The CX Cast

Practitioners from Fabletics and Consensys offer detail on what it takes to move conversational AI into production—grounding deployment in customer experience, organizational readiness, and measurable outcomes.
Featuring:
Francesca Del Gobbo, Fabletics

Dror Avieli, formerly of Consensys, current Chief Customer Officer at Elliptic

And guest host Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Show notes:
Generative AI promises to transform customer service, but the move from experimentation to AI-powered self-service is a leap for most organizations. Principal Analyst Max Ball brings two more experts from his network to share best practices: Francesca Del Gobbo, Technical Product Manager - Conversational AI, and Dror Avieli, former Managing Director and VP of Customer Success at Consensys (and current Chief Customer Officer at Elliptic) We explore:

Why Fabletics and Consensys moved beyond traditional, deterministic bots, how LLMs change conversation design, testing, and multilingual support (among other things)
What teams need to successfully operate once these systems are live
Basics on how to select use cases, build the right data and API foundations, gain executive support, and assess vendors

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

This week on the CX Cast we dig into our archives to bring you an episode that's stood the test of time.

Fujitsu is a global B2B technology and services company, and Europe is its largest region outside of Japan. To double down on customer centricity, Fujitsu Europe focused on four success factors:

Blending CX expertise with business inputs and creating clear CX accountability across countries
Proving the value of CX to leaders and account teams
Using a standardized but customizable approach to scale CX across account teams in various countries
Focusing on value by cocreating improvements with customers

Ben Phillips was the Head of Customer Experience Performance Centre when we recorded this episode. He joined us to share the path Fujitsu Europe took on its CX transformation.

Most organizations still design for an "average" customer. The problem? There is no average customer.

In this episode, producer Hannah Jachim, who in her day-job is a Forrester Researcher, joins Angelina Gennis and Martin Gill to explore the report she recently published exploring inclusive design in the automotive industry. Our discussion reveals how designing for people with different abilities, needs, and circumstances unlocks better experiences for everyone. From the origins of cruise control to the challenges of autonomous vehicles, Hannah explains why accessibility should be treated as a driver of innovation rather than a compliance exercise. The conversation also explores how assumptions about drivers, passengers, age, ability, and technology continue to shape customer experiences across industries. We cover:

Why inclusive design often produces better products for all customers.
What is the "curb cut effect" and what business leaders can learn from it.
How automotive design highlights broader customer experience (CX) challenges.
How organizations can embed inclusion early instead of retrofitting accessibility later.
Why the entire customer journey matters, not just the product itself.

Whether you're focused on customer experience, service design, accessibility, journey mapping, or product strategy, the lessons extend far beyond automotive.

Customer growth comes from two sources: strengthening relationships with existing customers and attracting new ones. Forrester's Total Experience (TX) framework was designed to measure both. Now it takes the next step.

Host Angelina Gennis welcomes James McQuivey, VP, Research Director at Forrester, to discuss the next generation of Total Experience and the introduction of EX impact, a new measure that reveals how employee experience influences customer experience (CX) and brand experience (BX). James explains why employee experience is not simply another score to add to the model. Instead, it acts as a force that can accelerate or hinder growth ambitions. Using examples from retail brands such as Costco, Trader Joe's, and Aldi, Angelina and James explore how employee empowerment, enablement, and inspiration shape customer outcomes and long-term business performance. They discuss:

Why Total Experience focuses on customers and non-customers as the two sources of growth
How employee experience can amplify or constrain CX and brand performance
What Forrester's new EX impact measure reveals about organizational momentum
Why some companies achieve strong CX despite weaker employee experience, and the risks that creates
How leaders can use connected customer, brand, and employee data to make smarter investment decisions

Most CX leaders know stakeholder alignment is hard. Strategy workshops stall. Teams focus on blockers. Momentum fades before transformation begins.

In this episode, Angelina Gennis and Martin Gill share lessons from a season of CX forums and immersive experiences. From stakeholder management workshops to AI-powered game shows and full-scale transformation simulations, they explore how interactive learning helps people build skills, collaborate across functions, and experience change before it happens. We cover:

Why simple, hands-on activities create stronger engagement and learning
How gamification helps teams move past organizational barriers
Ways to use AI and audience participation to make CX education more effective
What immersive simulations teach leaders about CX strategy, governance, and stakeholder management
How CX teams can create their own CX Week or CX Day using game-based learning

Angelina shares examples from Forrester CX Forums, including a stakeholder management workshop, a live "hype or happening" AI game show, and a transformation simulation that challenged participants to build growth-focused CX strategies under pressure.

The discussion also explores interactive learning, CX transformation, stakeholder management, AI in CX, and organizational culture change.

Most organizations have journey maps, dashboards, and customer insight. Many struggle to turn them into meaningful decisions. In this CX Cast episode, learn how to bridge the gap.

Great CX starts outside-in. If customers aren’t using what you built, the problem isn’t them.

Host Martin Gill speaks with Tom Mouhsian, Principal Analyst at Forrester, about why, even after years of investment, digital experiences still fail. The issue isn’t channels or technology. It’s a persistent gap between how customers want to get things done and how organizations force them to do it. Tom introduces the Digital Moments Map and Digital Connections Tracker—two frameworks that reframe CX around customer goals, interaction modes, and real-world behavior. We discuss:

Why thinking in channels is outdated and what to replace it with
The four “moment types” that define all digital behaviour (control, consumption, communication, commerce)
How interaction modes (voice, chat, GUI, XR) shape effort and adoption
How to identify the gap between current usage and customer preference
What device, channel, and platform complexity means for CX design

Tom shares real-world examples to show how even “successful” digital transformation can increase cost and friction when misaligned with customer needs.

Most CX strategies fail to land. Not because the ideas are wrong, but because teams don't internalize the decisions behind them.

Host Martin Gill speaks with Joana de Quintanilha, VP and Principal Analyst, about how immersive, gamified experiences turn CX strategy into action. Drawing on real examples like escape‑room style simulations to auction‑driven prioritization, Joana explains how leading organizations drive alignment, confidence, and better decisions at scale. We discuss:

Why immersive experiences outperform traditional workshops for CX strategy rollout
The five design principles: experiential, purposeful, participatory, repeatable, measurable
How to use gamification to improve decision quality—not just engagement
How to design for impact, including memory, behavior change, and stakeholder alignment
Practical formats: journey labs, customer carousels, simulations, and executive decision rooms

Joana shares lessons from real deployments, including how to stage experiences, measure outcomes, and avoid common pitfalls.

If CX leaders want strategy to stick, teams need to learn by doing, not just listening.

CX Summit EMEA brought CX, digital and marketing leaders together to challenge them to build the experience AI can't. We focused on earning trust, aligning teams, and turning experience strategy into something that actually operates at scale. We added an employee lens to our Total Experience framework to draw a clearer line between employee experience (EX), brand perception, and customer outcomes, and we leant into trust, empathy and the human foundations of AI.

We sent producer Hannah out onto the conference floor with a microphone to find out what the attendees thought.

Featuring multiple attendees:

Mickael Subileau & Nicolo Broccati, Jungheinrich Service & Parts

Adam Kaye, Sonata Software

James O'Connor, AmplifyXM

Krishneel Naidu, Infineon Technologies

Richard Prochazka, TheyDo

Tina Lilje, Xenadi GmBH

Adelita Artero, Netigate Deutschland

Enterprise CX transformation rarely starts with journey maps or dashboards. It starts with fixing real problems fast.

In this episode of CX Cast, Angelina Gennis and Martin Gill speak with Amory Somers‑Vine, Customer Experience Director at Expereo, about leading customer‑centric change during a major B2B business model shift—from wholesale network services to enterprise partnerships.

Amory shares how Expereo:

Prioritised CX improvements based on live customer issues, not theory
Built a customer health model from frontline insight before formal metrics
Used behaviour‑led culture change to win hearts, not just compliance
Linked customer experience (CX) directly to employee experience (EX) and growth
Scaled trust and partnership in a highly technical, high‑risk B2B environment

This conversation is a practical playbook for CX leaders operating in complex B2B services, infrastructure, or technology‑heavy environments navigating transformation under pressure.

Amory Somers‑Vine is Customer Experience Director at Expereo, a managed network service provider supporting global enterprises. She leads CX strategy, culture, and customer health across the organisation.