Today’s interview is with Gopi Polavarapu, Chief Solutions Officer at Kore.ai, a market leader in Conversational AI platform space. Gopi joins me today to talk about two reports that they recently published ( the Agent Experience (AX) Benchmark Report 2024 and the Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark Report 2024), why a bot must emulate a company’s brand and how to keep this authentic to your brand, the importance of building a multilingual bot and the importance of protecting vulnerable customers as the presence of AI in our day-to-day increases.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Brand Connectome™ and why we are doing marketing all wrong – Interview with Leslie Zane – and is number 513 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.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Today’s interview is with Leslie Zane, who is the Founder and CEO of Triggers, a brand consulting firm, and an authority on harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Leslie joins me today to talk about her new book, THE POWER OF INSTINCT: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life, why she thinks we have entered the age of instinct, being 10-15 years ahead of Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahnemann, the Brand Connectome™ and growth triggers amongst a bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The customer isn’t always right – Interview with Daphne Costa Lopes of Hubspot – and is number 512 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.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Today’s interview is with Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot. Daphne joins me today to talk about customer success, why the customer isn’t always right, how siloed systems inhibit the delivery of tailored experiences, and what brands should be doing more of to drive customer-led growth.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – There needs to be a really tight relationship between business strategy and target state architecture - Interview with Cale Urwin of Bupa – and is number 511 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.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Today’s interview is with Cale Urwin, Director, Data, Digital & Marketing Health Services at Bupa. I caught up with Cale recently at PegaWorld in Las Vegas to talk about what stood for him at the event and how Bupa has evolved its customer engagement story and Customer Decision Hub capabilities in Australia from outbound to digital management and surprise & delight strategies.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The ongoing decline of brand loyalty, what’s driving it and what should be done about it – Interview with Simon Morris of ServiceNow – and is number 510 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.

Disclaimer: I partnered with Pega to conduct interviews and provide my perspective on PegaWorld iNspire 2024.

Today’s interview is with Simon Morris, the Area Vice President of Solution Consulting at ServiceNow. Simon joins me today to talk about ServiceNow’s new Consumer Voice Report 2024, the ongoing decline of brand loyalty, what’s driving it, why “The future of customer experience is high-tech meets high-touch” and some of the biggest lessons coming out of the report.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We’ve only just scratched the surface of artificial intelligence – Interview with Peter van der Putten of Pega – and is number 509 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 Dr Peter van der Putten, who is Director of the AI Lab at Pega and assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in The Netherlands. I caught up with Peter at the recent PegaWorld to talk about his highlights from the event, how to think about AI using a left/right brain thinking metaphor and what’s coming next in the enterprise AI space.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Listening and taking action at scale – Interview with Ron Secrist of Citi and Christina Sansone of Dish – and is number 508 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.

Disclaimer: I partnered with Pega to conduct interviews and provide my perspective on PegaWorld iNspire 2024.

Today’s interview is a combo podcast in which I interview (separately) Ron Secrist, Managing Director, Head of Client Experience at Citi, and Christina Sansone, Vice President of CX Transformation at Dish. I met both of them when I attended Qualtrics’ X4 Summit in Salt Lake City last month and talked to them about their Qualtrics journey, what they are doing with AI and what listening and taking action at scale means for them.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – How to get 2.7mln ‘Mom & Pop’ stores to adopt a new distributive trade platform – Interview with Prashaant Huria of Unilever – and is number 507 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 Prashaant Huria, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Unilever’s Digital Distributive Trade business. Prashaant and I connected after he spoke at Adobe’s Global Summit in Las Vegas back in late March. We talked about how they got 2.7mln ‘Mom & Pop’ stores to adopt a new distributive trade platform that Prashaant and his team at Unilever have developed, what it can do and what impact it has had on the retailers as well as what sort of changes Unilever has had to go through to bring this to life and make it a success.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Lessons learnt from testing Copilot for service across tens of thousands of service engineers – Interview with Jeff Comstock of Microsoft – and is number 506 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 Jeff Comstock, CVP of Dynamics 365 Customer Service at Microsoft. Jeff joins me today to talk about Co-Pilot for Service, the impact it is having on the agent experience and also customer/business outcomes, their experience trialling it extensively with their own customer service engineers, how their early adopter clients are leveraging Co-Pilot in Service, what they have done, the outcomes they achieved, how long it took them to achieve those outcomes and, finally, what are the big challenges that organisations need to tackle in order to fully realise the potential of leveraging Generative AI in customer service and experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Personalisation and the pink elephant in the room – Interview with Emma Springham of TSB – and is number 505 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.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.

Today’s interview is with Emma Springham, Chief Marketing Officer at TSB, a British retail and commercial bank. I met Emma at Adobe’s Global Summit in Las Vegas after she spoke on the Main Stage. Emma and I talk about the importance of your personal brand in marketing and CX leadership, the pink elephant in the room, what personalisation means for TSB, what they have done to deliver that, what impact it has had, and the importance of speaking the language of your CFO.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Making in-store grocery shopping fun and going viral on TikTok – Interview with David McIntosh of Instacart – and is number 504 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.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.