Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty-four of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Alec Maloney to talk about new beginnings and fresh start for 2026. Hey Alec, how are you doing? Nice to see you. Hey Charlotte, I’m good.
Alec Moloney: 0:38
How about yourself?
Charlotte Ward: 0:39
Yeah, not too bad. Thank you. And happy new year to you too. Gosh, yes. Yeah. So, Alec, here we are in 2026 already. Uh, and I’m gonna ask you in a second to introduce yourself for the benefit of our new listeners coming to us this year, and also for the benefit of uh returning listeners, people who haven’t um heard me on the airwaves for a little while now, uh, and uh maybe uh we can start there. So, would you introduce yourself? It’s not your first time on the podcast, but here we go, a fresh start.
Alec Moloney: 1:11
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m sport and operations manager. I’ve worked at Snowplan on the Past with yourself, which is where we met. It would have been about a year and a half ago. I was originally on the podcast. Since then I’ve changed jobs, and in the past I’ve been working in sport for about what, nine and a half years now.
Charlotte Ward: 1:30
Nine and a half years, so the decade this year, huh?
Alec Moloney: 1:34
Yeah, yes.
Charlotte Ward: 1:36
Yes, yeah, um I yeah, so um, well, welcome, welcome. Um you mentioned there how we know each other, so let let’s uh let’s talk a little bit about that and then we can talk about what we’re doing here, shall we?
Alec Moloney: 1:50
Sounds good.
Charlotte Ward: 1:51
All right, so um you were um you joined Snowplow four three and three years ago, give or take. Three years ago, maybe?
Alec Moloney: 2:01
Twenty, twenty, twenty uh August, no, August 22, yeah. Three and a bit.
Charlotte Ward: 2:06
Three and a bit, three and a bit, okay. And um in that time you um stepped into a leadership role in my team. So uh we worked together leading sort of the uh well, I don’t know why I’m claiming any part in the leadership of this. You ran the uh the Australia and Amir support teams at Snowplow for me. Um and when you moved on, it became very evident we would stay in touch and stay friends, and uh uh we have decided uh at some point quite randomly when I think we were I I think we were having a chat and I was expressing my despair at the website falling over. And and you just said I’ll help. And there was no doubt in my mind, um, there was no hesitation. I just said, please, yes, that would be amazing. Uh and so um the website that that accompanies the podcast is now thanks to you, entirely thanks to you. Stood back up. It is there, it has content, and you’re contributing as well. So uh on the website now, there’s fresh articles, there’s a fresh look, um, there’s more to come, right, which we’ll touch on in a minute. And the podcast is up and running again for 2026. Here we are.
Alec Moloney: 3:24
Yeah, no, it’s exciting. It’s been a really like good experience, right? For both of us, I think, having the opportunity to sort of re-kindle the podcast on your end, but as well for myself. It’s been great to, you know, step out of my previous sort of like, you know, side hustle in you know, earlier mid-25 and you know, chatting to you October, October, November-ish, whatever it was. And and you know, for us to pick it up and start going, hey, you know, what can we do with the CSL brand, customer support leaders for those of the thing who don’t know the acronym, and really just yeah, start getting content pushed out across articles and obviously the podcast for yourself as well. So yeah, really enjoyed it so far and it helps to work with good friends.
Charlotte Ward: 4:11
It certainly does, man, and particularly good friends who just uh think in the same way about so many things. I think that we we’ve both come we uh you know you bring a decade of support experience yourself. I bring three decades, sorry to say, um, to to to these conversations. And so the podcast is now 2026 will be its sixth year. Okay, we’ve had a few breaks in that time. I think will be its sixth year.
Alec Moloney: 4:41
I’m I’m kind of I’m trusting you.
Charlotte Ward: 4:43
Yeah, it’s fine. It’s fine. There’s been a couple of breaks in that time because you know I do have a day job as as you do. And um, you know, it’s uh it this has always been a bit of a passion project of mine. Um, and it’s great to have you on board and just help out because uh it was getting difficult to sustain the output. And um, like all technology, when things break in ways you don’t understand, then it just becomes harder to climb back climb back out of the mire, doesn’t it? So I couldn’t be more grateful for you to just for just picking up the website and getting it back on its feet, and it looks great. There’s some great new articles on there. The podcast, uh, you know, when I started Customer Support Leaders in 2017, I think it was, just as a website with articles and some text interviews from other support leaders on there and began gathering experiences. It took me about two years to realize or to think that I needed to do more with it. And that was when the podcast was born. And the podcast absolutely became my first love. So I think this is how broadly how we’re gonna divide it up. We’ll we’ll we’ll cross-pollinate. You’re gonna come on the podcast a bit more, you know, aren’t you? And uh I need to get back to my writing. But the podcast is my love, and like you’re absolutely like holding the website together, contributing there, and figuring out the direction for that. Is that a fair summary?
Alec Moloney: 6:08
I definitely think so. I I’m I’m glad to say we’ve we’ve graduated from the WordPress blog in this day and age, and we’re now really starting to bring our content together in in much more like cohesive ways. Yeah, yeah. So it’s exciting.
Charlotte Ward: 6:22
So I think when we um I think when we were thinking about what we might talk about for this episode, um we were talking about we, you know, the the collaboration, and for some reason you used the words terrible decision. What was that?
Alec Moloney: 6:37
I’m pretty sure you used the words terrible decision.
Charlotte Ward: 6:42
Um have we just established that we both think it’s a fairly good decision at this point?
Alec Moloney: 6:47
I definitely think we have. I think we did four months ago, but you know, like we’ve got to give it a bit of a run, right?
Charlotte Ward: 6:54
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. There was there was a moment where suddenly it seemed like there was quite a lot to do, and then um over over uh the last couple of weeks of December it all kind of came together, right? So yeah, yeah. Watch this space for the website. Dear listeners, keep coming back and uh listening to the podcast, but go to the website and you’ll find so much more supporting content to your point, like bring bringing it much more cohesively together. It’s great, it looks great as well. Um, so yeah. Um, let’s talk about the podcast first, then. Um, this year, 2026, um we have a number of return guests coming from the last five or six years, which is great. Some really, really fun, interesting experience, support, and success, and adjacent um uh leaders coming back to the podcast. Um, some people I’ve just had some great fun talking to and who have done nothing but kind of inspire and inform me for the last five or six years. Um, so um anyone who’s coming to the podcast this year as a return listener will recognize lots of faces and uh will know that those people are just gonna bring more um for this for this coming year. Um we have some topics that we’re gonna touch on again because there are topics that will always be uh I nearly said the word festering. Uh it’s the wrong word, but we’ll there are some topics which are perennial, which are always a concern, they always bubble up for all support leaders everywhere. And um these are topics that over the last five or six years that I have touched on at least once, but probably multiple times with different leaders, because they are always things that um support leaders think about at various points in their own career or at various points inside their organizations, right? So what so what have we got coming on the podcast?
Alec Moloney: 8:57
I’m going to start by saying that we’re going to close out the old series because I actually think you’ve probably got like we’ve got heaps of listeners, right, who are still hanging out for that final cat games episode. Oh my goodness. Yes. I think, you know, uh for people out there who don’t know me particularly well, I’m a very passionate incident management operator, and I’ve been following the Cat Gain series for quite a while. So I’m really excited to see um, you know, Charlotte release the end of that. So I think I’m hoping there’s other people out there as well who are quite excited for that. So I think, you know, getting I think that’s really the only overhang series. I’m not sure if there might be another one. So I think that’s probably coming. Well, I do know what’s going on. Yeah, there’s some probably. I know it’s coming.
Charlotte Ward: 9:38
It is it is coming. I also have some interesting record recordings, which would be uh interesting time to release them. But I have some recordings in the bank on AI, which were recorded quite a while ago, actually. So it’ll be interesting to hear those perspectives come back. And all I can say, Alec, is thank you for highlighting my complete failure to complete to push out last series. I was hoping to gloss over that and just look forward, but you know, here we are. Here we are.
Alec Moloney: 10:05
It’s all right, it’s all right. We’ve got to tie it back to the history, you know. We remember the classics, replay the classics.
Charlotte Ward: 10:11
If you say so. All right. No, so let’s let’s done with the apology and the embarrassment. Thank you. Let’s look forward.
Alec Moloney: 10:17
Looking forward, looking forward. Um, I look, I I think you know, we we we’ve talked about topics right around like career progression for senior leaders. I think anybody out there, God, I think this has probably been happening for years at this point, right? We’re seeing it accelerate more with you know recent technological sort of developments. But what we’re seeing is sort of, you know, that compression of you know the career matrix and how do we build progression for senior leadership at this point, right? Like we don’t have, you know, organizations don’t always have multiple layers for senior leadership to sort of work through. So it’s you know, what does that look like? Getting on the leadership ladder as well is another thing. This is all very leadership focused, these type of topics, right? But I think they are perennials, right? In terms of, you know, how do we foster, how do we engage emerging leadership, how do we help people get onto that ladder in the first place? What does that look like? And then the whole spate of operational topics beyond that, as we’ve just talked about.
Charlotte Ward: 11:11
Yeah, yeah. And and yes, that the sort of the early ideas we had definitely were very leadership focused. It is a support leadership podcast. We do have a lot of individual contributors listening as well, and and as guests, um, people at the start of their career, people trying to figure out what support leaders are thinking about um and those concerns, they are perennial, you’re right. Like I think that there are reasons that um, and you touched on one just there, why we keep coming back to these topics and changing technology, changing uh, you know, the zeitgeist changes in sport every few years, and it definitely has in the last 12 months. And that compression of the career matrix, that uh that sort of collapse of of the leadership ladder in its traditional form and the hierarchy in its traditional form is something that a lot of leaders, particularly senior leaders, are having to wrangle. Like, what does it actually mean for them and for everyone on their team? You know, how do you build future leaders when there isn’t necessarily an obvious place right now for those leaders to go? And, you know, so um, and and the nature of the roles that those future leaders might step into is significantly and rapidly changing, for sure. Um, so we talked a little bit there about um technology being the driving reason for that compression, and really primarily there we’re talking about AI, aren’t we?
Alec Moloney: 12:37
Yeah, yeah. It it’s I I know we we’re sort of calling it nuke it on the block, but it’s probably been around for a couple of years. But the the paradigm shift is or the zeitgeist shift is really in that full swing, I think, at the moment. You know, we’ve seen, especially in the past sort of like, you know, 12, 18 months, there’s not a lot of you know, roles going that don’t mention AI in some form, right? Out in the sort of out in the market, internally within teams, you know, the conversation is really powered around what what what can we do with a AI? How is it maturing our us as a team? How are we you know maturing it as a technology and where does its usage go, not just sort of like in terms of efficiency but responsibility as well. How do we use it in the right way?
Charlotte Ward: 13:22
Yeah, yeah. That that that maturing, that maturation of AI and its um its place inside any support organization is definitely that sort of arc for me of the last 18 months. I think we’ve gone from and there are whole podcast episodes in here that we’ll unpack over the next few months for sure. But um I think what we’ve seen with AI is sort of it go from that experimental thing on the side, you know, everyone’s got Chat GPT or Claude or something. Um, and he’s just using it for research or to, you know, write an email or you know, do do some basic kind of uh language help or research help or knowledge help. Um go through the tooling. We’re almost going through the tooling right now. Every tool has an AI offering, every tool has an AI component or an AI backbone. Um, and and that’s certainly like the primary marketing driver, but but also that backbone is doing so much more. It’s your QA, it’s it’s your you know, um ticket management, it’s your knowledge management, it’s running automations and operations for you. But I think in some ways, um teams are almost going beyond that now, and and I think AI is starting to feel really like it’s coming into the hands of the teams more than just as a bought-in tool. And so you see an increasing number of uh organizations and particularly support organizations looking at how they can tailor and cater and craft their AI operations and experiences more than just buying a tool that does it for them, and and and that is becoming so much more accessible with um adjacent technologies like NAN and more, right?
Alec Moloney: 15:15
Yeah, I I I can definitely agree. Like it’s you know, I was there when Snowflow started this journey a year and a half, two years ago, right? And I think, you know, looking at how far the technologies come from, you know, the tooling solutions we were looking initially then to what you know I’ve been doing most recently, it’s it’s fascinating to see how much it’s shifting from tooling economy to like complexity uh sort of nuances of understanding how complex is the problem you’re solving to what the right solution is using AI. It’s not just an out-of-the-box tooling all the time. It’s how customizable is it, how contextualized is it. And I think that’s what we’re going to see more and more of becoming really well embedded in terms of the sort of like cultural understanding we have as an industry and definitely business in a wider sense as well.
Charlotte Ward: 16:04
Yeah, yeah. And and therefore what that means for our customers, right? The experience we’re delivering to them.
Alec Moloney: 16:10
Exactly. Exactly.
Charlotte Ward: 16:12
Yeah, yeah. Um, and and I think that that sort of customizable experience, both internally and and for our customers, is as far as I can see. Well, and and kind of super interesting to me the direction we’re heading in. It’s it’s that every organization. I and in fact, this is kind of something I I’ve always said on this podcast, you know, every organ what I what I always say is no two support leaders are the same because no two support organizations are the same. And I think that the same is now true of AI in that landscape, is where I’m going with this. That the custom the customizable nature is uh something that support leaders are really like grabbing at this stage of the of the like maturation arc of AI because everyone wants to do something slightly different. Everyone or everyone has to do something slightly different or somewhere between the two. Um and we’re crafting experiences internally and externally in a way that just buying in a tool doesn’t allow you to do.
Alec Moloney: 17:13
Yeah, absolutely. I think that internal experience is like where a lot of teams have started. And I think it’s that crafting of it that you know we’ve certainly seen accelerate in the past. Well, at least I can say 12 months that I’ve seen it, it might have been a little bit longer for you know the early adopters, but it’s certainly something that’s sort of coming into full form.
Charlotte Ward: 17:31
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I I think um what’s interesting to me about the very individual nature of these experiences and uh how leaders are tackling them and how leaders are building them and crafting them, particularly with AI, is that the insights that you then draw are also becoming very, very individual, aren’t they? They’re becoming very like no two support teams now talk about the same metrics. They’re not measuring the same, the same uh measures of success, the same KPIs, they’re focused on different parts of that experience because each experience is very different. And so, so we’re getting to a point where pulling insights from any of those experiences is another, almost another job, without it being a human job necessarily, right? It’s another task that needs completing because you don’t just buy a ticketing system anymore and measure CSAT in the same way as everyone else does, just to take the the bleeding obvious one, you know.
Alec Moloney: 18:38
Yeah, yeah. I think it’s it’s fascinating when you start digging into insights and you’ve you’ve really called out what I’ve at least I’ve seen, you know, over the past sort of years and months, right? But even going from you know, that concept of support as an insight center, and I feel like AI is supercharging it because you know, the the classic taxonomy, I’m trying to think of what we had in the early days at Snowflower for a common thread here. I think it was like challenge and task. I can’t quite remember, but it was like pretty much what are we doing?
Charlotte Ward: 19:08
And yeah, yeah.
Alec Moloney: 19:09
Jobs to be done, jobs be done. But yeah, it was like, you know, what is it what we’re pretty much what is it that we’re doing and what’s sort of the cusp like the challenge or like the friction in the customer’s experience or the user experience that’s led to us having to do this thing. And I think, you know, we saw that that classic matrix, and it’s worked for a very long time. And I think what we’re seeing now with AI, though, is we’re shifting away from that sort of like task-based insights generation, sort of insights generation across to AI where it can be really nuanced around like, you know, what are the analytic signals that are coming from the product? What are the analytics signals in terms of success, in terms of support, in terms of sales, in terms of, you know, like that sort of like um, you know, codified connective layer that sits underneath everything that the AI can operate in now. It’s really starting to pull together sort of threads that you would have had to have data science team. To sort of fathom through initially. And now it’s like, hey, we can pull all this together and support is the bleeding edge of interacting with our customers with the most context and knowledge. So when they’re plugged into that, they’re able to offer much richer insights. So I think that’s a really interesting sort of emerging trend or continuing trend, at least that’s becoming supercharged now.
Charlotte Ward: 20:23
Yeah, that that’s interesting because I think that um support typically is one of the touch points in a business where customers are um frequently interacting, but also the depth of those interactions is is quite staggering in some cases. And how you mine that beyond a taxonomy on each ticket, um, then the insights that are buried inside those conversations and inside other conversations that your customers are having across the business with customer success, with pre-sales, or you know, um with professional services, like capturing all of those when each of those teams is working with customers in a different way and on a different task and at a different point in the life cycle. Um the the layer of insight to your point, like the the the amount of data there in volume needs a data science team to wrangle, um, as well as the complex nature of that data, how it interconnects, what one thing that happens over in this part of the lifecycle or business means for something else over there. Um, and then you add product analytics and uh insights on top of that, which are getting more and more sophisticated. I mean, working inside Snowplow, I can see that obviously, but uh, you know, the the way that um we understand how our customers move through our product and through our business um is I mean, it’s an absolute like canyon of information. Um and and there is no I I I think that the the only way to gather insights and meaningful insights that you can act on, whether you surface those for a human in your business, say for the support engineer or for a customer success manager or anyone else, or whether you’re surfacing them so that you can tailor the customer experience um dynamically. So the way customers move through your product or move through your business dynamically in an automated fashion, none of that would be possible without AI without AI’s existence. Never mind like the the sophistication that AI can bring to all of that now and the uh because of its maturity stage.
Alec Moloney: 22:41
Absolutely.
Charlotte Ward: 22:43
Yeah, yeah. Um we we talked then about um we talk well, I talked about a little bit, touched on customer success, right? Being one of those roles that um these kind of insights are uh going to heavily influence. And I think what we’re also seeing, if we can just step slightly away from AI a little bit for this year, I think we’re seeing we’ve touched on the compression of the career ladder, but we’re seeing some role compression as well, aren’t we?
Alec Moloney: 23:11
Yeah, definitely. I I don’t know if like coming from an Australian market, is probably the way I’ll put this or frame this through the lens of the Australian market, right? Is you know, there’s definitely a lot of cross-pollination between sort of success and support roles. The traditional like reactive support, proactive success model is is it’s really shifting away from that. There’s a lot more sort of, you know, uh full-time support roles with part-time success, or full-time success roles with part-time support. And I think, you know, it’s traditionally been seen as quite a challenge uh in the more established markets. But I think there’s a bit of a trend as well where that’s starting to spread a bit more rapidly, and we’re seeing that sort of like I don’t want to call it exact merging of roles, but there’s definitely a bit of sort of like uh task sharing across them now, I think, where it’s like if you know you’ve got relatively tech touch type customers in a success sense, there’s something that can probably be bundled in with support. Whereas, you know, more complex accounts probably do need that full-time team still, and that’s where you might see a bit of support bleeding into the success role, and especially like as technical account management becomes more popular as well. That’s another side of it again, in terms of uh having that context and that understanding of the individual customer and being able to answer the technical questions there.
Charlotte Ward: 24:27
Yeah, yeah, maybe it is just answering the technical questions that um that is the support in in inverted quotes that CSMs are like being asked to do. I I was just gonna ask what what is that task cross-pollination that you’re seeing? So so very obviously for a CSM, it would be taking on time some of the technical or product help, you know, which haven’t tradition traditionally been part of the remit of a CSM. Um I think I think we’ve seen that slow burn for a number of years, but but again, maybe AI is accelerating that, right? Access to knowledge is just so much easier for anyone.
Alec Moloney: 25:06
We definitely could, especially when you think like CSM through that adoption lens, right? It’s always been that, you know, be the adoption partner for a sort of an account and answering those questions, removing those roadblocks. And I think it’s you know much more natural when you’re you’re the relationship owner, people are going to come to you to ask those questions. So you kind of end up answering them a bit sort of by de facto. And I think that’s sort of where it it’s definitely sort of germinated from, I think, in terms of like the success role blurring a bit with support. I think on the sports side it’s in it’s it’s it’s a bit more sort of interesting and complex, right? Um I think it it comes down a lot to sort of different resourcing levels and understanding like the account structure that a company’s operating on. Um I can talk a bit to snowplow, right? Whereas like, you know, here in AU we didn’t have a dedicated CSM. There was sort of like you know, CSM covering from other regions, and then we had a solution architect and the support team here. And it worked really well though, because you know, there was sometimes a bit of those relationshipy questions, but it wasn’t a full-time role. It was just maybe once a month someone wanted to have a you know half an hour chat about something. And I think, you know, even you know, what I’ve seen in other roles as well has really aligned to that where it’s you know, okay, you’ve got once a month service ops meeting to talk about support tickets, but someone wants to chat about something else, which is probably a bit more success focused about whether the accounts in a good state or not and what that ties to, even if it’s not directly tied to support. And I think that’s where we’re starting to see more bleed, though, is it used to be probably much more defined. And I think over time support, we’ve definitely sort of started to pick up a couple more hats just through the sort of natural bleed that comes from customers coming to us going, hey, we’re already in a meeting, let’s chat about this as well.
Charlotte Ward: 26:46
100%. Yeah. I mean, I can I can I can see this change and uh have lived the previous the previous structure very sort of tangibly. You know, I’ve been sat in meetings where a CSM is leading the meeting with a customer, and and even in-person meetings back in the day, going to a customer site and sitting in a room with a customer with a CSM, um, and the CSM having a full deck to run through and you know help the customer kind of understand their next kind of business goals and how we can help them get there, all your classic CS stuff. Um, but then a page on you know, a slide on that deck was open support tickets or support tickets that have been logged in the last three months or whatever, and hand over to Charlotte now to cover this and then come back to the CS person to to kind of you know um pick up that side of the conversation again. It was like very, very, very clear demarcation of the lines. Um, and the CSMs in those kind of in that landscape really were handing over tangibly in the meeting for me at that point, but but in every conversation, and to your point, it is when the relationship is there, customers will naturally ask whoever’s in the room or in the Slack channel or on the Zoom with them, hey, I’ve got this problem. Do you know anything about that? And historically, the CSM would be blogger support ticket. Um, but but that just doesn’t happen so much now. I mean, it it need it needs to certainly for very technically complex products. I don’t think we’re seeing like this role compression, like I don’t think this is ever going to be one role. It it’s very, very context dependent, but but there is definitely that that cross-pollination that you’re talking about. And on the support side, I think that this is where it becomes it becomes interesting from the point of view of some of the insights we were just talking about, right? How do you surface your customer’s whole experience in a nutshell to maybe a fairly junior IC on a support team? Um so that that support team member can talk about things or at least understand what your customers’ goals are in the right way and help them get there rather than just being faced with the question in front of them.
Alec Moloney: 29:06
Absolutely. And I I know we’ve talked about this before in the past. I’ve I’ve had this exact challenge, and I assume many other leaders have as well, right? Where you could have someone who’s been in your business a month that’s handling a support ticket and they don’t know that it’s a you know one million dollar ARR account, they’ve just had a major incident two months ago and they’re gonna be really, really touchy about something, and you want to make sure that you know you’re on the ball, that you’re really proactive, that you’re you know, always saying that step ahead of what’s what are they gonna ask next? What are they gonna need next? How do we make sure we, you know, remedy sort of like where they are as a customer in terms of the relationship on the back of an event, and it could be even a good event, you know, how do you how do you make sure that your team know, hey, these people are great to work with, or hey, they’ve had a really great event. We want to, you know, make sure they, you know, keep keep enjoying that for a few more months, you know, like and it’s how do you get that context to them? And there’s nothing quite like having to, you know, have drop downs in Salesforce fields that you’re hoping some poor person is manually updating once a week, you know, to keep the context rolling.
Charlotte Ward: 30:09
We’ve been there.
Alec Moloney: 30:11
I I think I think every team has everyone has like a you know the the hub spot of the Salesforce, you know, sort of chaos. But you know, it’s it’s how do we get beyond that? And I think this is where, you know, again, I try not to tie this all back to AI because it’s it’s certainly the agentic future we’re living right now, at least. And I think though, you know, we’re gonna see more and more solutions emerge for this. I think, you know, when we’re talking role compression as well, we’re really talking customer journey sort of sharing. I think it is really we’re no longer looking at that silo of, you know, you you touch pre-sales, then you go to like an implementation team, which probably professional services, right? Then you go to like success and support, handling two different things. I think we’re going to see that customer journey really evolve into a much more fluid state where it’s not a lot of people having to work together to keep it fluid. It’s we’re going to be using a much more shared sort of insights and services layer to elevate the experience so that the customer isn’t getting sort of jary silos, it becomes much more fluid contact sharing.
Charlotte Ward: 31:13
Yeah, 100%. Um, I I I the word that sprang to my mind when you talked about customer journey was dynamic. Like the customer journey is just not fixed anymore. You know, a few uh five years ago, oh gosh, it must be five years or so since I took my CCXP. Uh, I did a lot of work on customer journey mapping and all of that kind of thing for that. And um it and I’d historically tackled a bit of customer journey mapping. And the thing that I learned about customer journey maps is that most organizations do them once and then put them in a cupboard, you know.
Alec Moloney: 31:51
I I think that’s every organization. It sounds really bad to say, but I also feel like once you you flatten them out enough, they all start to look very much very, very similar, no matter what organization you’re at.
Charlotte Ward: 32:01
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I’d seen it done several times in uh in the last decade or so. And uh uh yeah, it was always written down um, you know, on a Miro board or on a Notion page or on a PowerPoint, and and it was fixed. Like this is our customer journey, this is who owns each stage of it, these are the transition points, this and and and we we’re seeing less of that because collective ownership is becoming much more the norm. And and yes, I don’t want to make everything about AI either, but AI is definitely supporting that and democratizing that customer journey across the organization. And and and this isn’t just role compression at play, this is also about you know the uh the fact that customers are expecting, I think, and we are certainly expecting to deliver very um uh customized, very individual experiences. And and even with even how we envisage delivering our experience to our customer is going to change because we it’s now coming back to the AI and crafting that experience point, the power is in our hands to do that. We’re not driven by the tools anymore.
Alec Moloney: 33:16
Yeah, yeah. I I think Lenin’s customer journey, just very briefly, right? But you know, if you think the sort of the traditional personalization frame, it was always we’re relying on automation, right? It was, you know, get the customers within a couple of fields about you know what their intentions are, what did they want to use it for, what cohort do they belong to, you know, try and get that data and then based on automation adjust those pillars. But I think exactly to your point now, where we’re not relying on some sort of fixed structure anymore. It’s it’s how do we like personalize at scale, it’s no longer automation, it’s really dynamic. Exactly to your earlier point.
Charlotte Ward: 33:52
Yeah, yeah. I feel like this should be a podcast episode in its own right. So we should probably actually we should probably record this properly at some point, but I think there’s some really interesting uh strings to pull at there. Um, I do want to bring this to a close though, because this was supposed to be uh this is definitely not a pattern you and I fall into quite frequently. Definitely not. We don’t we don’t think we’ll have a five-minute chat that becomes an hour chat. Uh so um I feel called out. I know, uh just seen, right? Just seen at this point. So um I do want to bring this to a close because first of all, I I want to leave our um listeners with a sense of what we’re gonna cover over the next few months and not just do it all in this one episode, which is where you and I could instinctively go.
Alec Moloney: 34:44
Yeah, yeah. I I think I’m glad I’m glad to know that the shared brain cell is still in effect because I had that exact same feeling about a minute ago. So we’re going well.
Charlotte Ward: 34:52
We’re going well. We’re going well. So to that end, um, lots of interesting stuff coming up, lots of other people to talk talk with on all of the topics we’ve just touched on. And uh you and I will certainly be talking again and deep diving into some of this. Um, is there anything else for the website or the podcast that you want to uh just just highlight for the next few months?
Alec Moloney: 35:15
I don’t think so right now. I’m I’m sure I’ll be back sometime in the next few months on the podcast to probably talk about stuff more. The only probably shout out really is the LinkedIn page. I think the website is going to run on its own feet, but not that I don’t know if many of our listeners out there are following the LinkedIn page currently, but we are endeavoring to sort of start posting content on there again. So it’ll be a bit more of a social touch point to sort of like post the articles, post the podcast releases, all of that kind of goodness as we start generating content. So I think that’s probably the notable shout out.
Charlotte Ward: 35:48
Mm-hmm. So go follow the LinkedIn page, follow Alec and me on LinkedIn as well individually, and we’ll certainly be highlighting some of the content as we release it. Uh, more podcast episodes coming very rapidly. Um, articles are already landing on the website. So go to the website at
