Latest Posts
Passikoff: Measuring REAL Loyalty
Brand Keys measures brands – and how loyal their customers are to them, because loyalty matters. We’ve done…
Precision Selling Starts When Sales Stops Guessing
The newly announced partnership between SugarCRM and Syspro will inevitably be described as “ERP meets CRM” or “sales intelligence powered by AI.”…
January 8, 2026
Infrastructure Is the Strategy
Why Retail’s Next Advantage Won’t Look Like Software Retail has spent years talking about experience – personalization engines,…
The Emotional P&L of Flying
Why Airlines Keep Losing Trust – and What That Reveals About Us When we looked at thousands of…
The Best of Customerland (So Far)
This year, Customerland crossed a meaningful milestone: 53 published episodes! It’s been a year of massive shifts – AI…
December 29, 2025
Retail at the Speed of Intent
Retail has crossed a quiet but consequential threshold. Real-time decisioning is no longer a differentiator reserved for elite…
In Trust We Calculate – Rebuilding Confidence in the Age of AI
Welcome to the final installment in our series on AI and human behavior. If Parts 1 through 4…
When The Cart Becomes the Channel
Why Smart Carts Mark the End of “Unmeasured” Retail A conversation with Yaniv Zukerman, CMO at Cust2Mate For…
Passikoff: Greetings, Marketers!
Greetings, marketers, both old and newHere’s a 2025 year-end review. The best-known holiday poem is generally considered to…
Unified Commerce, Real Loyalty, Actual Results
A conversation with Eagle Eye’s Jeff Baskin For decades, retail loyalty sat on top of the business like…
December 3, 2025
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…
December 1, 2025
Fraud, Identity, and the New Economics of Trust
Digital commerce delivered on its promise of speed. What it didn’t deliver – at least not fully –…
November 26, 2025
Passikoff: ‘Tis the (really long) Season
Brands like Coca-Cola and Macy’s helped entrench Santa Claus in popular culture, and Christmas became a retail juggernaut,…
Who Carries the Moral Weight? Accountability in the Age of AI
Welcome to Part 3 of our ongoing series on AI and human behavior. If Part 1 explored the…
November 21, 2025
The Collapse of “Good Enough”
What Andrew Schulkind Shows Us About Strategy, Craft, and the Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter Marketing spent the…
November 19, 2025
The Vibe-Shaped Customer: Micro-Moments, Mood, and the New Consumer Logic
Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed something odd happening in the consumer world. It’s subtle, but…
Cardlytics and the Real Economics of Commerce Media
From a conversation with Amit Gupta, CEO of Cardlytics Commerce media has quietly moved from marketing experiment to…
November 12, 2025
Passikoff: A Brand That Doesn’t Need Gimmicks
Tomorrow is Veterans Day – a national celebration honoring the patriotism, courage, and sacrifice of America’s veterans. I…
November 10, 2025
Is Agency Is the New Loyalty?
This has been bugging me for a while. We talk about loyalty as if it were a program…
After Omnichannel – Why Brands Must Redesign for Agentic Customers
In my recent Customerland conversation with Ben Wiener, Managing Partner at Cognizant Moment, one theme kept resurfacing: the ground beneath marketing is…
The Marketing Alternative to Customer Research
We hear a lot of reasons for not doing the kind of customer research you should be doing…
October 30, 2025
CX at Its Core: What Technology Can’t Fix
Takeaways from our conversation with Lee Kemp Customer experience has never been louder.New tools, dashboards, frameworks, and acronyms…
What If We Could Design for Emotion?
Why the next great marketing advantage may lie in the one variable we’ve never truly measured. For all…
Rewriting the Math of CX
My conversation with Ken Lain, Senior Vice President and Head of CX, Customer Service and Operations at Verizon…
Passikoff: Marketing’s Haunted House
There’s an old joke that goes, “I had a nightmare I was at work. Then I woke up.…
October 20, 2025
Empathy, AI, and the New Operating Model for Customer Engagement
The conversation with Rob Walker, GM of 1:1 Customer Engagement at Pega, begins with a blunt truth: if we work…
October 15, 2025
POV: How Webex Is Rewriting the CX Playbook for the AI Era
From Service Function to Growth Engine In the final quarter of 2025, the customer experience landscape looks fundamentally…
Outcomes Now: What Verint’s Engage Says About Its Next Chapter
TLDR: If you ignore the slogans and look at what Verint actually highlighted at Engage 2025 (who it rewarded, which partners…
When Research Finally Meets Reality
What SightX and ZS Are Really Solving Insights professionals are skeptics by design. When your work is picked…
Passikoff: The Loyalty Code
In 2025, loyalty isn’t earned once and stored away. C’mon, this isn’t 1983! A little reality check, huh?…
The Emotional P&L of Food Delivery
It turns out that food delivery’s bottom line is less about speed and more about trust. Food delivery…
Clarity First, Then Velocity
A conversation with NexChapter’s Art Sebastian Retail is changing in ways that feel both sudden and overdue. For…
October 1, 2025
Spring Cleaning for Fall Marketing
Spring cleaning may get all the attention, but fall’s a great time to take stock and decide whether…
September 26, 2025
Agentic AI and the New Demands of Leadership
The AI revolution is not arriving incrementally. It’s unfolding at a pace that outstrips the organizational reflexes of…
September 24, 2025
Why Product Experience Is Becoming Retail’s Most Valuable Currency
The retail industry stands at a critical inflection point. Once defined by supply chains and store shelves, today’s…
Cust2Mate’s Smart Cart Strategy Moves From Pilots to Scale
Cust2Mate’s recent $25M order from Latin America marks more than just a sales milestone – it signals a…
Quick-Take: Why Lone View’s Bet on Jumpmind Matters
The strategic investment by Lone View Capital into Jumpmind is more than a routine private equity deal –…
Passikoff: The Venn of Loyalty
I want to talk about marketer-types who revere/use/misuse/ignore/are-just-plain-stupid-about loyalty. I thought I’d use a visual tool to catalogue…
The Paradox of CX: Why Cost-Cutting Technology Initiatives Often Backfire
CX as a Battleground, Not a Back Office Function For more than a decade, leaders have repeated a…
Stronger, Faster, Measurable: Why Verint’s AI Bet in CX Matters
At the opening of this year’s Verint Engage 2025, the company doubled down on a message that’s becoming increasingly…
September 9, 2025
Do Consumer Expectations Even Matter?
Every brand executive will tell you that they are “committed to meeting and exceeding customer expectations.” It’s the…
Why Post-Purchase “Transaction Moments” Are Becoming Retail’s Next Frontier
A conversation with ROKT’s Ashley Firmstone In e-commerce, innovation often focuses on the flashy front end: discovery, targeting,…
From Desktop to Mobile and Back Again: Why is responsive UX still such a challenge?
What informs users’ decisions to use one device over another? It could be any number of factors: generational…
Retail Media’s Shifting Center of Gravity
The retail media ecosystem is evolving with unusual speed, and the pace of change is beginning to outstrip…
Thoma Bravo, Verint, and the New Shape of AI-Driven CX
When a private equity firm pays $2 billion to take a public company off the market, it’s rarely…
August 25, 2025
The Difference Between Knowing Your Audience and Reaching Them
“Our audience is mid-sized manufacturing companies.” “We target IT decision-makers in healthcare.” There’s a difference between knowing your…
August 25, 2025
Michael Abramov on the Next Frontier of AI
When you talk to Michael Abramov, CEO of Keymakr & Keylabs, you get the sense he’s been living…
August 21, 2025
Retention Is the New Growth Engine
A conversation with Recurly’s Lina Tonk. For two decades, the subscription economy has lived by a single mantra: acquire,…
Changing the Conversation Around the Passenger Experience
How conversational AI is improving traveller communications in aviation As is the case in many industries, airlines and…
Is It Time for CustomerOps?
Think about how much customer expectations have changed in the past few years. It’s not just that people…
