A resource for customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM) professionals.
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Full Episode Listing

A complete list of episodes from The CX Leader Podcast.

Your Opinion Counts

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Episode #230

Released: August 23, 2022

Women's Equality Day is celebrated in the United States on August 26, commemorating the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. In honor of that event, and in honor of her great-grandmother Tommie Walker, who founded Walker in 1939, Sara Walker guests hosts to highlight words of wisdom from women who have been guests on The CX Leader Podcast.

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Your CX Career

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Episode #257

Released: March 7, 2023

There have been many guests on this show, each with unique stories and backgrounds about their path to becoming a customer experience professional. But we haven’t often discussed how YOU can develop your own professional life. So how is your career growth going? Are you new to the profession and need some tips, or are you a seasoned pro that could use some ways to spark new creativity? How do you keep your career batteries charged? Host Steve Walker welcomes Natalie Onions, vice president of customer experience at Customer.io, a marketing automation platform, to discuss way to help develop your career as a customer experience professional.

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Your Best Behavior

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Episode #165

Released: May 11, 2021

There’s a ton of science behind something as simple as a customer making a decision to purchase a product or service. Behavioral economics is a field that seeks to help us understand the biases and errors in a person’s decision-making process. Understanding this field can also provide CX pros with better insight into customer behavior, thereby finding ways to improve the customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Richard Jordan, CEO of Raggit, a customer-service review app, and one of the contributing authors of a new book, “Customer Experience 3”, to discuss how CX professionals can look to behavioral economics to help improve customer experience.

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You’re Never Too Big For Change

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Episode #228

Released: August 9, 2022

Change is not easy. It’s human instinct to become comfortable with “what you know.” But sometimes a change is necessary – when CX professionals notice a problem, or recognize a way to make the customer’s experience better, their instinct is to find solutions to improve how they interact with customers. And a large global technology company needs a CX leader who can bring people together into a common purpose and inspire them to do what’s best for their customers. Host Steve Walker welcomes Bob McDonald, vice president of global CRM experience for IBM, for a discussion on how Bob made the business case to transform their customer experience.

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You need to drive action!

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Episode #29

Released: July 24, 2018

CX experts are often on the front-lines of instituting changes to better the customer experience, but it’s not an easy task. Steve welcomes back Walker expert Noah Grayson to begin a three-episode series on change management and how to effectively drive action in your company.

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XM on the Move

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Episode #122

Released: June 23, 2020

Moving is stressful, but relocating employees is sometime necessary. Now imagine you’re a company whose expertise is relocating employees for other companies: how does experience management work in that situation? Does your program focus on the company that hired you, or on the employee that is being relocated? Or do you focus on both? Host Steve Walker welcomes Kathryn Cassidy, President and COO of Altair Global, a full-service, global mobility services company, to discuss how they manage the experience from the perspective of both B2C and B2B relationships.

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X4 Recap

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Episode #60

Released: March 14, 2019

Steve along with Walker's own Sonya McAllister, Brad Harmon, and Jamieson Prala discuss what they experienced at the Qualtrics X4 Summit in Salt Lake City.

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Who you gonna call? (Your client, of course!)

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Episode #102

Released: February 4, 2020

Customer experience professionals have an abundance of technological choices when it comes to gathering customer feedback, providing vast amounts of data to use in guiding their CX efforts. But sometimes the “low tech” solution is the best option. Steve welcomes guest Jen Pardi Cusick, senior customer experience strategist at GoGo Business Aviation, to discuss how employees across their company participate in a client callback program to gain better insights into their customers’ needs.

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When In Doubt, ask the Employees

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Episode #128

Released: August 4, 2020

Empowering more people throughout the organization to help with CX strategies can be effective – especially when working with front line employees that interact with your customers the most. Host Steve Walker welcomes Sue Brady, vice president of marketing and customer engagement at Hughes Network Systems, a global satellite broadband solutions and services company, and a provider of managed network services and applications, to discuss how they implemented a program to gather employee recommendations for improving the customer experience.

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What’s your goal?

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Episode #34

Released: August 28, 2018

In a continuing series on technology, Steve welcomes Mike Grindstaff to the podcast for a discussion on getting the most out of your technology and how to gauge success by defining your goals.

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What’s your “word-of-mouth” strategy?

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Episode #41

Released: October 16, 2018

Businesses often focus on various types of strategies to get ahead in the market: sales strategy, market strategy, customer experience strategy - but do you have a "word-of-mouth" strategy? Steve welcomes New York Times bestselling author Jay Baer to discuss his new book, "Talk Triggers", and how companies can recruit their own customers into becoming marketing volunteers.

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What’s Trending Today?

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Episode #132

Released: September 8, 2020

These past few years have seen some amazing changes in the customer experience space. And these past few months responding to the COVID pandemic has tested and proven the importance of CX. As our understanding of customers’ needs becomes more refined, experience management professionals are finding ways to innovate, setting trends that help further define how we approach customer experience. Host Steve Walker welcomes guest Dutta Satadip, global head of customer success and operations at Pinterest, to discuss some of today's more prominent trends in customer experience.

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What to do with all this data

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Episode #70

Released: June 4, 2019

In the first episode of a new series focusing on best practices for CX professionals, Steve welcomes Jessica Gregory, associate vice president for advisory services and analytics expert to discuss how analyzing customer data can bring you powerful insights to help drive your customer experience program.

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What Gets Measured Gets Done

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Episode #210

Released: March 29, 2022

Building a CX program from the ground up can be a challenge, especially in a field such as healthcare. Where do you start? What’s most important to customers? How do we develop a customer – or “member” – centric culture? Host Steve Walker welcomes Gratia Carver, vice president and chief experience officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, or “Blue KC”, for why measurement is such a crucial practice to building a customer-centric culture.

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Wear Comfortable Shoes

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Episode #92

Released: November 12, 2019

Immersive experiences can be a powerful tool to demonstrate the customer experience, but for patients at a hospital, it can be impactful - and emotional - for the leadership of an organization. Guest host Pat Gibbons welcomes guest Karen Cernock from Indiana University Health to discuss how an immersive experience for their board developed into a program throughout the organization.

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We Are All CX

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Episode #229

Released: August 16, 2022

People love origin stories. And for CX professionals, narratives of customer experience “newbies” growing from humble beginnings into “heroes” can be insightful. Continuing in our series of featuring winners from the Awards International 2022 US Customer Experience Awards, host Steve Walker welcomes Lee Kemp, operations, supply chain, and Customer Experience leader, and Sam Wegman, vice president for customer experience, at Univar Solutions, a global chemical and ingredient distributor. Lee and Sam describe how they built an award-winning program from scratch, having received three gold awards and one silver for Univar's customer experience efforts.

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Voice of the Customer through the Employee

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Episode #112

Released: April 14, 2020

Companies are often hesitant to actively seek feedback during crisis situations and that can affect your customer listen programs. But there are ways in which employees can be a source of customer insights. Host Steve Walker welcomes back Dr. Troy Powell, vice president of strategy as Walker, to discuss how a voice of the customer through the employee program, or "VOCE," can continue to provide a means to listen to customers without actively soliciting feedback from customers.

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Virtual Workshops

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Episode #110

Released: March 31, 2020

“Social distancing” has become the term saturating the news and social media. Experts all agree that the best way to fight the spread of the coronavirus is to keep distance from others, when possible, and practice some basic hygiene, like washing our hands. That makes things a bit difficult for CX professionals who are used to leading exercises like journey mapping and other workshops that require people to collaborate in the same space. Host Steve Walker and guest Kristina Kittle, vice president of advisory services, discuss ways CX leaders can move to virtual workshop experiences.

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Upping Your Sales Game (Part 2)

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Episode #18

Released: May 8, 2018

In the second part of this podcast series, Steve continues his conversation with Bill Caskey on how CX leaders can improve their effectiveness in sales. Bill is the creator of the 2X Group and co-host of the Advanced Selling podcast.

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