TP – and is number 561 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 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 brands 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.