Fireside chats without the fires

Neal Topf is proud, and a little bit fanboying, to welcome back to the podcast the esteemed author Annette Franz.

Following on from the success of Annette's first book, "Customer Understanding", Annette's second book, "Built To Win", promises to reshape how companies and individuals look at employee experience and the difference between customer-centric vs customer focus.

Annette takes Neal on a whirlwind tour of the book, she touches on the 10 principles that help change the culture, why changing culture is hard and how can you measure culture.

We also get to hear a bit about what drives Annette, why did she want to write this book, what was her why.

All of the above, and more, are discussed in the podcast. Download to find out more!

Happy New Year to all our listeners at Fireside Chats Without The Fires, and thank you all for the support for the podcast. As we enter our second year (yes, second!!), we are amazed to be starting the year with a simply outstanding guest.

Adrian Swinscoe, the author of Punk CX, joins Neal to talk about his latest book, Punk XL. 

Punk XL does the entire CX community a solid by creating this creative masterpiece (yes, masterpiece) of tracks that make us think/re-think how we set our customer-facing organizations up to succeed. Ever heard of rEcIpe? HIPPO? Proto-WTF-col? Each of these explained on video and sound by author extraordinaire, Adrian Swinscoe 

Amanda Malach joins Neal Topf on today’s episode of #spotlightonthebusinessofcx. In the limited podcast series, Fireside side chats without the fires brings together thought leaders and experts from the world of investment and finance to share their knowledge on how important it is to align any CX projects to the company’s bottom-line.

Amanda Malach is one such expert. She shares her thoughts on how you can make the CFO your BFF. Through some simple to use strategies that anyone can put in place today, Amanda demonstrates what are CFO’s looking for when it comes to CX. Amanda shares what annoys CFO’s and how to get into their minds, so that you know what they are thinking. This technique is extremely helpful when you are thinking about pitching your latest and greatest CX idea! Amanda discusses with Neal which metrics the CFO cares about (we won’t spoil this), what time to cash means and why that is important to the CFOs. As the podcast draws to a close, Amanda takes a look into her crystal ball for 2022, and gives some thoughts as to what may be happening in the very near futu

David Koning and Robert Bamberger from Baird are back from a third episode focusing on the business side of CX.

Hosted by Neal Topf, the limited podcast series aims to bring a clearer understanding of the impacts that positive CX has on business, from an investment and financial standpoint.

On this episode, David and Robert talk about the insights from Bairds Q3 survey results about 2022 in the BPO space, and the potential impact that wage inflation may have on pricing. They also discuss the performance of TaskUs, TELUS and Accenture, and how these three companies are bucking the trend and showing growth in Q3 and what that means for 2022.

The panel also discuss digital channels, pre and post COVID, the difference between value and value companies and Robby shares his experience of Curb Mobility.