Most companies are rushing to layer AI onto customer operations without fixing what sits underneath. Deb Ashton of Certinia says that's the wrong order. When sales, delivery, finance, and customer success work from separate systems with different views of the same customer, AI doesn't close those gaps; it amplifies them. Clients feel the disconnect as friction: repeating themselves across departments, getting inconsistent answers, and slowly losing trust.

What You Will Learn

• Why adding AI to customer support fails when your sales, finance, and delivery systems do not share customer data, and what customers experience when they do not
• The three layers of trust that determine whether clients renew, and which one AI cannot replace
• Where AI actually protects revenue in your business versus where it erodes customer relationships
• The difference between "human in the loop" and "human on the loop," and when to use each one with AI workflows
• Why metrics like NPS and renewal rates hide the real problem with your AI implementation until the customer has already left
• How to identify which administrative work should be automated and which customer-facing decisions need human judgment before execution
• What to do when your customer success manager cannot answer basic questions about a contract, and why that moment determines whether you keep or lose the customer

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Certinia.

Certinia is a professional services platform built natively on Salesforce that connects the full services lifecycle — sales, delivery, financials, forecasting, staffing, and project management — on a single data layer, so every team works from the same view of the customer, and AI can act with certainty. Learn more at Certinia.com.

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What does it take to create extraordinary experiences that make customers happier and tell others?

Stacy Sherman and featured guest Mark Sanborn reveals proven principles to consistently deliver positive emotion and go beyond the ordinary. You'll learn the 4 principles from his book, "The Fred Factor" focussed on a real-life postal carrier who made a difference. You'll discover how to reinvent, build relationships, and add value without spending more. And, some of the best advice about leadership, customer experience, and succeeding in the age of AI.

What You Will Learn

• Ask your team a version of the Sanborn question after key transactions: "Are you happier you chose us than a competitor?" Use the responses to identify specific moments where the answer is no.
• Direct training budget toward frontline employees, since customers interact with delivery drivers, support agents, and reception staff far more often than they interact with executives.
• Give employees permission to add a small, no-cost gesture at one point in the customer journey, similar to the pizza driver who asks to give a child a piece of candy at the door.
• Set a rule for AI use on your team: AI drafts content, but a person still asks the original question, checks the output for accuracy, and carries out the final action.
• Write down, in one sentence, what your team is trying to accomplish this quarter, then ask five employees the same question and compare the answers.

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Most companies view their customer service team as a cost to reduce. Lisa Oswald at TravelZoo says that is precisely the wrong instinct. When you see the people who communicate with customers all day as an expense, you stop understanding why customers are dissatisfied, continue doing what frustrates them, and lose their business without ever realizing the real reason. By the time it appears in your data, the customer is already gone.

So what separates the companies that keep their customers, grow their revenue, and earn the budget to do more from the ones that keep losing both? You've come to the right place for answers.

This episode is for any leader who is tired of fighting for a budget and wants to make a case that their boss actually says yes to.

What You'll Learn:

• Why CSAT and NPS get a polite nod in the boardroom, and which three specific numbers make finance actually approve budget
• Whether your customers would miss you or just miss your price, and why that gap is where you lose revenue
• The gap between saying "it's my responsibility" and feeling "I own this outcome," and why only one stops churn
• Why attaching a name to every survey question turns feedback into action, and what happens when you don't
• How a 30-year-old bus tour still explains why companies lose customers without knowing the real reason
• Why contact center AI delivers measurable returns in weeks, creating the data service leaders need to secure larger CX budgets
• What emotion customers feel at each stage that predicts whether they'll stay or leave, and where most companies stop looking

Have a question or thoughts to share? Leave a voice message: https://www.speakpipe.com/StacySherman

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Are you struggling to engage your employees to consistently deliver customer excellence? Are company silos getting in your way of aligning teams and exceeding business goals? If yes, this episode will be incredibly valuable to you as host Stacy Sherman and renowned HR industry expert and author Josh Bersin unveil the secrets of the world's most enduring employee-focused organizations.

You'll gain insights to foster a work environment that attracts and retains top talent. Likewise, you'll learn practical strategies and tactics for building an irresistible brand that starts with creating enjoyable employee experiences that fuel exceptional customer outcomes.

Have a question or thoughts to share? Leave a voice message: https://www.speakpipe.com/StacySherman

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Most companies are rushing to deploy AI faster than their competitors. Alvin Stokes of Princess Cruises says that is exactly the wrong instinct. Speed without emotional intelligence does not create better guest experiences. It creates tools your frontline team will not use, prototypes your customers will not trust, and revenue you will not recover. Alvin has spent two years inside one of the most guest-focused industries in the world, generating a nine-figure incremental revenue gain from AI programs by doing one thing most leaders skip: proving it works before scaling it. This episode is for any leader who wants to move fast with AI without breaking the customer relationship in the process.

What You Will Learn About AI, Guest Experience, and Emotionally Intelligent CX:

• Why emotional intelligence is the missing ingredient in most AI deployments, and how Princess Cruises builds it into every tool before agents ever touch it
• The blueprint Alvin's team uses to prototype fast, pilot heavily, fail quickly, and scale only what actually works, producing a nine-figure revenue gain in 12 months
• How AI is changing what "listening to customers" means, from three-month-old NPS surveys to real-time sentiment analysis across every channel interaction
• Why the frontline agents who resist new tools are your most valuable source of feedback, and how to use their input to drive faster adoption across the team
• How Princess Cruises' Smooth Sailing Squad uses AI-generated daily reports to surface policy and process friction points before they damage the guest experience
• What new KPIs are replacing NPS as the primary measure of guest loyalty, and why tracking sentiment over 10, 50, or 200 interactions tells you things a single survey never can

Have a question or thoughts to share? Leave a voice message: https://www.speakpipe.com/StacySherman

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Most leaders think they are delivering a great customer experience. Pierre Charchaflian of IBM says they are delivering yesterday's version. The new standard is not fixing problems when customers report them. It is knowing about the problem before the customer does, and solving it before they have to ask. That shift, from reactive to anticipatory, is what separates the brands that customers stay loyal to from those they leave without explanation. The technology to do it exists right now. Most companies are not using it. Pierre has spent 25 years at the intersection of data, technology, and customer experience, and he says this transformation is unlike anything he has seen before. The window to act is open. It will not stay that way.

What You Will Learn About Anticipating Customer Needs With AI:

• What agentic AI actually is in plain language, why it is fundamentally different from prior AI capabilities, and what it means for your CX strategy starting now
• Why IBM's research found that technology stack limitations, not budget or talent, are the number one barrier preventing CMOs from delivering the customer experience they already know they need to deliver
• How agentic search engines are becoming a direct threat to brand digital presence, and what leaders need to do before their customers' AI agents start bypassing them entirely
• Why anticipating a customer's need before they express it is now a measurable competitive advantage, and what separates the companies building that capability from the ones still reacting
• How AI can read sentiment, detect frustration signals across structured and unstructured data, and trigger a response before a customer decides to leave
• Why conversion is the metric that tells the truth about whether your customer experience is actually working, and what NPS and CSAT consistently miss

Download IBM's Win the Moment report now: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/customer-intent?utm_id=Stacy-Sherman-AdobeSummit-LinkedIn-IBVCMOStudy-04-16-26

#IBMPartner

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Your contact center agents are not the only people responsible for your customer experience. Every person in your company who touches a product, a process, or a decision is shaping how your customer feels about your brand, whether they realize it or not. Chris Morrissey, General Manager of Customer Experience at Zoom, calls this horizontal CX, and it starts with one question every leader should be asking every employee, every quarter: how did you use what you learned from customers to make a better decision? When that question becomes routine, "not my job" stops being an option. This episode covers what it takes to build that accountability across every role, every channel, and every technology decision your company is making right now.

What You Will Learn

• Why measuring individual interactions instead of full customer journeys causes teams to celebrate outcomes that are actually failures
• Which voices of the customer most companies are collecting but never routing to the teams making product, marketing, and service decisions
• Why keeping customers is a bigger revenue lever than acquiring them at scale, and why most recognition and compensation structures have not caught up to that reality
• What it takes to make store staff, product owners, and agents show up as one brand to a customer who does not care about your org chart
• Why the pressure to adopt AI fast may be creating a problem worse than the one companies are trying to solve

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Most loyalty programs are designed around rewards: points and discounts that give customers a reason to return. That design produces a specific problem. When the incentive expires or another brand matches it, the customer accepts the offer and does not return.

The companies that retain customers year over year treat loyalty as a relationship, not a transaction. Most companies have not made that shift yet.

In this episode of Doing CX Right℠, Stacy Sherman examines that problem with Martin Villanueva, Global Head of Personalization and Loyalty at IKEA. They explain why most loyalty budgets stay underfunded, what that costs in long-term revenue, and the specific steps leaders need to take first.

You will learn how to:

• Position loyalty as a growth engine, not a cost center, when making the financial case to the C-suite
• Use customer journey mapping to align CX, support, personalization, and marketing teams around a single experience
• Design a value exchange that gives customers a clear reason to share their data
• Apply AI to personalization in a way that increases relevance, not just message volume
• Measure customer loyalty through repeat purchase rate, active member rate, CLTV, and whether customers are sharing more data over time as a signal that they believe the brand delivers value

Final Thoughts

Customer acquisition costs rise every year. A loyal customer base reduces dependence on that spending. The leaders who make that investment first hold an advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.

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