Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s interview is with Jan Kodadek is the Digital Lead for the Sexual Wellbeing category at Reckitt. Jan joins me today to talk about the massive shift to digital that has taken place over the last year, the leadership lessons that have emerged for her, what this has meant for a FMCG company and how we can build our understanding of customers and build better relationships with them, particularly when dealing with a potentially sensitive area. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Crushing complexity and keeping customer outcomes front and centre – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega — and is number 387 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at SugarCRM for sponsoring my podcast this month. SugarCRM, the provider of the #1 rated Customer Experience platform, is trusted by thousands of companies in over 120 countries to help them achieve high-definition CX. Recently they released their new CRM and Sales Impact Report which surveyed 1,000 sales professionals from around the globe on what’s driving (or stalling) revenue and customer engagement. The report also asks a provocative question: Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis. To find out the answer check out and download the report here.

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems. Don joins me today to talk about customer experience and digital transformation, what sort of grade he would give us for our performance through the pandemic, the need for more fluidity, the response to the need for greater empathy in customer and employee interactions, the collapse of the gap between rhetoric and activity, not losing the lessons of 2020, crushing complexity, what we have leaned about leadership and technology that we can carry forward and lastly the upcoming Pegaworld (www.pegaworld.com). This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customers are like chameleons – Interview with Professor Michael R. Solomon — and is number 386 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month. It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Today’s interview is with Michael Solomon, PhD who is Professor of Marketing in the Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of one of THE books, if not THE original book, on consumer behaviour. He joins us today not to talk about that book but a new one that he has just published called The New Chameleons: How to Connect with Consumers Who Defy Categorization, the difference between horizontal and vertical thinking, whether marketers really know their customers, whether there is a myth around the idea that customers want choice and other ideas that will help you build a better understanding of your customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – What the democratisation of artificial intelligence (AI) means for customer experience – Interview with Matthew Nolan of Pega — and is number 385 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month. It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Today’s interview is with Matthew Nolan, the head of Product Marketing for the Decision Sciences division at Pegasystems, driving Pega's portfolio of marketing technology, decision management, and customer engagement solutions. Matthew joins me today to talk about the democratisation of artificial intelligence (AI), what that means, the benefits and risks associated with that and some practical advice for leaders and practitioners looking to improve the experience that they deliver to their customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Enabling everyone to have the ability to understand the hidden stories in their data – Interview with Dr Derek Wang of Stratifyd — and is number 384 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month. It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Today’s interview is with Dr. Derek Wang, the founder and CEO of the AI-driven experience analytics platform Stratifyd. Derek joins me today to talk about empowering everyone to understand the hidden stories in their data, a vision of the future that features humans and AI working together to build better experience programs, proving or delivering a ROI for CX initiatives and some practical advice for leaders and practitioners in this space. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Getting closer to customers means connecting with them irrespective of the logistics – Interview with Bansi Mehta of Koru UX Design — and is number 383 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month. It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Today’s interview is with Bansi Mehta is the CEO and Founder of Koru UX Design, a global leader in strategic enterprise UX for the healthcare, telecom and finance industries. Bansi joins me to today to talk about how UX is changing and what should brands and organizations be paying attention to, what the future of UI/UX/CX look like, how she was able to scale her business to become one of the leaders in the UX space for B2B businesses and the trials and tribulations of being a minority, female leader in this space. This interview follows on from my recent interview – What you are doing right now will be the hallmark of your entire career – Interview with Tom Peters — and is number 382 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that 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 Tom Peters, best-selling author of numerous business books (19 in total) and speaker. He is, perhaps, best known for his 1982 seminal book: In Search of Excellence (co-authored with Robert H. Waterman Jr). He is a personal hero of mine and an inspiration and I am honoured to say that this is the third time (the first and the second) that he has been on the podcast. Tom joins me to today to talk about his new (and possibly) final book: Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism and the new set of courses he has developed: Excellence: Now More Than Ever. We talk about excellence, service, experience, leadership, kindness, extreme humanization and why it is needed now more than ever. As ever Tom was brilliant, insightful, funny and still dancing to the same beat that he has been for last 43 years. It was a huge amount of fun so do check it out. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Delivering empathetic customer experiences will require us to move from fuzzy into action – Interview with Joyce Kim, Chief Marketing Officer at Genesys — and is number 381 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that 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 Joyce Kim, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Genesys, a global leader in cloud -based customer experience and contact centre solutions that serves over 11,000 mid-sized and large businesses around the world. Joyce joins me today to talk about what it’s going to take for organizations to deliver a more empathetic experience to their customers, how empathy will move from fuzzy to actionable, how CMOs can take responsibility addressing customer experience woes as well as what lessons service and experience leaders need to be learning. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Journey analytics and orchestration is helping brands stop doing stupid stuff – Interview with Mark Smith of Kitewheel — and is number 380 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that 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 Mark Smith, President of Kitewheel, whose platform is powering real-time customer journeys for the world's most customer-centric brands. Mark joins me today to talk about leading edge customer experience, Voice of the Customer (VoC) and Voice of the Process (VoP) data, why VoC data is often partial and potentially misleading, journey analytics and customer journey orchestration as well as what lessons service and experience leaders need to be learning. This interview follows on from my recent interview – It’s the deviants that make the difference – Interview with Gary David and Adam Gamwell — and is number 379 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

WARNING! Today’s interview is not like the regular interviews you would normally find here. This episode of the Punk CX podcast is a bit of an experiment and features Gary David, an ethnographer and a professor of Sociology at Bentley University, and Adam Gamwell, a Design Anthropologist, or as he likes to describe himself a Design-Centered Human, and myself having a bit of a rummage around some of the ideas in my Punk CX book as well as a number of other issues related to service and experience including sociology, design, anthropology, systems thinking, organisational dynamics and psychology. We had fun. It was a conversational rummage. I learned a lot. Hope you enjoy the experiment. This interview follows on from my recent interview – We need to talk about customer service’s “messy middle” – Interview with Michael Ramsey of ServiceNow – and is number 378 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. It was quite some conversation so I haven’t produced highlights this time around. I’ll leave it up to you to jump in and find your own highlights. Normal service should resume next time 😉