The CX Cast

Angelina Gennis and Max Ball speak with Joe Wang of Ancestry and Guneet Singh of AppFolio about what it takes to move conversational AI into production—grounding deployment in customer experience, organizational readiness, and measurable outcomes.

Featuring:

Joe Wang — Director of Customer and Commnunity Experience at Ancestry

Guneet Singh — VP of Customer Experience and Global Operations at AppFolio

And guest host Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Show notes:

The next horizon includes more proactive onboarding, stronger voice authentication, and expanded API-enabled capabilities. It also points to an emerging need for CX leaders who combine product thinking, technical fluency, and a strong service culture. Jo Wang, Director of Customer and Community Experience at Ancestry, and Guneet Singh, VP of Customer Experience and Global Operations at AppFolio, are candid about the journey to AI adoption. Their advice:

Lead with an experience-first deployment strategy.

Start small with pilots and A/B testing before scaling.

Prepare knowledge and content, as well as the APIs needed to enable useful actions.

Measure customer effort and outcomes rather than relying on deflection alone.

Partner early with legal, risk, information security, product, and finance.

Support frontline teams through thoughtful change management.

Look beyond service efficiency to revenue and retention opportunities.

Learn how these CX leaders use the quality of the customer journey, not the technology itself, to guide priorities, deployment choices, and measures of success.

Journey mapping is valuable. Journey centricity is transformative.

In this replay, explore how to move beyond individual projects and build a journey-centric operating model that aligns teams around customer goals.

Featuring:

Joana de Quintanilha, VP, Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

Journey mapping is valuable. Journey centricity is transformative.

In this replay, explore how to move beyond individual projects and build a journey-centric operating model that aligns teams around customer goals. We discuss:

What journey centricity is and why it matters. 

How journey centricity supports customer obsession.

The stages organizations progress through on their journey-centricity roadmap. 

Common challenges, catalysts, and mindset shifts. 

The evolving role of the CX team in driving change.

If you're looking to connect journey mapping, CX strategy, and organizational transformation, this episode provides a practical roadmap for making customer journeys a core part of how your business operates.

The best journey programs do more than identify problems. They create opportunities for innovation.

In this replay, explore how customer journey insights can spark new ideas, improve experiences, and uncover opportunities for growth.

Featuring:

Joana de Quintanilha, VP, Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

The best journey programs do more than identify problems. They create opportunities for innovation.

In this replay, explore how customer journey insights can spark new ideas, improve experiences, and uncover opportunities for growth. We discuss:

How journey insights fuel innovation.

Methods for identifying high-value opportunities.

Ways to prioritize experience improvements.

Strategies for turning insights into action.

Learn how customer journeys can become a catalyst for innovation across the organization.

Creating journey maps is only the beginning.

This replay from way back in the archives explores techniques for increasing the value, influence, and outcomes of journey mapping programs.

Featuring:

Joana de Quintanilha, VP, Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

Creating journey maps is only the beginning.

This replay from way back in the archives explores techniques for increasing the value, influence, and outcomes of journey mapping programs. We discuss:

How to strengthen journey insights with additional data.

Techniques for improving stakeholder engagement.

Ways to connect journey mapping to business outcomes.

Approaches for sustaining momentum over time.

Perfect for CX leaders looking to move from tactical projects to ongoing journey management.

Customer journeys rarely exist in isolation.

In this replay, explore why leading organizations need a journey atlas to understand how journeys connect, overlap, and influence one another.

Featuring:

Joana de Quintanilha, VP, Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

Customer journeys rarely exist in isolation.

In this replay, explore why leading organizations need a journey atlas to understand how journeys connect, overlap, and influence one another. We discuss:

What a journey atlas is and why it matters.

How to create visibility across journeys.

Methods for prioritizing CX investments.

Ways to improve organizational alignment.

Learn how a journey atlas helps transform customer experience efforts from disconnected initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Many organizations create journey maps. Far fewer use them to drive measurable change.

This replay breaks down seven practical steps for creating journey maps that align teams, uncover customer pain points, and support better business decisions.

Featuring:

Joana de Quintanilha, VP, Principal Analyst

Show Notes:

Many organizations create journey maps. Far fewer use them to drive measurable change.

This replay breaks down seven practical steps for creating journey maps that align teams, uncover customer pain points, and support better business decisions. We discuss:

How to structure a successful journey mapping initiative.

Common mistakes that limit impact.

Ways to connect journey insights to action.

Approaches for building stakeholder support.

If your organization is investing in CX, journey mapping, or experience transformation, this episode provides a proven foundation.

Many CX leaders know culture needs to change before a customer experience (CX) transformation can succeed. The challenge is knowing where to start.

In this episode, Angelina Gennis and Martin Gill explore a surprisingly simple approach: using powerful customer-focused questions as organizational rituals. Drawing on real examples from executive workshops and customer-centric organizations, they explain how the right question can expose silos, encourage knowledge sharing, improve accountability, and reinforce customer-focused behaviors. We discuss:

Why culture change starts with behavior, not slogans

How simple rituals can reshape behavioral norms

Questions leaders can use to encourage customer curiosity

Ways to uncover accountability gaps and siloed thinking

How customer-focused questions create habits that support lasting CX transformation

In this episode, Martin Gill and Angelina Gennis welcome Enza Iannopollo — VP, principal analyst — to discuss new research on trust, responsible AI, and what businesses must do to earn customer confidence. Drawing on fresh European consumer data, they explore why distrust has become the default response to AI and how organizations can build experiences that customers are willing to trust. The conversation introduces four distinct consumer groups, from AI distrusters to embracers, and explains how different customers evaluate AI-enabled experiences. The discussion also examines the foundations of responsible AI, including transparency, accountability, fairness, privacy, security, reliability, and human oversight.

AI moderators promise to make qualitative research faster and more scalable, but where do they fit in the research process? Senem Biyikli joins Martin Gill and Angelina Gennis to explain how AI-moderated interviews work, when they deliver value, and why human researchers remain essential. The discussion covers practical use cases, implementation guidance, participant trust, and the future of AI-powered customer research.

Many organizations collect customer feedback. Far fewer consistently turn it into action and measurable business results.

Angelina Gennis speaks with Michelle Samuel, Chief Customer Officer at Nationwide, about building a customer-driven operating model inside a 100-year-old mutual company. Michelle shares how her first 90 days focused on listening, alignment, and capability assessment, and how those insights led to a simple but scalable CX framework: Listen. Act. Monitor. They cover:

How to move from customer-focused activity to customer-driven impact

How to prioritize journeys that create the greatest customer and business value

The role of associate empowerment in delivering exceptional customer experience (CX)

Lessons from scaling CX across both B2C and partner-led business models

How to connect CX measurement to loyalty, retention, and growth outcomes