Today’s interview is with Jamie Smith, who is the Founder and CEO of Customer Futures Ltd, an advisory firm helping businesses seize the opportunity around disruptive and customer-empowering digital propositions, and author of the weekly Customer Futures Newsletter. Jamie joins me today to talk about CustomerTech tools, EmpowermentTech, the emerging Customer Stack, what this all means, the implications of all this for personalisation and privacy and what customer engagement in the near future could look like. This interview follows on from my recent interview – A look inside a punk-inspired contact center – Interview with David Powers – and is number 497 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 David Powers, who is an author, podcast host, Chief Experience Officer at Rooter Hero Plumbing & Air and a true punk. David joins me today to talk about the need for taking a more punk approach to customer experience and the contact center, what that means in practical terms, some of the big changes he’s seen in the contact center space over the last 23 years as well as some of the biggest challenges coming down the pipe and, finally, what it means to create a tribe and/or a scene in your contact center. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The CX value model and linking experience to business outcomes – Interview with Michael Hinshaw of McorpCX – and is number 496 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 Michael Hinshaw, the founder and president of customer experience consultancy McorpCX. Michael joins me today to talk about the CX value model and why we should be linking experience to business outcomes, some key indicators of a successful customer-centric transformation, why your company might need an experience operating system (the XOS), what it is and what are the benefits. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leadership lessons from the winner of the 2023 CX Leader of the Year – Interview with Roxie Strohmenger of UKG – and is number 495 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 the winner of the MyCustomer 2023 CX Leader of the Year competition: Roxie Strohmenger, GSO - VP, CX Strategy at UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group). This interview is slightly different this week as I conduct it with Clare Muscutt, Founder and CEO of Women in CX but follows the same format to the one last year where we interviewed Maneesha Bhusal of JD .ID, the winner of the 2022 CX Leader of the Year. In the interview, we discuss Roxie’s journey to where she is now, why she applied for the CX Leader of the Year competition, how she felt when she won and the biggest lessons that she has learned along the way. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The frontline is where you connect EX and CX together in a very natural way – Interview with Joe Tyrrell of Medallia – and is number 494 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 Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Medallia. Joe joins me today to talk about why brands must consider EX in their journey to CX success, his view on the impact Generative AI is having on the world of experience and where he thinks it is heading, personalization and the big challenges that organizations need to tackle in order to fully realise the potential that lies in front of them. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Forget the hype. Here’s what enterprises are actually doing with generative AI – Interview with Stefano Puntoni and Jeremy Korst – and is number 493 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 Stefano Puntoni, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School and Director of AI at Wharton, and Jeremy Korst, President at GBK Collective. Stefano and Jeremy join me today to talk about a new report called The Rise of Generative AI in the Enterprise that they collaborated on and recently released, some of the biggest emerging applications and use cases for gen AI in the enterprise space coming out of the report, what reservations leaders have about the technology, the impact that gen AI will have on the demand for talent, what functional areas are lagging behind and what sort of safeguards brands should be putting in place to safely realize the potential of AI with customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The raw and honest truth about what agents think about their jobs – Interview with Juanita Coley – and is number 492 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 Juanita Coley, who is best known as the “Contact Center Whisperer” and is also the CEO and Founder of Solid Rock Consulting, a workforce management consulting firm. Juanita joins me today to talk about the inside track on what customer service agents like or don’t like about their jobs, the implications of those findings, what contact center leaders should be focusing on/doing to help improve their employees’ (agents) experience and why we should be talking about and leaning into the voice of the agent (VoA) amongst a bunch of other things. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The challenge with conversational analysis in the Nordics – Interview with Tue Martin Berg of Capturi – and is number 491 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 Tue Martin Berg, the CEO and part of the founding team at Capturi, Scandinavia's leading software provider for conversation analysis. Tue joins me today to talk about what they are up to, why some Scandinavian organisations who after implementing call/interaction analytics solutions from one of the big US providers, then ripped it out, whether the problem they faced applies to all brands that operate in languages other than English, the impact that has on their ability to offer automated conversational features as part of their services and what many Scandinavian organisations are now doing and achieving with the help of Capturi. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Are you doing change to people or with people? – Interview with Phil Lewis and Claire Croft of Corporate Punk – and is number 490 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 Phil Lewis and Claire Croft of Corporate Punk, an award-winning management consultancy that helps clients innovate and transform their business culture. Phil and Claire join me today to talk about how many change/transformation initiatives suffer because they try to do change to and not with their people, how doing change with and not to people is grounded in both data and dialogue and a framework to help an organisation/department/team determine how change-ready they are. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customers don’t want minimally viable anything. They just want quality – Interview with Debbie Levitt – and is number 489 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 Debbie Levitt, who is the CXO of Delta CX and the author of Customers Know You Suck. Debbie joins me today to talk about how we are in danger of over-indexing on failure and celebrating failure rather than trying to emulate what makes successful companies successful, how that is manifesting itself, why we talk about Apple and Amazon a lot but often don’t really emulate them, the relationship between failure, speed and quality and what customers actually care about. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Personalization is pervasive but it’s not personal – Interview with Shafqat Islam – and is number 488 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.