Service economics have long depended on headcount. Scale meant higher cost, and capacity constrained performance.

AI changes that.

This week on The Modern Customer, Matt Price, Founder & CEO of Crescendo, explains how AI expands capacity and connects service directly to business outcomes.

Instead of charging per seat or hour, Crescendo ties pricing to measurable results. When teams treat service conversations as engagement opportunities, more than half involve buying intent — and repeat visits increase.

In this episode, you'll learn how organizations:

• Turn service interactions into buying moments

• Increase repeat engagement and loyalty

• Move beyond seat-based economics

• Scale service without proportional headcount growth

If you're thinking about how AI fits into your customer service strategy, this episode is for you.

👉 Watch the full episode and learn more at www.crescendo.ai

This episode is sponsored by Crescendo.

Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com

New data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index reveals nearly a decade of stagnation, a narrowing gap between top and bottom performers, and rising loyalty. Together, these shifts point to one conclusion: customer experience is converging.

In this week's episode of The Modern Customer, Forrest Morgeson, Director of Research at the American Customer Satisfaction Index, explains what this means for leaders heading into 2026.

As AI accelerates and economic uncertainty persists, differentiation becomes harder to sustain and more critical to get right.

If you're shaping your 2026 strategy, this conversation offers a clear, data-backed perspective on where competitive advantage is tightening — and where leaders should focus.

🎧 Listen to the full episode.

Access the full ACSI report to evaluate what these trends mean for your competitive position: https://theacsi.org/news-and-resources/blog/2026/02/17/the-shrinking-distance-between-the-best-and-the-rest/

Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com

Customer conversations generate value. Yet most organizations never connect that value to action.

Context gets lost across channels, and next steps never connect to downstream systems.

This week on The Modern Customer, Ali Tore, RingCentral's SVP & GM of Conversational AI, shares how agentic voice AI closes that gap. He outlines why organizations must move beyond isolated automation and build systems that coordinate conversations, context, and follow-through across every touchpoint.

If you want AI to drive real customer outcomes — not just efficiency — this episode is for you.

👉 Listen to the full episode on The Modern Customer and explore the RingCentral Agentic AI Trends 2026 report to go deeper.

This episode is sponsored by RingCentral.

Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com

As restaurants scale, preserving hospitality becomes harder to sustain. This week on The Modern Customer, Andrew Rebhun, Chief Experience Officer at CAVA, shares how the Mediterranean fast-casual brand keeps hospitality at the center while scaling to 400+ locations.

The conversation breaks down how experience leadership actually works at scale—from loyalty and social listening to team training and selective use of AI—without losing human connection.

Where do you see the biggest gap today: loyalty design, social listening, or team alignment?

🎧 Listen to the full episode to explore how hospitality translates into loyalty across digital, rewards, and social touchpoints.

Curious to try it yourself? Visit cava.com to learn more.

Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com

Great customer experience doesn't lose customers to competitors—it loses them to apathy. And it creates superfans when ownership of the experience is clear.

In this episode of The Modern Customer, customer experience speaker and author Brittany Hodak explains what actually turns customers into superfans—and why tools, automation, and AI alone aren't enough. Drawing on her work with organizations like American Express, Benihana, and Keller Williams, she shows why ownership, accountability, and human judgment drive lasting loyalty.

🎧 Tune in to the full conversation to learn how great CX turns customers into superfans.

Blake Morgan was called "The Queen of CX" by Meta. She is a customer experience futurist and author of three books on customer experience. Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here. Learn more at www.blakemichellemorgan.com

Customer experience leaders face a familiar tension: do we put employees first or customers first? As organizations scale and adopt AI, that question becomes operational.

In this special takeover episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, Jacob Morgan shares insights from The 8 Laws of Employee Experience, based on research with more than 100 CHROs. He explains why CX and EX operate as one system—and how leadership decisions behind the scenes shape customer outcomes.

This conversation gives CX leaders a practical, systems-level lens to strengthen trust, consistency, and performance as AI raises the stakes.

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today's Customer.

Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.

This week on The Modern Customer Podcast, you'll hear why winning with AI doesn't start with an AI strategy.

In this episode, Peter Czimback—former VP of Experience Innovation at Aramark—shares a business-first approach to transformation that begins with experience, outcomes, and human capability, with AI supporting execution underneath.

The conversation explores how leaders can move beyond AI experimentation and hype by anchoring technology decisions to growth, productivity, and the experiences they want to deliver to customers and employees.

If you're navigating AI investments, organizational change, or transformation at scale, listen to the full episode to learn how experience-led thinking helps leaders use AI to strengthen what already works.

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today's Customer.

Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.

As digital products become the primary customer interface, delays in bug diagnosis and resolution now directly affect the customer experience.

In this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast, Matt Rubright, Chief Customer Officer at Jam, explains how Jam fits into the bug-reporting and support workflow by capturing technical context as issues are reported. That shared context helps support and engineering diagnose problems faster, reduce handoffs, and move toward resolution with greater clarity.

The conversation looks at why resolution speed and coordination have become CX priorities—and how AI is influencing the way teams work together when something breaks.

This episode is sponsored by Jam. 🎧 Learn more about Jam and how teams are rethinking bug resolution: https://jam.dev/

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today's Customer.

Follow Blake Morgan on LinkedIn

For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.