Claim OwnershipPunk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe
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Description
Adrian Swinscoe discusses customer experience and strategy with industry leaders in this engaging series about how to deliver a standout customer experience and service.
Topics covered in the interviews include customer service, customer experience, customer engagement, employee experience, employee engagement, technology, adaptable and responsive organizations, digital transformation, high-performing teams, how to best leverage artificial intelligence to drive better outcomes, other new technologies and related issues.
Essentially, Adrian is looking for practical clues and insights that will help you build a business that both customers and employees love.
557 Episodes
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Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Sharath Keshava Narayana, CEO and Co-Founder of Sanas, which provides a real-time speech understanding platform with accent translation, noise cancellation and now real-time speech translation technology.
Sharath and I talk about the challenges with current translation methods, what they are doing with regards to real-time speech translation, the possibilities that this type of technology offers for customer service and experience and the exciting fact that Douglas Adams’ Babelfish application/device that featured in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is getting much closer. We also finish off with Sharath’s best advice, his Punk CX brand and his very own good news story.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Twilio’s secret sauce and CarFinance247’s road to success – Interviews from Twilio SIGNAL London 2025 – and is number 566 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is a two-parter that I recorded while attending the Twilio SIGNAL event in London on November 19th. My first guest is Peter Bell, VP of EMEA Marketing at Twilio. Peter and I talk about his highlights from the event, what he is seeing companies do well/right to help them harness the obvious potential of all of the new technology that is emerging, as well as some examples of brands that they are working with, what they are doing, what challenges they are overcoming and what outcomes they are driving. Following my chat with Peter, I spoke to Michael Binks and his colleague Paul Mawson, who are Director of Technology and Head of Product, respectively, at CarFinance247, the UK’s leading digital car finance platform. We talk about their motivations for attending the event, what they spoke about in their breakout session, their journey with Twilio and some advice/lessons learned along the way.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Are machines making marketers more human? – Interview with Elizabeth Maxson of Contentful – and is number 565 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a discussion I recently had with Elizabeth Maxson, CMO at Contentful, a digital experience platform trusted by more than 4,200 companies around the world. Elizabeth joins me today to talk about a research report they recently published called When Machines Make Marketers More Human, whether marketers are moving beyond experimentation with AI tools, what sort of pain points/challenges they are facing, the possibility that all of these new tools are creating their own complexity problem and what sort of differences in behaviour and performance they are observing between marketers in EMEA and the US.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why you need the I4JM in your life – Interview with Mark Smith and Ray Gerber – and is number 564 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a discussion I recently had with Ray Gerber and Mark Smith, Co-Founders of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM). We talk about customer journeys, where most people go wrong with them, some examples of customer journeys done right, where AI fits into all of this, the backstory to the Institute for Journey Management, the problem they are trying to solve, and their plans for the coming year.
Disclosure: I’ve known Mark and Ray for sometime now and have a huge amount of respect for what they have achieved in the past and what they are aiming to do with the I4JM. As they were setting up the I4JM, they invited me to become a Founding Member. I accepted.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX is reaching a tipping point – Interview with Jonathan Rosenberg of Five9 – and is number 563 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a discussion I recently had with Jonathan Rosenberg, who is the Chief Technology Officer and head of AI at Five9. Jonathan and I talk about why he believes CX is reaching a tipping point and what’s driving that, how things are likely to change for customers, agents, and businesses, what he’s seeing companies do well/right, as well as what to avoid in order to better harness the obvious potential of AI.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – How Vodafone, Rabobank and others are driving meaningful results with AI – Interview with Matt Healy of Pega – and is number 562 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I recently had with Matt Healy, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega, where we talk about legacy transformation, how big some of the legacy challenges facing firms are, how Pega is responding, why it’s important for organisations to have a real strategy with respect to AI agents in order to get meaningful results rather than just applying a bunch of agents and hoping for the best and some lessons from the most successful companies who are managing to scale their AI projects, generate meaningful commercial returns and drive improvements in customer-related outcomes.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Equip people with AI to enable them to lead with emotional intelligence – Interview with Miranda Collard of TP – and is number 561 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I had with Miranda Collard, who is the CEO of the Americas at TP (formerly Teleperformance). Miranda and I talk about Miranda’s career journey from employee #27 to now being the CEO of the Americas, how she still takes customer calls, why the future of CX isn’t about bots versus humans, how this technological (r)evolution is changing the role that TP plays with their clients, the lessons that TP have learned about how to drive real results and RoI from working with more than half of the Forbes Top 100, how helping clients succeed is about equipping your people to lead with effective AI implementation that balances both emotional and artificial intelligence and how that focus on the human element is helping TP set themselves apart from their competitors.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Some of the most innovative brands in the world are using AI to create a service dividend – Interview with Tom Eggemeier of Zendesk – and is number 560 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I had with Tom Eggemeier, the Chief Executive Officer of Zendesk, following the conclusion of Zendesk’s recent AI Summit. We talk about the highlights from the event, what’s different from what they announced at Relate back in March, how they now have 20,000 customers using their AI and where they are seeing the fastest and most effective adoption, their recent acquisition of HyperArc and what it will bring to their platform in terms of advanced reporting, analytics and insights, the launch of their voice AI agents and a whole bunch of other things, including an intriguing idea of how for some innovative brands the application of AI is creating a ‘service dividend.’
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The terms deflection and containment should be banned – Interviews from Cisco’s WebexOne – and is number 559 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is a three-part episode featuring conversations I had with Vinod Muthukrishnan, the VP & COO for the Webex Customer Experience Business Unit at Cisco, Chang Chang, a Senior Director of Product for Cloud CX Solutions at Cisco and a Cisco Webex customer - Patrick Cornish, a Senior Network Engineer specialising in collaboration Architecture and Engineering at BancFirst, while at WebexOne recently in San Diego. We talk about their highlights from the event, what stood out for them from the slew of announcements and their views about some of the big challenges that organisations are facing in trying to improve their customer service and experience, particularly when it comes to harnessing the potential that new AI-powered innovations offer.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The State of Customer Engagement – Interview with Chris Koehler of Twilio – and is number 558 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features Chris Koehler, the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio. We discuss Twilio’s recently published State of Customer Engagement Report, how many brands are using AI to personalise experiences and the impact they are seeing as a result, customer concerns about the use of their data, the rise of first-party data strategies, how increasingly customers want control over their personalisation settings, whether we are witnessing a convergence of marketing, sales, and customer service teams, data sharing and collaboration, and finally, why executives need to step out of their “ivory towers.”
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Closing the CX chasm – Interview with Jamie Anderson of UserTesting – and is number 557 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features Jamie Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer of UserTesting. Jamie joins me today to talk music, the mismatch between what companies believe they deliver and what customers actually experience, and how this can be fixed with human-first design. We also explore how AI risks disconnecting teams from real human needs if left unsupervised, why many digital experiences suck and what we should do about it.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Creating a customer service system that scales without losing authenticity – Interview with Ty Givens of CX Collective – and is number 556 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Ty Givens, who is the Founder and CEO of CX Collective, where she partners with ambitious brands to build customer experience programs that don’t just keep up—they lead. Ty joins me today to talk about how emotional labour and systems thinking are missing from leadership, why there is a better way to reduce employee churn and inconsistency rather than chasing tools, burnout for team leads, and how to get fast-growing support teams that are often structurally shaky onto a more steady footing without losing momentum.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Think you know Gen Z? Think again – Interview with Matt Powell of Great State – and is number 555 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Matt Powell, Creative Director at Great State, a digital product and service design agency. Matt joins me today to talk about some research that they recently released called Shifting States, which examines Gen Z behaviours and digital expectations. We explore the implications of this research, what it means for brands, and how they should adjust their thinking and marketing. Additionally, Matt outlines five principles that will help brands build reciprocal loyalty, particularly with their Gen Z customers.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why most brands build chatbots backwards – Interview with Sophie Cheng of Sinch – and is number 554 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Sophie Cheng, the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Sinch, the global CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) provider. Sophie joins me today to talk about why most brands build chatbots backwards, why success hinges on journey-led design, not tech-first thinking, how to design real conversational experiences and key pitfalls to avoid with AI assistants.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The value of hyperpersonalization and the state of CX – Interview with Greg Kihlström of The Agile Brand – and is number 553 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Greg Kihlström from The Agile Brand. Greg is a best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur, and serves as an advisor and consultant to top companies on marketing technology, marketing operations, and digital transformation initiatives. A couple of months ago, Greg invited me to be a guest on his show, and we took the opportunity to meet up and record the episode while he was in Scotland recently on vacation. We covered a lot of ground, including the state of customer experience, what brands get right and what they don’t and hyper-personalisation. It went so well I thought I’d release it as an episode on the Punk CX podcast too.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Envisioning a personal AI agent for every customer – Interview with Malte Kosub of Parloa – and is number 552 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Malte Kosub, the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a provider of an enterprise-grade AI agent management platform for customer service. Malte joins me today to talk about standing out in an increasingly crowded field, his vision for how customer support will evolve over the coming five years, and what successful companies are doing to allow them to tap into the potential of this new technological wave.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Transforming CX with predictable AI and workflow automation – Interview with Rebecca Miller of Pega – and is number 551 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Rebecca Miller, Senior Product Strategy Manager in the customer service and sales automation division at Pega. Rebecca joined me on the podcast recently to talk about the recently announced Pega Self-Service Agent, the problem with the current solutions in the market, why Pega is taking a fundamentally different approach to self-service and why it’s critical that these types of solutions leverage enterprise workflows.
This podcast is sponsored by Pega.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Overcome incrementality by reimagining customer and agent experience – Interview with NiCE’s CEO and Staysure’s COO – and is number 550 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 episode of the Punk CX podcast features two interviews. The first is with Scott Russell, CEO at NiCE, a provider of AI-driven customer service software that helps deliver automation & personalized experiences at scale. Scott and I talk about their recent Interactions events in Las Vegas and London, why many organisations are still uncertain about how to best leverage AI and innovation to transform customer experiences, why we should be creating a more human experience and not just automating for efficiency, their 2025 Global Happiness Index, a new report they have produced called The C-Suite Disconnect and, finally, their new campaign about creating a ‘NiCE world’.
Following my chat with Scott, I spoke to Alistair Hadfield, the COO of Staysure Group, the UK’s #1 Travel Insurer, about the digital transformation that they are going through, their journey with NiCE and why they chose them and what lessons they have learnt along the way.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Five blind spots that get in the way of customer understanding and growth – Interview with Toni Keskinen of 180ops – and is number 549 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 Toni Keskinen, who is the Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer & Chairman at 180ops, a revenue intelligence platform built on account-based customer data that empowers B2B businesses to drive revenue growth, optimize operations, and enhance customer lifetime value. Toni joins me today to discuss five different blind spots that he believes many organisations suffer from when it comes to understanding their customers, driving growth, and where they should focus their resources, particularly in sales and account management.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – SRM and why it matters to growth and customer experience – Interview with Ryan Hamilton – and is number 548 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 Ryan Hamilton, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, an author and the co-host of The Intuitive Customer Podcast with Colin Shaw. Ryan joins me today to talk about his new book (The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things), why an obsession with growth can be counterproductive, what the heck SRM is, why marketers should be thinking about customer segment compatibility and what happens when a brand serves incompatible segments, amongst other things.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Employee understanding and cracking the code of a better employee experience – Interview with Annette Franz – and is number 547 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.
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