Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features three interviews I recorded whilst at Medallia’s Experience event in Las Vegas on the 10th, 11th and 12th February. The interviews are with Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada, and Paloma Paraja, Customer Experience Manager at Santalucia Seguros. We cover the big themes of the conference, the latest developments at Medallia, agentic CX, building an ACX team, the importance of context in empathy and what it takes to deliver an award-winning customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The dangers of a CCaaS monoculture – Interview with Paul Hughes of Mitel – and is number 574 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Sid:

• The CX industry is at an inflection point: The traditional, survey-led, dashboard-focused model of Customer Experience is yielding diminishing returns and must pivot due to the acceleration of AI and the influx of diverse data signals beyond surveys.
• Shift from Metrics to Financial Outcomes: Senior CX leaders must move past a sole focus on traditional metrics (like NPS) and strategically align their programs to drive clear business outcomes—specifically, retention, loyalty, and sales—to secure C-suite relevance and prove ROI.
• AI is the new engine for Insight and Action: New Gen AI-enabled tools, such as Medallia’s Insights Assistant and Topic Builder, are fundamentally changing how experience data is interrogated, moving from manual dashboard building to natural language querying and automated topic organization.
• Embrace the Agentic Future: The future of experience is connected and “agentic,” leveraging AI-powered conversational bots (like the Medallia-Ada partnership) to move instantly from customer insight to automated action, such as initiating returns or closing cases.
• Redefine the CX Role: The job of the CX professional is changing from a “program manager” to a connector, conductor, architect, and business changer—a leader responsible for rationalizing investments and navigating company-wide transformations driven by AI.
• The Call to Action for Change Makers: CX leaders must step out of isolation and drive action by focusing on three questions: 1) What specific business outcome do you want to improve? 2) Which key internal stakeholder will you collaborate with? 3) What is the immediate, actionable text or email you will send to get started?
• Technology Serves the Human Enterprise: Despite the rise of AI, organizations remain human constructs. The ultimate objective is to leverage technology to improve outcomes for customers, employees, and the business, re-emphasizing that CX is about making human-to-human interaction more empathetic, precise, and personalized.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Mike:

• Context is the New Scarcity: Ph.D.-level intelligence is now abundant (a single API call away), but the quality of the customer experience is constrained by the amount of context the intelligence has access to. Success hinges on equipping AI with deep historical, channel, and signal context.
• The Power of Agentic Partnerships: The Ada-Medallia partnership demonstrates a path to exponential CX improvement by pairing a “system of agentic CX” (Ada) with “extremely performant signal infrastructure” (Medallia), leading to significant performance gains, such as 60% higher resolution rates and 20% higher CSAT for an online retailer, IPSY.
• AI is a Management Discipline: AI-powered software is not a set-and-forget tool. It represents a “new operating muscle” that requires a dedicated, shared model of maintenance and development between the vendor and the customer.
• Establish ACX Teams: Companies must formalize an ACX (Agentic Customer Experience) team to manage the performance, development, and training of customer-facing AI agents. This role is a new, high-growth career path often filled by top-performing customer service representatives.
• Enter the ‘Resolution Era’: CX focus is shifting from simple resolution to the depth of resolution, meaning AI must be capable of handling tasks of increasing complexity and longer time horizons to truly improve customer experience quality.
• Anchor CX to CLTV: The most successful AI-native companies are anchoring their CX efforts to Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), realizing that the best customer-facing AI drives loyalty, which ultimately shows up in this top-line financial measure.
• Reinvest the Service Dividend: Leaders should view efficiency gains from AI not just as cost savings but as a Service Dividend—an opportunity to reinvest in human agents, infrastructure, and training, thereby enabling human teams to be “more human” and provide a higher quality of personal interaction.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Paloma:

• Context is the Catalyst for Internal Empathy: The foundational success of the Santalucía Seguros program was linking the Experience Management platform (Medallia) to internal operational systems (CRM, claims). This provided “context” (technician, repair cost, time) for every customer interaction, which was essential for internal teams to build empathy, understand the true impact of their work, and mobilize action.
• The Discipline of Real-Time Listening: CX is described not as a system connection but as a “hard work and a very high discipline.” Senior executives must ensure their teams are constantly monitoring signals, learning themes, and reacting in real-time to avoid the risk of merely “collecting data and not doing anything.”
• ROI is Proved by Preventing Effort: Direct business impact is demonstrated by proactively managing customer effort. By detecting process delays or issues on the first customer call, the company is able to prevent repeated, costly follow-up calls (three, four, or five times), showing a clear and measurable KPI impact on the business.
• Shift Focus to Unsolicited Feedback: In the low-interaction insurance sector, unsolicited feedback (phone calls, texts) is the “huge source of knowledge” during high-stakes moments like a claim. Leaders must listen during the process, not just wait for a post-event survey, to capture the complete customer journey.
• The Strategic Future is Proactive Predictability: The next major step for the program is moving from rapid reaction to predictability and proactivity. Leveraging information from speech analytics, digital, and social channels allows the company to anticipate customer needs, mitigate risks, and even redistribute contact center resources before a problem escalates.
• Keep the Human in the Machine: Even with big data, analytics, and AI, leaders must cultivate the discipline of “putting on your customer’s shoes.” Executives must regularly stop, think, and imagine the customer’s experience in a concrete situation to avoid focusing solely on numbers and objectives.
• CX is Humanity at Scale: The overarching philosophy and “biggest learning” is that “great customer experience is just humanity at scale.” Technology must be used to ensure that the human elements of empathy, care, and understanding are delivered consistently to every customer.

About Sid

Sid Banerjee is the Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia.

Over a nearly 30-year career, Sid Banerjee has amassed deep skills building companies and solutions based on customer experience, business intelligence, and AI-powered technologies. Sid was the Founder and served as CEO, Chairman, and Chief Strategy Officer at Clarabridge. He most recently served as Chief XM Strategy Officer at Qualtrics. He presently serves as Chairman at Prolific, a high-growth technology company that provides a platform for high-quality, human-derived AI and research models. He was a founding employee of MicroStrategy and founder/CEO of Claraview. He also held executive and management positions at Ernst & Young and Sprint. He holds a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

Do check out Medallia, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Medallia and feel free to connect with Sid on LinkedIn here.

About Mike

Mike Murchison is CEO of Ada, the agentic customer experience company. A serial entrepreneur focused on using AI to transform the conversation between businesses and their customers, he champions the Canadian innovation ecosystem at home and abroad.

Before starting Ada, Mike founded several other tech companies, including a social search community and a consulting firm for Fortune 500 clients. He also worked as a customer service agent, which led him to understand firsthand how AI could make life better for customers and support teams. Founded in 2016, Ada’s customers now serve more than 16% of the world’s population (as of September, 2025). Mike envisions a world where every company is managing customer-facing AI Agents that deliver a new standard of personalized experience at scale.

A Forbes 30 Under 30 winner, Mike has also been recognized by EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year program and Goldman Sachs’ Builders and Innovators Summit. When he’s not imagining the future of customer experience, you can find him reading, cooking, or training for an ultra-marathon.

Find out more about Ada, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @ada_cx and feel free to connect with Mike on LinkedIn here.

About Paloma

Paloma Paraja is Customer Experience Manager at Santalucia Seguros.

Paloma believes in turning insight into empathy, data into connection. She guides her organization to listen deeply, act swiftly, and design experiences that feel human at every touchpoint. With a background spanning insurance, energy, and logistics, she is committed to unlocking simplicity, trust, and relevance in every interaction.

Find out more about Santalucia Seguros, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) and Instagram @santalucia_seg and @santalucia_seg respectively and feel free to connect with Paloma on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by Kalei de Leon on Unsplash