Peter Mullen, Strategic Brand and Growth Leader at Simply Systems LLC, discusses how customer experience can pivot from a cost center into a growth driver. He highlights a $3.7 trillion opportunity resulting from poor customer experience (CX) and explains why AI-driven personalization is now the new baseline. Peter outlines how immersive brand storytelling and C-suite alignment fuel BPO success.

“You want zero daylight between you and the brand you're supporting. You want a contact center that looks and feels like it's part of the company itself. You want your BPO partners to understand the brand storytelling, and you want the BPO team and everyone involved to fully buy into it.” – Peter Mullen

In this in-depth discussion, Peter Mullen illuminates how transformative leadership, rooted in resilience and personal adversity, reframes customer experience from a cost center to a strategic growth driver. He explores the $3.7 trillion opportunity lost to poor CX, details how AI-driven personalization is rapidly becoming a baseline expectation, and outlines pragmatic steps to align the C-suite's vision with business process outsourcing (BPO) partnerships for sustainable, revenue-focused outcomes.

Tim Wilbourn, SVP Support and Customer Success at Crexendo® Business Solutions, unpacks the challenge of linking CX metrics to revenue in a Wall Street-driven world. He outlines strategies for establishing clear expectations and promoting long-term initiatives. He also explains why short tenures hurt CX leaders and how to build sustained success.

“The first thing investors look at is revenue, then free cash flow. But customers are what drive all of that. So, think about it differently. Focus on how many customers have been implemented, the revenue generated from those implementations, and the outcomes that define success.” – Tim Wilbourn

Tim Wilbourn highlights how aligning customer success metrics with revenue KPIs drives sustained growth. He shows why embedding customer-focused OKRs across every department prevents short-term thinking and empowers leaders to advocate for long-term investments. With his “press release exercise,” Tim offers a straightforward method to unify teams around multi-year goals.

Matt Hartley, Head of Pixel Customer Care at Google, dives into why customer care must be its own strongest advocate within a large organization. He outlines how support teams can earn a “seat at the table” by tying their work to product and business outcomes. Matt discusses systems for cross‑functional touchpoints and using data plus storytelling to influence peers. He also shares anecdotes from building partnerships across product, marketing, and sales.

“You need to think through when you want to go fast and when you want to go far, who to involve in that discussion, and how to approach it continuously rather than as a one‑off to make sure you’re running the marathon, not just the sprint.” – Matt Hartley

In this in‑depth conversation, Matt shares actionable frameworks for aligning support goals with product roadmaps and weaving data and narrative into compelling cross‑functional dialogues. He discusses how to establish repeatable systems for collaboration, leverage AI‑driven insights for real‑time impact, and tailor storytelling to each stakeholder’s priorities.