CX Today

Marketing budgets have been flat at 7.7% of company revenue — and over 40% of CMOs pushing for more are losing C-suite influence. Why? They can't prove ROI.

In this episode, Francesca Roche sits down with Marie Bahl, CMO of Uptempo, to unpack why enterprise marketing still lacks a proper system of record, how the breakdown between planning and measurement costs brands millions, and what it actually takes to earn a CFO's trust.

The pressure on marketing leaders isn't just internal — it reflects a wider industry shift. As AI reshapes how businesses operate and boards demand greater accountability across every function, marketing is being held to a standard it was never structurally built to meet. With martech stacks growing in complexity and economic headwinds forcing leaner operations, the teams that will come out ahead are those investing now in a proper data backbone — not more point solutions. The conversation is moving from "what did we spend?" to "what did we build?".

AI is already reshaping customer service, but Simon Thorpe, Director at Pegasystems, argues the biggest shift is not the technology itself. It is the rise in customer expectations and the pressure on CX teams to deliver consistent outcomes, fast. In this CX Today interview, Thorpe explains why many organisations are treating service as a strategic battleground, tied directly to retention, churn reduction, and trust.

Thorpe warns against the idea that AI is a silver bullet. If businesses layer automation on top of broken journeys and fragmented workflows, they will frustrate customers more quickly, not less. The focus, he says, should be on strong foundations: governance, transparency, auditability, and AI that is connected to real processes so leaders can explain what happened, when, and why. That matters even more in regulated enterprise environments where trust is non-negotiable.

Don’t miss the full interview for a practical take on building trustworthy, outcome-driven AI in CX.

Speaking with CX Today, Susan Ganeshan, CMO at Emplifi, explores why customer trust in digital community spaces is under mounting pressure, and what brands must do to course correct. As more of the customer journey takes place on community platforms like Reddit, review sites, and social channels, the stakes for getting this right have never been higher. Ganeshan draws on Emplifi’s latest consumer research with 85% of consumers saying they are willing to pay more for brands they consider authentic, and 93% saying that genuine engagement is what builds their trust in the first place.

In regard to AI transparency, Emplifi’s recent report found that disclosure has become a non-negotiable for today’s shoppers. Ganeshan highlights that 91% of consumers now expect a brand to be explicit about when and how it is using AI, whether that’s responding to a community post, routing a query, or generating dynamic content on a website. For brands still treating AI-powered interactions as invisible, this represents a significant trust gap. The data suggests that consumers apply the same rigorous expectations to community spaces as they do to direct brand touchpoints, and that inconsistency across channels is one of the fastest ways to erode confidence.

Ganeshan also argues that user-generated content is a trust accelerant, where consumers are far more likely to trust images and peer reviews than polished brand photography, they want to see products in real homes, real cars, and real lives, not studio settings. Combined with the growing influence of Reddit and similar platforms, this means brands can no longer afford to be passive bystanders in the spaces where their reputation is being shaped daily. The conversation is happening whether they participate or not, and showing up authentically, with clear privacy guardrails and consistent messaging separating trusted brands from those losing ground.

Looking ahead, Ganeshan anticipates that trust will move from being a peripheral concern to a core design principle for CMOs. Governance tools and AI-powered workflows will play a growing role in helping teams identify where human intervention is needed and where automation can operate safely at scale. The brands that win, she argues, will be those that approach every community interaction with the same transparency, consistency, and accountability they bring to every other part of the customer experience.

CFOs are scrutinising every CX investment, and “better CSAT” rarely cuts through. In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson sits down with Matt Clare, VP Product Marketing at UJET, to unpack how CX leaders can translate customer conversations into outcomes finance teams actually care about: lower churn, fewer interactions, reduced cost per contact, and higher customer lifetime value.

Matt explains why traditional VoC programmes often stay trapped in silos, how conversational analytics can consolidate signals from calls, tickets, CRM, and social into a usable root cause view, and why the best CX is often the interaction that never happens. They also explore what “agentic AI” changes in practice, including AI-generated taxonomies, natural-language querying for non-technical teams, and closed-loop automation that reduces swivel-chair work while keeping humans in control when risk is high.

Customer expectations keep moving, but many enterprise CX programs still sit too far from the CEO and too far from value. In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Bain & Company's Jamie Cleghorn, Global Head of Customer Practice, and Eduardo Roma, Global Head of Customer Experience Transformation for Customer Strategy & Marketing Practice, about what it takes to reconnect customer experience across strategy, technology, and execution.

They unpack a practical blueprint built around a bold Customer Value Creation Plan, “transformation engines” that turn insight into action, and the culture and capabilities needed to sustain change. The conversation also explores how AI can speed up learning cycles, enable always-on customer signals, and support agentic workflows, without losing trust or the human element.

The conversation also digs into the operating mechanics: always-on customer signals, predictive learning, and agentic workflows that shorten cycles from months to days. The speakers challenge leaders to drop “call containment” thinking and design AI-supported service that feels fluid, trusted, and human.

If you are trying to move from siloed improvements to enterprise-wide growth, check out this conversation for a clear look at the mindset shifts, operating model changes, and day-to-day mechanisms that make CX transformation stick. 

Autonomous AI is moving from “interesting” to operational, but CX leaders are still balancing excitement with real anxiety about risk, compliance, and quality.

In this interview, Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer at Sprinklr, breaks down what it takes to make AI agents precise, predictable, and trustworthy, and why governance is the new battleground. He shares how Sprinklr’s Spring 26 release focuses on calibration, longitudinal context, and large-scale testing to improve resolution outcomes while keeping leaders firmly in control.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

In this UC Today interview, host Kristian McCann speaks with Simon Peters, Director of Channel Sales at Smarsh, to unpack the company’s latest innovations in digital communications governance, its incorporation of CallCabinet, and what that means for partners and customers worldwide.

Smarsh is a global leader in digital communication capture, archiving, and compliance, empowering organizations to manage voice, text, and social interactions securely and intelligently across platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco, RingCentral, and 8x8.

Simon discusses how Smarsh is transforming compliance from a traditional box-ticking exercise into a strategic, AI-driven advantage - one that helps businesses uncover insights, detect risks, and improve performance across industries ranging from financial services to contact centers and healthcare.

Listen to The Interview to Discover:

• How Smarsh helps organizations move beyond simple data capture to proactive compliance and analytics.
• Why unified call recording and platform-agnostic capture are critical for scaling across multi-channel environments.
• How Smarsh’s acquisition of CallCabinet strengthens its unified voice capture and compliance capabilities.
• The ways AI governance, data sovereignty, and supervised analytics are reshaping how businesses handle regulated communications.
• What emerging technologies - including AI and machine learning - mean for the future of compliance, surveillance, and risk management.

Customer data is plentiful. Using it in the moment is the hard part. In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Michael Zagorsek, Chief Operating Officer at SoundHound AI, about what’s changing and why real-time decisioning is finally becoming practical across channels.

Zagorsek explains how conversational AI can support both self-serve customers and human associates, especially in retail environments where staff need fast, accurate context. He also outlines the shift from channel-specific stacks to agentic AI systems that can be deployed anywhere, with orchestration and guardrails to keep experiences coherent, safe, and production-ready.

The conversation closes with a pragmatic take for leaders: learn the technology, but prioritize robustness, privacy, and the right strategic partners before putting AI in front of customers.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

 Four CX leaders get brutally honest about why organizations are drowning in customer data but still can't act on it 

In this CX Today Roundtable, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher is joined by Blair Pleasant (COMMfusion), Nick Lygo-Baker (Paradigm CX), Tabitha Dunn (CX Transformation Leader), and Simon Leyland (Cloud Interact) to tackle one of CX's most persistent problems: the insight-to-action gap. 

If you suspect your analytics stack is working harder than your organization is actually using it, this conversation is essential viewing. 

Most CX teams aren't short of data; they're short of the ability to do anything meaningful with it. 

Four industry leaders dissect exactly where the breakdown happens and why AI often accelerates the problem rather than solving it. 

The wallpaper dashboard problem: Simon Leyland describes supervisors cycling through 12+ tabs, making decisions on six-week-old data, and analytics too unusable to trust. 

Measuring the wrong things: Nick Lygo-Baker argues VoC programmes are built around business journeys, not customer goals – collecting feedback that was never going to answer the right questions. 

AI without trust is just faster noise: Blair Pleasant and Tabitha Dunn explore why agents fear AI tools and why skipping root cause analysis means optimizing for the wrong outcomes. 

The metrics that need to go: Tabitha makes the case for retiring NPS and CSAT in favor of measuring tangible, year-over-year experience improvements. 

Next Steps 

Audit your dashboards: are they driving decisions, or have they become wallpaper? 

Ask your frontline team whether they trust the tools they're given. 

Subscribe to CX Today for more roundtable discussions from across the CX space. 

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Steve Blood, VP of Market Intelligence at Five9, about how AI is evolving into the connective layer across the modern contact center.

As organizations move beyond disconnected tools, Steve explains how combining AI with a unified CX platform enables real-time insights, smarter routing, and more personalized customer interactions. By bringing together interaction data, operational data, and customer history, enterprises can gain deeper context and make faster, more informed decisions.

The conversation explores how AI-driven systems analyze customer intent and sentiment in real time, enabling dynamic routing, immediate coaching insights, and continuous optimization across the entire customer journey. Steve also discusses how AI is augmenting agents with real-time guidance, helping them deliver better outcomes while reducing burnout.

Watch the full conversation to learn how to unlock real-time insights, empower agents, and deliver more connected, intelligent customer experiences.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com