Latest Posts
Passikoff: Real Polling vs Not-So-Real Polling
What’s the difference between a bad poll, a fake poll, and a short-term social experiment? Spoiler Alert: there’s…
Gift Cards Have Escaped the Aisle
Highlights from our conversation with Alex Preece, CEO of Tillo The term gift card is doing a poor job of describing…
September 23, 2026
Your Redemption Rate Is Lying to You
Brands spend enormous amounts of money creating incentives designed to influence customer behavior. Points, rebates, promotional credits, cashback,…
The FTC’s Personalized Pricing Proposal Is About More Than Personalized Pricing
The Commission’s proposed enforcement policy is being framed largely around predatory retail pricing. Its treatment of individualized discounts,…
Target Is Redefining What UX Actually Means
For years, user experience was treated as a layer. The business decided what it wanted to do. Technology…
Passikoff: Achieving Brand Loyalty in the Age of AI
There was a time when brand loyalty was easy. It was defined only by repeat purchase. Bought this.…
Commerce has a Checkout Problem that Happens after Checkout
Andrew Schmid is Chief Product Officer at Route. Package protection, tracking, notifications, claims, returns, exchanges, warranties – the…
Measuring Loyalty After a Customer Experience Failure: The Metric That Matters Most
We have a measurement problem in loyalty. We measure purchases, trips, nights, visits, opens, redemptions and share of…
The McDonald’s 515-Page Customer Profile That Really Isn’t
McDonald’s apparently has 515 pages of data on one loyalty member. That’s both more – and considerably less…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind – Part 5
In the first four articles in this series, we looked at marketing from the prospect’s perspective, examining what…
August 25, 2026
Lies, Damn Lies, and Customer Statistics
Finding the Missing Bridge Between Customer Metrics and Corporate Value Dallas Area Rapid Transit put out a press…
The Unexamined Half of Customer Worth
Customer experience metrics describe what happened but rarely suggest what to do about it, and almost never convey…
Passikoff: Caveat Venditor
Yes, I know you’re used to the other caveat maxim, but that’s not what came to mind when…
August 10, 2026
“Buy Canadian” is Here to Stay for Many Consumers
A year ago, buying Canadian was a reflex. When American tariffs hit, several Canadian provinces pulled products off…
Turning customer signals into revenue
What’s the next big use case for AI now that many retailers have optimized their back-office workflows? In…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind – Part 4
In the first three articles in this series, we covered the framework for thinking about marketing outcomes, getting…
Passikoff: How Bud Blew It
Loyalty is created by understanding what customers expect and then meeting – or preferably exceeding – those expectations.…
Sell the Outcome, Not the Migration: Inside Verint’s Open-Platform Bet
Ask Heather Richards for the plain-English version of Agent Factory and she corrects the question before answering it.…
Who Carries the Moral Accountability in the Age of AI
Welcome to Part 3 of our ongoing series on AI and human behavior. If Part 1 explored the…
July 13, 2026
The Hidden Cost of AI at Scale and What Marketers Need to Do About It
Across most organizations, there’s a conversation happening amongst marketing leadership that isn’t being talked about enough. It goes…
July 10, 2026
What If We Could Design for Emotion-based Outcomes?
Why the next great marketing advantage may lie in the one variable we’ve never truly measured. For all…
What CX Is Actually Worth — And Why We’re Measuring It Wrong
We’re increasingly asked to justify CX investments not just on “how they feel,” but on what they contribute. Most…
We Know What Customers Cost. We Don’t Know What They’re Worth.
It’s time to start measuring customers the way we measure every other investment. Loyalty programs, incentives, retention offers,…
The Emotional P&L of Flying
Why Airlines Keep Losing Trust – and What That Reveals About Us When we looked at thousands of…
Sentiment Signals: The Next Layer of Intelligence
Beyond performance metrics like accuracy and latency lies a subtler yet more powerful layer: emotional trust. In intelligent…
July 7, 2026
Sales, Marketing & Loyalty Should Buy CX a Pony
I’ve spent a lot of years inside the customer technology industry watching two extraordinarily powerful capabilities develop in…
Passikoff: America at 250 -The Brands That Earned the Flag
Patriotism isn’t just something Americans observe on July 4th, It’s something they live on July 5th, and every day…
CX is Bigger than CX
Takeaways from Verint Engage ’26 The keynote at Verint Engage 2026 told a confident story: AI investment is…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind – Part 3
Third in a Series: Change What They Feel In the first two articles in this series, we covered…
What Verint’s Keynote Says About Where Enterprise CX AI Is Actually Going
The annual conference keynote is a reliable artifact. Strip away the production value and the carefully sequenced demos,…
Passikoff: Patriotism as Brand Strategy
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, marketers may want to rethink what makes a brand feel patriotic. Brand…
We All Live in Customerland Now
“Nobody gives a sh*t about brands anymore.” A few weeks ago I found myself wondering whether it might…
Brand Keys’ New Segmentation Reveals What “Patriotic” Actually Means to Consumers
25th annual Most Patriotic Brands survey identifies nine distinct paths to patriotic perception – and the rankings don’t…
Passikoff: Real vs Borrowed Brand Patriotism
Authentic American identity matters more than ever. Especially as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. Patriotism is…
The Next AI Retail Transformation Is Happening Right Now
By Jessica Leitch Over the next decade, retail will leave behind today’s channel-based model and its distinctions between physical…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind – Part 2
Second in a Series: Change What They Think In the first article in this series, we laid out…
May 29, 2026
Signal, Noise, and the Customer Continuity Problem
Q&A with Michael Hutchison, Customer Operations Principal, eClerx There’s a growing disconnect in customer experience right now that…
What If Your Fastest Growth Lever Is Inclusion
Editor’s note: Global Accessibility Awareness Day is May 21 so this piece is timely. But this conversation opened my eyes…
Passikoff: On Patriotic Brands
This July, as the United States will mark its 250th anniversary, Brand Keys marks the 25th anniversary of…
The Backlash Against Bad Automation Has Begun
There’s a subtle but important shift hiding inside Verint’s newly released State of Customer Experience 2026 report, and I suspect…
What If Better Support Is Your Real Moat?
There’s a phrase that keeps coming up in customer service conversations that I think we need to retire,…
The Mall Hangout Is Back
by Michael Ganci Before smartphones, social feeds and next-day delivery, the mall was more than a shopping destination.…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind – Part 1
First of a Series: The Question Most Marketers Never Ask Ask most marketers what they’re working on and…
April 21, 2026
In the Current Economic Uncertainty, Small Businesses Are Investing in Marketing
When times get tough, the old playbook says to tighten your belt and cut costs wherever you can.…
April 9, 2026
Passikoff: Branding, Without the Illusions
A scoutmaster asked his troop what three things they’d want if they were alone and lost in the…
From Call Centers to CX Engines: eClerx’s Michael Hutchison on Closing the Expectation Gap with AI
The modern contact center sits at the fault line of customer capitalism. Every day it absorbs the friction…
When AI Starts Designing the Business
Insights on enterprise AI from a recent conversation with Alan Trefler, CEO of Pega In a recent conversation with Alan Trefler,…
Subscriptions Need to Manage Volatility, Not Just Churn
For most of the last decade, subscription strategy was framed as a retention optimization problem. Reduce churn. Increase…
Passikoff: Listening for Silent Loyalty
The English version of “silence is golden” first appeared in an 1831 poem by Thomas Carlyle. Forty years…
How to Avoid “Good Enough” Marketing and the Race to the Bottom it’s Creating
Last fall, I sat down with Mike Giambattista right here at Customerland for a conversation about “The Collapse…
February 26, 2026
