The CX Leader Podcast | A resource for customer experience leaders

Women's Equality Day is celebrated in the United States on August 26, commemorating the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. In honor of that event, and in honor of her great-grandmother Tommie Walker, who founded Walker in 1939, Sara Walker guests hosts to highlight words of wisdom from women who have been guests on The CX Leader Podcast.

People love origin stories. And for CX professionals, narratives of customer experience “newbies” growing from humble beginnings into “heroes” can be insightful. Continuing in our series of featuring winners from the Awards International 2022 US Customer Experience Awards, host Steve Walker welcomes Lee Kemp, operations, supply chain, and Customer Experience leader, and Sam Wegman, vice president for customer experience, at Univar Solutions, a global chemical and ingredient distributor. Lee and Sam describe how they built an award-winning program from scratch, having received three gold awards and one silver for Univar's customer experience efforts.

Change is not easy. It’s human instinct to become comfortable with “what you know.” But sometimes a change is necessary – when CX professionals notice a problem, or recognize a way to make the customer’s experience better, their instinct is to find solutions to improve how they interact with customers. And a large global technology company needs a CX leader who can bring people together into a common purpose and inspire them to do what’s best for their customers. Host Steve Walker welcomes Bob McDonald, vice president of global CRM experience for IBM, for a discussion on how Bob made the case to transform their customer experience. 

Building CX programs from scratch is never an easy task. And the endeavor usually starts with the vision of a single person that sees the benefits of CX and agrees – or is appointed – to spearhead the project. And that includes a lot: program planning, gaining support throughout the organization, putting convincing metrics in place, and a whole lot more. It’s a daunting task. Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes Carol Tesarek from Equipment Depot to highlight how they put all the right pieces together to create an award-winning program.

Today’s technology allows for peer-driven collaboration on an unprecedented level. People from across the globe can create knowledge resources on Wikipedia, or develop software on GitHub and share it with the world. There are even ways to create art and music collaboratively online. So it only makes sense that a group of CX pros decided that the customer experience profession needed some sort of playbook that “documents CX terms, tactics, and approaches based on the CXPA CX Framework." Host Steve Walker welcomes Heather Gillbanks, CCXP and Director and Customer Experience & Customer Center of Excellence Lead at Cornerstone Building Brands, for a discussion on how she lead the effort to create this resources for CX pros.

Health is a deeply personal topic and these last few years have pushed healthcare institutions into making unprecedented changes in how they deliver that care. Naturally, this has had an impact on the patients’ experience. XM professionals in healthcare institutions must be mindful that patients are NOT customers, and design programs accordingly to improve the patient experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes Sarah Andrews, vice president for advisory services at Walker, and Sarah Gilstrap, a senior consultant for healthcare customer experience and an XM scientist at Qualtrics, for a discussion on trends in patient experience. 

If you’re a CX pro for small or medium size company, you already know the challenges in designing and delivering the best possible experience for your customers. But what about companies that have multiple locations? What about a company like Starbucks which has over 33 thousand locations? How do they deliver such a consistent experience across so many countries and cultures? Host Steve Walker welcomes Jim Hardeman, chief marketing officer and chief product evangelist for CMX, for a discussion on how larger companies create experiences consistent across multiple locations.

We’ve had some great guest on the show recently and the importance of the employee experience has started to emerge as a notable topic. Many guests emphasize the need for companies to empower and trust their employees to make decisions that improve the customer experience. In this episode of our “Turn Back Time” take home value series, producer Chris Higgins highlights some of the take home value offered from our guest in regards to employee experience.

Few if any of customer experience pros went to school to be a CX professional, and yet there are thousands in this flourishing profession. So what does it take to be a CX leader? What are the right skills and what is the best career path to take? How do you break into this and how do you determine whether your company will really support customer experience strategies? Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes Shelly Chandler, a certified CX professional and as head of customer experience for Delaware North, for a discussion on what it takes to start and advance your career in CX.

There are a number of ways to design experiences for your customers, but you're stuck. You find it hard to think beyond how things are currently done. And even if you had some sort of break-through idea, changing your current processes and getting others on board seems pretty daunting. And yet you constantly wonder, "what if?" Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes Jonathan Shroyer, Chief Customer Experience Innovation Officer for Arise Virtual Solutions, for a discussion on driving innovation in your CX program.