A resource for customer experience (CX) and experience management (XM) professionals.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Stitcher Listen on Stitcher Listen on YouTube

Full Episode Listing

A complete list of episodes from The CX Leader Podcast.

Your Opinion Counts

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

Your CX Communication Ecosystem

More details

Episode #276

Released: July 18, 2023

For some people, getting excited about a new project means diving right into the “fun stuff.” Working to fix up that cool classic car you just bought, or painting a landscape that inspired you. The temptation is to pick up the wrench or paint brush and dive in. But even artists and mechanics need a plan, and so do CX experts. And a critical area of planning for customer experience is communications. It’s important to know your audience and why you’re collecting data in the first place and planning your communications should be one of the first things you do. Host Steve Walker welcomes Molly Work, associate vice president in client services at Walker, for a discussion on the importance of communication - internally and externally - to improve customer experience.

Listen to this episode

Your CX Career

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

Your Best Behavior

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

You’re Never Too Big For Change

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

You need to drive action!

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

Yes, It’s Worth The Effort!

More details

Episode #295

Released: December 5, 2023

It’s a subject on which we’ve dedicated several episodes: employee experience. And we’ve even covered how to effectively combine CX and EX, a subject for which Walker released a report that you can find on walkerinfo.com. But we haven’t really explored the value of combining employee and customer experience – is it even worth it, and what challenges can I expect? Host Steve Walker welcomes Suzanne Scharer, a product scientist at Qualtrics, for a discussion on why it's worth the effort to combine your customer and employee experience data.

Listen to this episode

XM on the Move

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

X4 Recap

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

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

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

When In Doubt, ask the Employees

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

What’s your goal?

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

What’s your “word-of-mouth” strategy?

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

What’s Trending Today?

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

What to do with all this data

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

What Gets Measured Gets Done

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

Welcome to 2024

More details

Episode #300

Released: January 23, 2024

That’s right - 300 episodes! Walker has been producing this podcast since January of 2018 and collected over 150 hours of content, discussed trends and events that included everything from COVID to artificial intelligence, and met some amazing customer experience professionals along the way. And at the beginning of each year we like to take a look at what to expect in CX over the next 12 months. Host Pat Gibbons welcomes Walker experts Sonya McAllister, Sean Clayton, and Tanner Smith, to reminisce on 2023 and make some predictions about trends moving into 2024.

Listen to this episode

Wear Comfortable Shoes

More details

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.

Listen to this episode

We Are All CX

More details

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.

Listen to this episode