Interviews – InsightSofa

Dr. David Doležel: They told me finance has nothing to do with CX. So I showed them the numbers.

Jana Rouček — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:00:04 +0000

Dr. David Doležel, CCXP, is one of the most experienced CX/EX consultants in the Czech Republic, and we’re delighted he took the time to speak with us. He spent over 20 years in the corporate world, at Philip Morris, AIG and Generali, where he didn’t just build processes and teams but also set up his own call centres serving hundreds of thousands of customers across several countries. Today he passes on that experience as founder of the CXX Academy & CXX Institute, a member of the CXPA Europe Council, a judge for the International Customer Experience Awards, and a university lecturer.

And since he doesn’t deal in vague generalities but speaks concretely from his own experience, let’s get straight into the interview.

David, before you became the face of CX in the Czech Republic, you spent over 20 years at Philip Morris, AIG/Colonnade and Generali. What exactly happened that made you one day say, “I’m done with my corporate career, I’m going to teach companies about customer experience”?

It wasn’t one particular day, and it wasn’t an escape from the corporate world. It was more that I gradually realised that a lot of what I’d already been doing in marketing, insurance, IT, operations and running regional teams was, in fact, already customer, employee and partner experience — we just didn’t call it that.

At AIG, for example, I built my own in-house call centre, and we tackled retention, churn, cross-sell and upsell in a very hands-on way. It wasn’t about a nice-looking score for a slide deck; what mattered to me was how many customers stayed, and what impact that had on the business. And that’s where I saw that a well-designed service and a deliberately managed experience can directly generate revenue.

After more than twenty years in the corporate world, it started to make sense to bring these experiences together, put a name to them, and pass them on. So I wouldn’t say “I’m done with corporates” — I still work with them — it’s more that “what I learned inside companies, I now want to apply across companies, while also teaching it to the next generation.”

Your bio lists no fewer than five acronyms side by side — CX, EX, TX, MX, PX. X Pulse readers already know what CX and EX mean, but where do you think the real line sits today between these disciplines in practice — in other words, when is a company actually dealing with TX or MX, rather than “just” CX?

I think of these acronyms mainly as different perspectives on one single system, rather than five separate disciplines. CX looks at the customer’s experience, EX at the employee’s, PX at the partner and the wider ecosystem, and so on.

With MX, I’m looking at management’s experience and role — how their decisions, goals, metrics and priorities create the conditions for CX and EX. I always say a fish rots from the head, and management is always ultimately responsible for the customer and employee experience, because it’s management that shapes the company’s culture. Above all, you can’t rely on a “random” positive experience — it has to be genuinely managed and deliberate. And here I always ask: is management giving employees all the tools they actually need?

And the line between them? It’s simple: it doesn’t really exist, because everything overlaps across the whole company (yes, including finance, operations and so on — the very departments that always insist “this doesn’t apply to us”. That’s a big mistake. It really does apply to everyone.)

In a study for Foxentry, you said that if a brand is a customer’s “number one”, it doesn’t need to worry so much about acquisition tools like PPC. Can the strength of a brand actually be measured, or is it more of a feeling a company either has or doesn’t?

You want to be your customer’s number one.

You want them to come to you automatically, without even thinking about going anywhere else.

For a lot of things, I automatically go to Alza [a Czech e-commerce retailer] — I can rely on the delivery (and if something does go wrong, I know it’ll be sorted out), and pickup and returns are simple. Alza isn’t the cheapest, but that reliability is worth something. So Alza saves a huge amount on expensive acquisition costs when it comes to me — a customer who automatically comes back is a major source of profit, and that’s exactly the point. In my insurance business, acquisition had an ROI of roughly four years; a returning customer buying further products could cut that payback period in half, or even less. Of course it cost something, but it brought back far more than it cost.

And measuring it? In American companies, it’s simple: money in the bank. All the other metrics are just there to help you get to that goal.

You used to build and run IT systems for hundreds of thousands of customers across several countries. How does that “behind the scenes” experience with companies help you today when advising businesses? Do you see things that someone without an IT background simply wouldn’t?

Absolutely. My IT background taught me that the customer only ever sees the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it are processes, data flows, integrations, permissions, responsibilities, SLAs, and dozens of decisions the customer will never see — but will feel the consequences of immediately. That’s why, in CX projects today, I never start with “which tool should we buy?” — I start the other way round: what is the customer trying to achieve at this point in the journey, what process enables that, and only then, what technology should support it. Very often the problem is simply that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing: sales doesn’t see support tickets, the call centre doesn’t see the history of digital interactions, or the customer ends up repeating the same information to three different departments. Someone with an IT background has the advantage of being able to connect the “frontstage” with everything happening behind it, and translate between business and technology. For me, technology is a tool for a better experience, not an end in itself.

Companies often decide which system or tool to buy first, and only afterwards work out how it’ll actually be used. Then the people who have to work with it discover it doesn’t support everything they need — and a reliable sign of a poor implementation appears: new spreadsheets popping up everywhere. That process should run the other way round: start with a thorough, in-depth analysis of needs, wants and expectations, and only then put technology out to tender.

As a judge for the International Customer Experience Awards, you must have seen dozens of projects from different countries. Is there a story or project that’s stuck in your mind as completely unexpected, or brilliantly simple?

I’m careful about discussing specific competition entries, because as a judge you often see information and figures that aren’t meant for public release. But generally, the projects that stick with me most aren’t the ones that win on the size of their budget, but on how precisely they understood the problem. A typical example is a company struggling with low renewal rates, where everyone goes looking for complicated explanations around price or product — only to discover that some customers simply don’t even realise they need to renew their contract. A well-timed reminder and a simple renewal process can have a huge impact, both for the customer and for revenue. That, to me, is what brilliant CX looks like: removing unnecessary friction rather than adding another layer of technology. And what I also enjoy about international competitions is just how broadly “experience” can be understood — from banks and e-commerce through to public institutions (the Middle East, for instance, could teach our own public bodies a thing or two) and infrastructure. You realise that CX isn’t some luxury discipline reserved for “love brands” — it’s a way of thinking about any service at all.

But I do have one example: around 46 million people live in rural areas of the US. One very well-known company set up several hubs of technicians who started servicing people’s appliances — fridges, air conditioning units — over huge distances, covering more than 300 kilometres a day on average, or even flying over 500 kilometres by plane, just to service a fridge. Any manager would dismiss that outright — high costs with no visible ROI. But they didn’t. They focused on the customer, and what happened, of course, over time? That brand now dominates those regions without any real competition.

On LinkedIn, you’ve described managers who insist “customer experience has nothing to do with us — we’re finance, HR, or IT”. What’s your most effective argument for showing them they’re wrong?

My most effective argument is: show me one decision in the company that can’t, sooner or later, feed through into the customer’s experience. Finance sets payment terms, invoicing, refunds and partner rules. HR decides who gets hired, how people are evaluated, and whether they actually have the authority to help a customer. IT decides on availability, speed, data, and how many times a customer has to enter the same information again. You never have to speak to a customer directly, and you can still dramatically improve or damage their experience. In insurance, I even heard the finance argument that “we never meet customers” — only to find out shortly afterwards that they were in constant contact with partners and setting the very terms that flowed straight into the customer journey. So CX isn’t one department’s job. It’s the outcome of the company’s entire operating model. And if that argument doesn’t land, I translate it into money: complaints, repeat contacts, churn, rework and unnecessary costs tend to speak a very clear language of their own.

That’s exactly what I was told in insurance finance, and in the end I managed, in a fairly simple way, to save a full month’s work for two out of five people, plus the work of thirteen people in my own team, plus a good deal of work on the partners’ side too. Again — less friction, and substantial cost savings.

You founded the “CX/EX Professionals and Enthusiasts” community and you also teach at university. What surprises you most when you meet students or practitioners? And is there anything about how they see CX that differs from what you expected?

I’m often surprised by how students think before they’ve been weighed down by the phrase “that’s just not how it works here”. They tend to ask exactly the right questions: why does a customer have to enter the same information twice, why do they have to call when it could be self-service, why isn’t this in the app, or why does a company measure something it never acts on? Practitioners, on the other hand, bring knowledge of regulation, systems, budgets and real-world trade-offs. Ideally, you bring the two worlds together.

At the same time, I’m still surprised by how much confusion there is around the basic terms themselves — CX still gets mixed up with customer service, and that’s not just a Czech problem.

One more thing: today’s customer doesn’t just compare a bank to another bank. They compare it to the best e-commerce site, app, delivery service or restaurant they’ve just used — they simply measure it against their best experience overall. Students pick this up almost automatically, whereas for companies it’s sometimes harder to step outside the boundaries of their own industry.

As a member of the CXPA Europe Council, you have visibility across Europe. How is the Czech approach to customer experience markedly different from, say, Western Europe — and is that more of an advantage or a disadvantage?

I don’t think it’s simply a case of the Czech Republic being “behind” and Western Europe being “ahead”. In some sectors we’ve made huge leaps forward — you can see it beautifully in gastronomy, e-commerce or digital services. We’ve got pragmatism, technical skill and a real appetite for learning. The difference I see is more in how institutionalised the discipline is. In more mature markets, responsibility, governance, customer journey work and the link between CX and business results tend to be more clearly defined. Here, CX is still fairly often narrowed down to customer service, marketing, an NPS survey, or a one-off project. That’s a disadvantage. The advantage is that we don’t carry as much historical dogma, so we can skip certain stages — take the best of what’s out there and roll it out faster. And, incidentally, Western Europe hasn’t got it all figured out either: even in the UK in 2026, people are still explaining the difference between customer service, customer experience and customer centricity. So I wouldn’t turn this into a competition between countries — it’s really a question of the maturity of individual organisations.

At the moment, for my students on a brand-new subject, Customer Experience Management, I’m filming interviews with top global experts in the field, and they only confirm this. But did you know that Czech CX work has repeatedly won European and global awards?

If you had to recommend just one first step to a company that’s only just starting out with CX — something it could do this very week — what would it be?

This week, I’d go straight to wherever the customer actually is, and listen. Not a workshop about CX, not buying a platform, and definitely not a new survey. Sit in the call centre, talk to the operators, go through complaints and grievances, spend time at a branch, look at the real digital journey, or talk to five or ten customers… Only after that should you run a CX/EX workshop.

I always recommend to management: become anonymous customers of your own company and products — you’ll often be surprised at how different it looks from how it appears in a PowerPoint.

Then pick one recurring friction point and ask: why does it actually happen, and can we remove its root cause? And then the next one, and the next.

One of the best pieces of advice you’ll hear in CX is very simple: why ask the customer again if you haven’t yet fixed what they told you last time?

So, for me, the first step is contact with reality, and one specific problem the company actually starts to fix. Then close the loop with the customer and tell them what changed as a result of what they told you. That builds more trust than ten slides on customer centricity.

Over 20 years in the field surely means plenty of mistakes and dead ends too. Is there a decision or piece of advice from your past that you’d now say, “I’d advise completely differently today”?

I used to believe that once we had the right data and could see the whole problem, the best thing to do was present the entire solution and launch a big transformation. Today, I’d pay far more attention to the pace an organisation can actually absorb. CX people tend to be passionate advocates for the cause, and can easily bring thirty initiatives, a new framework, journey maps, NPS, a platform and a culture change all at once.

But a company can usually only handle, say, two real shifts at a time. So today I recommend: pick one important problem, give it an owner, connect the customer impact to a business outcome, fix the root cause, and only then scale it up.

The second thing is metrics. In the corporate world, I learned very quickly that leadership, in the end, cares about revenue and costs. CX metrics are useful, but they must never become a goal in themselves. A score is nice information, but it has to be turned into value — and that value only comes from a change in behaviour and process.

AI is now changing customer experience faster, perhaps, than anything before it. Where do you see the biggest risk of companies overdoing or getting AI in CX wrong — and, conversely, where’s the opportunity most companies are still missing?

I see the biggest risk in AI being deployed as a technology and cost-cutting project: “let’s remove people, automate contact, and save money.” If that’s the primary motivation, the customer often ends up with a cheaper but worse experience.

First, I need to understand what the customer is actually trying to do and where the friction lies; only then does it make sense to ask what AI can improve. In other words, technology comes last.

The biggest untapped opportunity, on the other hand, is proactive, hyper-personalised work with customer intelligence. Agentic AI can already track relevant signals continuously, recognise when a customer is stuck, and offer them the right help at the right time, through the right channel. In my view, AI should be reducing customer effort and increasing value — not just cutting a company’s costs.

If your younger self — fresh out of Philip Morris, with no idea yet where fate would take him at AIG and then in his own company — met you tonight, what one sentence would you tell him about customers that he didn’t know back then?

Focus on value for the customer — find out (don’t guess!) in real depth what their needs, wants and expectations actually are.

Alan Pock: The money you earn isn’t just virtual coins

Jana Rouček — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:10:28 +0000

Alan Pock has spent over ten years in finance and fintech. He first founded the software company Gettick, then bought Tržiště Hypoték (Mortgage Marketplace) as a struggling project at the time, reworked its business model and scaled it into the second-largest Czech mortgage platform, which he eventually sold successfully. Along the way he picked up experience in the US too, including on fintech and startup programmes right in Silicon Valley.

In April 2021, together with Vít Strnad, Filip Suk and Dominik Vávra, he launched Investown, which today ranks among the most prominent Czech crowdfunding platforms. It allows people to invest in property projects from as little as 500 CZK and is used by more than 135,000 people, which helped the company take second place in the FinTech category of the Zlatá koruna awards in 2024. At Investown, Alan focuses mainly on strategic development and investor relations.

Alan, Investown lets people invest in property projects from as little as 500 crowns. Do you remember the first reaction you got when you pitched that figure to investors or partners?

Most people told us it couldn’t work, that investments that small would never pay for themselves. They were right, of course – with one small catch. If we weren’t a technology company, it wouldn’t work. But we built technology that makes it possible. We’ve had to invest hundreds of millions of crowns in it, and we’re still not done. It’s an ongoing process, but we haven’t given up.

Building an investment platform into a community of more than 135,000 people doesn’t happen by accident. When did you first realise Investown had become more than just a product, that it was a real community?

The first strong moment like that came in 2022, when we ran our first livestream for investors. I half expected nobody would care and I’d be talking to myself. In the end it was a real success, hundreds of people joined and asked some genuinely interesting questions. The second such moment was our first in-person meetup with investors. Once you have personal contact with your customers, it really hits home that real people are using your product, that they like it and find it useful. That’s a great feeling.

You founded and sold Tržiště Hypoték yourself before Investown came along. What did you take from that sale into how you build customer relationships today?

First, let me set the record straight: I didn’t found Tržiště Hypoték. I bought it, reworked the business model to make it viable, then scaled it up and sold it.

In finance, your name is all you have. You have to do the work as conscientiously as possible. Even if it doesn’t make you rich in the short term, it always pays off in the long run.

Property investment used to be the domain of people with plenty of capital and experience. How does the customer experience change when you open that world up to people investing for the very first time?

We built Investown mainly for people who don’t have a lot of capital, or who don’t want the hassle of managing it themselves, so that literally anyone can invest in property and gradually build a financial cushion for the future. When you’re investing 500 CZK a month, it really is a long game.

A large part of our investor base genuinely sets aside a small amount every month and grows it that way. You just have to accept it’s more of a marathon than a sprint, and the bigger returns only come gradually as the portfolio grows.

Where does Investown draw the line today between what AI and digitalisation can handle for the customer, and what has to stay with a real person?

We mainly use AI at Investown to automate internal processes. Repetitive tasks that eat up a huge amount of time and energy collectively are handled by machines. Where it makes sense, we build our own custom tools for our specific needs. For example, we’ve built a tool for our internal legal team that saves us time and the licence fees we’d otherwise pay for a tool that still wouldn’t do everything we need. We’ve also built an AI agent for customer care that answers user questions. That said, people still appreciate contact with a real person more, so the AI agent often starts the conversation but one of our colleagues takes over from there.

Money is a sensitive subject. How do you build trust in a product where the customer sends real money based on data they can’t fully verify themselves?

In the early days, high returns helped us a lot. Projects were offering returns of around 10 to 11% a year, which was genuinely a lot. If you consider that the average savings account promised 5% at its peak and offers at most 3% today, an investment product with such a high return, which also regularly pays out real money, was bound to catch the attention of people looking to grow their savings.

Two other factors also helped us build trust. Early on, we secured seed investment from Česká spořitelna’s Seed Starter programme. The second factor is our licence from the Czech National Bank. We’re a regulated entity, so we have to follow a lot of rules and be completely transparent about everything.

Things are simpler for us today because we have real results behind us. Of the 10.7 billion CZK invested, 40% has been returned to investors, which comes to 4.3 billion in real terms. And we’ve earned investors more than 1.2 billion CZK in returns.

Regular meetups with investors are more the exception than the rule among financial platforms. What does personal contact with customers give you that no dashboard ever could?

For me, meeting investors is a great way to tell them, first of all, what’s going on at the company, because we know from experience that they really do care. It’s also how we gather feedback.

We meet investors who’ve reached Premium 3 and Premium 4 membership. Those are people who invest at least 500,000 CZK with us alone. Most of them also invest elsewhere, so they’ve got real money spread across different investments, they’re experienced investors and experienced users of various platforms. It’s a genuinely varied group, from very young people earning good money in IT, for example, to older people who might already be retired and for whom investing generates a nice, steady passive income.

For them, these meetups are a real benefit, so they enjoy attending, they’ve got plenty of questions about the projects and how the company runs, and of course they bring a lot of ideas about what they’d like to see in the app and what’s missing. Some investors come along regularly, so I already know quite a few of them personally. In a fast-moving online world, it’s a great way to stay connected with customers.

Has investor feedback ever fundamentally changed the direction Investown took?

We haven’t fundamentally changed direction based on feedback so far, but in development we often prioritise the features investors actively ask for. At the end of the day, user satisfaction matters most to us.

Regulation and security are a must in the financial sector. How do you combine strict rule-following with a customer experience that doesn’t feel bureaucratic?

Yes, we do have to follow genuinely strict rules. We try to speak to investors in plain language wherever we can, and keep the strictly legal wording tucked away in the Terms and Conditions, while our marketing communication stays as light and approachable as a non-bank financial institution can get away with.

As for processes, things like registering in the app, identity verification and the investor questionnaire are mandatory steps that can’t be skipped. What we can do is make them as simple as possible. So we’ve introduced Bank iD, for instance, which speeds up the whole registration process, and users can then log into the app using biometrics.

We’re also required to report results daily, so all the figures you see on our website are up to date. We try to present them clearly, in a visually appealing way, so anyone can get their bearings straight away and immediately see, for example, how much money has been invested through the platform, how much investors are earning in returns, or how many projects are currently in debt recovery.

If you had to name one thing Investown does differently in CX compared with most Czech financial companies, what would it be?

With us, an investor can see straight away exactly how much their investment is earning them: their average return, exactly how much money they’ve made in returns, how their whole portfolio has performed over the entire time they’ve been investing. What’s more, the money investors earn isn’t just virtual points on a screen, it’s real money they can reinvest immediately or transfer to their account and use as passive income. That’s what makes Investown unique.

As founder and CEO, you’re responsible for customer satisfaction, growth and community all at once. Which of those is personally hardest for you to keep in balance?

Growth simply goes hand in hand with customer satisfaction and a growing community. It’s all one connected system. Our data shows people have a lot of spare money they’d like to invest, partly driven by rising property prices in the Czech Republic and the cost of mortgages. Fewer and fewer people can afford their own home or an investment property, so investing in property-backed loans is a great alternative.

Our job is to connect these people with investment opportunities, which means making sure there are enough entrepreneurs out there looking for financing. Then everyone’s happy, because investors’ savings earn them money, and that naturally brings in more investors. Good old word of mouth applies here: every satisfied investor tells their friends about it.

Which book, podcast, conference or figure in CX has inspired you most recently?

Generally, I’m really into everything to do with AI. My colleagues also recently won Bloomreach’s Loomi Connect AI Hackathon with an AI agent called Silent Watch, which can identify inactive customers and nudge them back into activity. Partly thanks to that, I’m heading to LA in September to speak at the Edge Summit conference about how we connect Bloomreach and AI in our business. I’m really looking forward to it, I think it’ll be the biggest dose of inspiration and knowledge I’ve had in a long time.

Ondřej Borovička: CX needs to move from “knowing” to “doing”

Jana Rouček — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:30:55 +0000

Ondřej Borovička is one of the most experienced CX professionals on the Czech market. Over eighteen years, he built customer experience from within large companies such as Avast, ČSOB, Air Bank and T-Mobile.

Today, he works as a fractional CXO and CX partner for companies across the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and abroad, helping leadership make decisions that genuinely translate into business results, not just presentations. After years in corporate roles, he co-founded SentricityCX with former colleagues, where they help companies make the right decisions that drive growth through happy customers. They work across Europe and in Africa. He personally acts as a fractional CXO and CX partner for company leadership, helping them turn customer experience into real business impact, not just slide decks.

Alongside his consulting work, he mentors younger CX professionals and is one of the voices in the Czech Republic pushing to turn CX into a genuine business discipline, rather than just a stack of questionnaires.

Ondro, as someone who’s spent years listening to customer complaints and feedback across industries, has there been a “customer experience” from your own everyday life that really got under your skin as a professional?

I’ve got a fresh one. Last week I signed up for a race, and it was a terrible experience an unresponsive website, nothing made sense, an absolute nightmare. But I actually prefer the positive stories. And I love the everyday, ordinary ones. Small bakeries, restaurants, little shops that don’t think of CX as a “discipline” they just have it in their bones. It’s a joy to watch all those marketing and CX principles become reality in front of you. Take the Hvězda bakery in Petřiny, Prague, as an example. People are happy to queue there, pay a noticeably higher price, and then tell everyone about it afterwards. I even bring their bread home as a gift! I love seeing that play out for real I’m genuinely happy for them.

You’ve been through Avast, ČSOB, Air Bank and T-Mobile where did you get that best possible feeling of “we really nailed this for the customer”?

Each of those companies was, or still is, in a somewhat different situation. Avast was growing rapidly, ČSOB was a dominant player, Air Bank was the challenger. Air Bank was built around the customer from day one, and that made it different — and probably simpler in some ways too. I definitely had “this is brilliant” moments at every one of those companies. But Air Bank is probably the only place I could point to a mobile onboarding project that got delayed and dragged on, purely because the solution we had wasn’t good enough for customers. So we had to be honest with ourselves and stop making things easy for us at the customer’s expense. Internally, it cost us more effort, but it turned out to be a huge success with customers.

Your profile mentions “CX Program Setup & Restart” can you describe a specific moment when you joined a company and realised you had to start completely from zero?

Joining a company that’s starting completely from zero doesn’t really happen much these days. Most organisations already do some form of CX — collecting feedback, measuring NPS, or running individual customer initiatives. So the starting point usually isn’t zero.

You spot the real “zero point” a different way. Ask members of the leadership team what good customer experience means to them, or what customer promise their company actually makes. You’ll get five different answers. That’s when you know the problem isn’t that the company doesn’t measure or listen to customers it’s that they have no defined direction. And that’s what leaves the poor CX manager, if there even is one, in a tough spot. When we run these “alignment” workshops, there really are a lot of “aha moments”!

If you had to name one thing companies almost always underestimate when they start out with CX, what would it be?

Exactly that — aligning expectations and direction, and understanding what CX actually is and what it means for that particular company. It’s not NPS, it’s not customer support, it’s not a keyring given away as a gift. And then there’s the trap of creating a CX role tucked away “in the basement” and ticking the box that says “we’re customer-centric” except nothing actually changes, and that CX team just ends up having a really hard time. Really, the ultimate goal of a CX team should be to eventually make itself redundant — to reach a point where it’s no longer needed. Sounds strange, I know, but it’s true.

Fractional CXO is still a fairly unusual role in the Czech Republic. How did you end up in it, and what do you enjoy about it more than a standard employed position?

The title itself is still fairly unusual in the Czech Republic, but the need it addresses has been around for a long time. I know colleagues who work as interim CX leaders, and it’s a great model when a company needs someone to run CX on a day-to-day basis.

Fractional CXO is a bit different. In short an interim CX leader runs CX, while a fractional CXO helps leadership make the right decisions about CX.

What I enjoy is exactly that combination of strategic perspective and hands-on execution. The great thing about it is that the company gets a senior perspective for a fraction of a full-time cost (I don’t need to be there every day say, two days a week is enough). Another advantage is that you can get started very quickly and build momentum fast. And last but not least, being fractional is an interesting hybrid of “deeply embedded, but still an outsider” a bit like being the scooter queen of the situation. I’m close enough to the business to understand its people, its data and its everyday reality, while still keeping enough distance to raise sensitive topics, mediate discussions between teams, and bring an objective view. I don’t have that sword of “what will they think of me” hanging over my head.

SentricityCX works with an AI dashboard for tracking the customer journey was there ever a moment when you were genuinely surprised by something AI uncovered that a person wouldn’t have found?

It’s less about what a person wouldn’t have found, and more about the speed at which it’s found. The tool works by analysing feedback and identifying friction points in the journey. What it’s really good for is helping you get your bearings quickly, and tracking changes and drivers over time. That said, I’d always recommend that once you find an area that genuinely hurts, you go deeper and do a detailed “manual” map and analysis. AI only gives you back what you put into it and the insights, policies, processes and relationships that go in are still often flawed.

What does a conversation with leadership look like when you have to defend the idea that CX isn’t just a “nice-to-have” extra, but something that actually pays back?

Imagine you’re presenting to the board a perfect customer journey, clearly identified moments of truth, you know exactly where it’s going wrong and where to improve the experience. The moment you finish, there’s a 100% chance you’ll get that tricky but entirely fair question: “so what?” Nobody really wants to hear that!

But if you can answer it, people start taking you seriously. At one company, we managed to answer it. Working with the CFO’s team, we were able to put a value on CX growth it came out to several million dollars for every point of improvement. That’s when we had everyone’s attention. If you combine that “strategic” figure with good discipline around costing out each individual pain point, life gets a lot easier. Companies’ prioritisation processes are often ruthless, and as a CX person you need a number whether it’s positive (revenue) or negative (cost). On top of that, it’s essential to know not just what your NPS score is, but what’s driving it, where it originates, and what’s causing it. Then you can say that removing a particular issue will save customers from having to call support — and that’s something you can measure easily. That’s the language leadership speaks and wants to hear. They’ll understand what they’re actually deciding on, and that gives you real power.

You’ve worked in both banking and cybersecurity where did you notice the biggest difference in how people thought about customers?

Surprisingly, I wouldn’t say the industry itself is the deciding factor. In both banking and cybersecurity you’ll find people with a real feel for the customer who fight their corner, and people who honestly couldn’t care less.

Other factors have a much bigger influence whether the company is growing fast, defending its market share, or under pressure to hit quarterly results. That’s what really shapes its priorities and how much room customer experience gets. CX simply isn’t a discipline you can run for a month, or even one quarter.

If I had to point to one real difference, though, it would be scale on a global level. At the largest Czech banks, we’re talking about a few million customers. At Avast, it was over 500 million users worldwide. That’s where cultural differences come into play. What one nation sees as a great experience, another might view completely differently. I remember how much this confused us with NPS — the same product had a negative NPS score in Japan, while in Brazil it was over +60. You quickly realise the number alone tells you nothing. You need to understand the context first, and only then can you make the right decisions.

What advice would you give yourself today if you went back to the start of your CX career?

That’s a lovely question, and my answer to it keeps changing as I gain more experience. I’d probably have told you something different a year ago compared to today!

Don’t become an AI fanatic it’s great for inspiration, not always for facts.
Start small, grow big. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t try to change everything at once.
Getting management support and alignment is essential without it, you’re stuck, and you often end up just collecting feedback.
Don’t be a champion of dead ends find a mentor who’s already been through it. AI isn’t that.
People love stories put together your CX story, your plan/direction, and your answer to “so what?”

As a mentor, you probably hear similar questions from younger people in the field all the time which one do you enjoy answering the most?

I wouldn’t really say there’s one question that keeps coming up. Everyone’s dealing with something different during mentoring we focus on specific areas, dig deep, and then work our way back out. Classic analysis and synthesis. That’s why the topics vary so much from how to set up satisfaction measurement properly, to embedding CX into the company, to storytelling in presentations.

Where do you think CX is heading in the coming years, and is there anything about that direction that worries you more than it excites you?

That’s a tough question, one I usually save for dog walks in the woods. So far I haven’t found that crystal ball out there, though.

Just a few years ago, the hardest part was getting good insights and data. Today, thanks to AI, you can get them within minutes. That’s great news, but it’s also a risk. More data brings more noise, and it’ll become increasingly important to be able to tell a real signal from the noise. You don’t want to invest millions in a change based on a hallucination from a single prompt.

I think CX will move over the coming years from “knowing” to “doing.” Almost every company can listen to its customers these days. But only a fraction of them can actually turn those insights into real change — and that’s exactly where the value lies. I see it in what companies are asking for today. They no longer want another survey or dashboard. They want to know how to set up their organisation so that change actually happens.

That’s why I’m curious what role AI will play here not in gathering insights, but in decision-making, prioritisation and driving through change. If it can one day help tame human entropy within organisations too unwritten rules, conflicting goals, internal politics that, to me, would be a far bigger revolution than data analysis on its own.

Petr Hulec: The road to the customer never ends

Jana Rouček — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:00:09 +0000

Bushman was founded in 1997, when Jindřich Melichar, wandering around Australia, realised that travellers need not just quality gear but also comfortable clothing made from natural materials. From four people in a Prague office in Smíchov grew a brand that today sells through its own network of shops and an online store in the Czech Republic and other European countries.

Petr Hulec has been at the helm of the company for eight years now, and he’s one of those taking Melichar’s original vision even further, with an emphasis on authenticity, natural materials and a close relationship with both customers and employees.

Before we get into the serious stuff: I read in Forbes that you first wore Bushman in Peru, long before you became its boss. What does the brand mean to you now, after six years at the helm?

Time really flies — this year marks my eighth at the helm. As a brand, Bushman is incredibly distinctive, with its own DNA, an interesting story and huge potential. I think it has what it takes to become a truly global brand one day. Even though Bushman will turn 30 next year, I see it as a teenager coming out the other side of puberty — most of the escapades are behind it, it’s starting to sort out its priorities and direction, and it’s heading into its next chapter with youthful energy.

You told me that instead of NPS and CES, you rely more on breakfasts with employees. What do you learn over coffee that no spreadsheet could tell you?

Honestly, sometimes I learn more than I’d like to 😊. We got to the breakfasts gradually. I wanted to find a way to draw in the people who make up the brand, so they’d have a fuller picture of how the company works as a whole, not just their own department. At first we sent everyone a monthly report on results and what was happening across departments. It worked for a while, but it got harder and harder to get one department to write its contributions, and I had no proper systematic feedback from the employees reading the reports. So more than a year ago we set up a routine: on the first Wednesday of every month, everyone except the shop assistants meets in the tearoom — what we call our biggest common room — for a breakfast we prepare together, and we talk openly about what we’ve been through, what worked, what didn’t, and what’s coming next. Everyone gets the chance to share how they feel, air a grievance, or suggest changes that would make sense to them.

These breakfasts don’t give me any hard data or a score, but they tell me very precisely what the current mood in the company is and what’s bothering people. On top of that, I think employees feel a greater sense of belonging to the company and take on responsibility more readily as a result.

I’m also curious about your “soft reports” from the shops no scores, just gut feeling. What actually happens with a report like that afterwards?

Every shop sends head office a monthly report. There isn’t a single number in it. We want the perspective of the shop assistants who serve customers every day — why some products sell well and others flop. We often find the reasons are completely different from what we assumed at head office. In these reports, the assistants also praise or tear apart our marketing campaigns, and there’s a section with customer wishes and comments too.

We read the reports at head office, discuss them, and try to draw real conclusions from them — ones that actually reach as far as Production or Marketing.

Petr, you said the only hard numbers you track come from reviews both product reviews and reviews of the brand itself. What happens the moment a bad review comes in?

Our customer service reads absolutely every review, and for negative ones they try to identify the specific order behind it. If they manage to work it out from the clues, they contact that customer directly and deal with their problem individually. Customers are often pleasantly surprised that we reach out to them ourselves and want to sort things out. Quite often they then adjust their negative comment themselves, or delete it entirely. Personally, I keep a regular eye on the score, and if the shop’s recommendation rate drops below 99%, or overall satisfaction with the shop falls below 4.9 out of 5, I dig deeper into the reviews and try to find the cause or a systemic issue.

Bushman got through Covid partly thanks to a clothing voucher scheme and employees voluntarily taking pay cuts. Do you think people’s love for the brand can be captured in any way, or is that exactly the kind of thing that can never be reduced to a number?

We more or less sense that Bushman is a genuine lovebrand for a lot of people. The degree of love for the brand, whether from customers or employees, can’t be expressed in a number or a score, but you feel it very tangibly in moments of crisis, when customers or employees stand by you. Not because it benefits them, but unconditionally, because that’s simply how they feel. This is actually one of the reasons I see real meaning and huge potential in Bushman.

Today you have physical shops, an online store and eight international domains. Where have you personally had to add more structure, now that you can no longer physically know every customer or every employee?

The secret lies in the whole ecosystem. Our basic premise is that there’s only one customer, and the sales channel is just a route to the product. Our goal is to make that route as simple and pleasant as possible for the customer. Choose online and collect in-store, because you want to try it out before paying; or come and feel the material in the shop, then order online and have the parcel delivered to a locker or your home. We’re removing obstacles that could put the customer off, and steering them towards whatever they need.

If I said we don’t chase hard data on customer satisfaction all that much, sales data is a different story — we’re extremely interested in that. We gather it from every possible channel, store it against individual customer accounts, and then dream up all sorts of clever segmentation tricks on top of it. I think that’s a trend that will resonate more and more with business as AI takes hold.

Alongside regular customers, you also clothe people from zoos, botanical gardens and national parks. Do you handle anything differently with them compared with someone popping into a shop to buy a T-shirt?

Yes and no. Yes, in terms of customisation and keeping contracted products in the same colour shade, cut and material composition throughout the whole contract period, sometimes for several years. But fundamentally, they’re the same kind of customers to us as the people who come into our physical shops or shop online. They have the same needs — the clothing has to be comfortable, practical, and has to last a long time.

You have quite an interesting line-up of ambassadors Jakub Vágner, people from the caravanning world, from the Dakar Rally. Do you see this purely as marketing, or are these people who genuinely speak to customers on your behalf?

Above all, they have to be people who wear Bushman not because it’s some business deal, but because they genuinely want to wear it. Most of our ambassadors are already our mates, and they don’t just represent us — they also test our clothing in extreme conditions. That might actually be even more valuable than the ambassadorship itself. They give us honest feedback, and that helps us improve our collections.

Back in Jindřich Melichar’s day, Bushman was known for politically engaged prints too. Do you carry that on under your leadership, or have you moved away from it?

Bushman has always been engaged in some way — I think it’s somehow part of our DNA. It’s true that Jindra pushed for more politically engaged prints. I probably don’t go to such extremes, but when I feel we need to speak up on some issue, I’ve no problem putting out a more controversial print. Personally, though, I get more involved in value-based issues. Either way, we still get plenty of hate mail, so we can’t complain 😊

Authenticity comes up again and again in your interviews as the key to surviving against cheap fast fashion. Can authenticity be deliberately built, or is it simply the result of a company being run by people who believe in what they do?

I don’t think authenticity can really be artificially manufactured — it either exists or it doesn’t. It grows out of established, deeply held values, and it draws people who share those values towards you like a magnet. Through their work, those values then bubble back up through the products and the communication, out into the world. And yes, I still believe authenticity is one of the few things that still lets quality brands survive alongside consumption-driven fast fashion brands.

If you had to sum up your approach to customers in one sentence that X Pulse readers could stick on their monitor, what would it be?

Always look for a way to delight the customer, and remember that the search never ends.

Kristýna Komsa: CX has to be in a company’s DNA, not just in a presentation for management

Jana Rouček — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:40:43 +0000

Kristýna Komsa is currently on maternity leave, but before starting this new chapter in her life she worked as a Manager at Prague Airport, where she was responsible for the overall customer experience strategy, feedback collection, passenger segmentation, customer journey mapping and setting service quality standards. She led a team of CX specialists, analysts and researchers.

Her career didn’t start in a call centre or customer service department, though. She worked in marketing at Seznam.cz, coordinated language teaching and did research. She studied at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University, and it was this blend of analytical thinking and creative practice that eventually led her to exactly the place where both make the most sense: customer experience in an environment where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world pass through every day.

Kristýna, you started your career in marketing at Seznam, then moved into a language school, and finally landed at the airport. That’s not exactly a straight path into CX. How did it all come about, and when did you first realise that customer experience was something you wanted to pursue full-time?

It wasn’t my original plan. I was mostly working in marketing, but I studied at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University, so research has always been close to my heart. I always enjoyed creative work, but I also needed a deeper insight and an analytical foundation to go with it. Thanks to that background, and a fair bit of coincidence, my path at the airport ended up shaping itself into CX.

Customer experience at an airport is complicated because you’re not the only one shaping it dozens of different organisations operate in the same space. How do you set standards in an environment like that, and who actually “owns” the customer experience?

You’re absolutely right. Environments like airports or train stations bring together customers of many different organisations under one roof – from carriers to shops to taxi services. That means you can only directly manage part of the overall journey. To make the end experience as consistent as possible, you first need to be clear on exactly what kind of experience you want to deliver. Ideally, you get the vision and the feelings out of people’s heads and onto paper, and then work with the other players towards a shared goal. In an ideal world, everyone would be after the same thing – a satisfied customer. After all, a customer who has a good experience tells other people about it, buys more, and is far more likely to use the service or product again.

Collecting feedback from passengers sounds simple, until you remember that someone queuing for security probably isn’t in the best of moods. How do you manage to get honest answers at the right moment?

If you want to know someone’s overall impression, you need to let them share it right at the end of their journey. If you’re interested in a specific touchpoint, it’s best to ask immediately after it happens. There’s also the question of what an “honest answer” actually is. Personally, I really enjoy exploring new technologies. Emotion-reading technology, for instance, is one thing that could, in future, help our field get much closer to genuinely honest responses.

You work with customer journey mapping, personas and segmentation. How different is the journey of someone flying for the first time in their life compared with a businessperson who lands every Monday?

It depends what exactly we mean by “businessperson”. Either way, in this respect an airport isn’t that different from a train station. Frequent travellers mostly just want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. They know their way around the space very well, but paradoxically it’s harder to get new information to them, because they’re no longer actively looking for it. Someone who doesn’t travel often, on the other hand, arrives with plenty of time to spare, finds it harder to navigate and tends to be more anxious. For me, there’s another really interesting dimension here too, and that’s the nationality of the traveller.

CX in places like airports, train stations or hospitals is unusual in that customers don’t really have alternatives. Does that change how seriously CX is taken within the organisation?

I think that for enlightened leadership, that shouldn’t make any difference. CX principles go hand in hand with business goals and directly support them. In fact, I’m convinced that CX actually helps money spent on innovation or marketing go further. At the same time, it’s not true that a single CX department can save an entire company on its own. These principles need to be part of the company’s DNA – from how individuals behave day to day, to how processes are set up, to how specific steps are actually carried out. That said, this shouldn’t come across as if CX is something only large corporations can afford. You can experience excellent customer service at a small business or with a local sole trader just as easily.

Looking back at your career in CX, which period or project has shaped the way you think about customer experience the most?

There have been quite a few. An airport environment is so wide-ranging that it lets you get hands-on experience with projects from all sorts of areas – from designing services for parents with children, to toilet design, choosing background music and developing websites, right through to standardising the customer experience, such as staff behaviour and training. Every project has left its mark on me, and together they now make up the whole of how I think about CX. To be honest, though, it’s not just about the projects – I also really love constantly learning and drawing inspiration from other successful companies.

You’ve worked in event marketing, research and product management. Do you find that CX professionals from the “data” world and those from the “creative” world approach customers differently? And who does CX better?

I find that “data people” are, by their very nature, more analytical and focus less on emotions. The creative world, on the other hand, sometimes misses the mark because of too much vision without real foundations or a proper understanding of the data. But the two worlds complement each other brilliantly. That’s why it’s ideal to have a range of different perspectives represented in a team. Everyone brings a different angle to the discussion, which enriches the whole project. Simply put, better CX is delivered by anyone who takes it seriously, rather than treating it as an empty buzzword for a management presentation.

Companies today have CX strategies, NPS scores, customer journey maps. And yet customers sometimes still walk away feeling like nobody listened to them. Where does all that effort get lost along the way?

Honestly, there are still companies out there with no CX strategy, no metrics and no genuine interest in what their customers need. And unfortunately, that shows immediately in the quality of their services. Then there are companies that have everything set up perfectly – but only on paper. Leadership and management aren’t genuinely convinced of the real value CX adds, and that scepticism filters all the way down through the organisation to the customer. In other cases, leadership is enthusiastic, but frontline staff – the real face and voice of the company – let things down. This is often because the rules aren’t clearly defined, or there’s no supervision or the right incentives in place. CX should also be reflected in regular feedback, both in the form of concrete recommendations and financially, through variable pay. In general, CX often overlooks EX – Employee Experience. Another major pitfall is that while we collect huge amounts of data from customers, we often don’t know how to turn it into concrete action. Right from the moment we start collecting data, we need to know exactly what question we’re trying to answer and what we’ll do with the answer once we have it.

Imagine you’re sitting having coffee with your grandmother and she asks what you actually do for a living. “Customer Experience” won’t mean much to her. How would you explain what you do all day and why it matters?

CX, or customer experience, is essentially about the feelings a person has when they come into contact with a company – from the very first impression to the very last interaction.

Our job is to understand who our customer is, how they behave, what they need and what they expect. We then bring these insights into the company as the voice of the customer, and help shape services, processes and communication so that every interaction is as pleasant and as simple as possible.

When we find something isn’t working well, we suggest specific improvements, test them, and evaluate whether they actually work. Through this lens, I make sure that the customer has the best possible experience throughout their entire journey, doesn’t run into unnecessary obstacles, and isn’t left disappointed.

The goal is for people to be able to rely on us, and to be confident that we, as a company, live up to the trust they place in us with their time and money. Ideally, so that they don’t just use us again, but recommend us to others with genuine enthusiasm.

And to finish off with a classic: do you have a CX story, either from your own work or as a customer, that has stuck with you and that you enjoy telling?

The best moments are always created by individual employees who go above and beyond their job description. That’s why it’s so important to look for people on the team who have a natural talent for working with people and who share the company’s values. One strong story has stuck with me, unfortunately a negative one. An employee at a company I’d ordered goods from called me and was extremely rude to me. Since I wasn’t aware of having made any mistake on my end, it really caught me off guard. The whole situation was absurd and unprofessional. It showed the flip side of CX – an unhappy customer tells many other potential customers about their experience.

On the positive side, I like to mention how well Starbucks has set up its staff’s authority. When a problem comes up, staff have the power to resolve it on the spot, immediately. I also really admire Rohlik.cz’s customer-first approach to handling complaints. Another great example is the Orea hotel chain and its products and services for families with children. But what I especially like to spread the word about is encouraging customers to give feedback – both when they’re happy, and when they haven’t received the quality they paid for. Politely, of course.

Jiří Landovský: Candidate isn’t a number in a queue. They’re a customer.

Jana Rouček — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 05:00:39 +0000

Jiří Landovský has London and Israel on his CV, started out in data automation and systems engineering, but these days his work is all about people. For over a decade he’s been Head of Customer Experience at Recruitis.io, helping companies build recruitment processes that treat candidates the way you’d treat a customer.

Perhaps because he spent a good chunk of his career working with data and for him, data has never been mere abstraction but stories told in numbers he sees candidate experience differently from most. He’s not just interested in whether the system works. He wants to know how the person on the other side of the screen actually feels.

Jiří, your title is “Head of Customer Experience” at an HR tech company. How do you define “the customer” in the context of Recruitis?

It’s not as straightforward as it might seem. Our paying customer is obviously the company using Recruitis ATS. But from day one, we’ve built Recruitis around a core mission: to make recruitment candidate-centric. That flips the whole perspective.

We wanted to help companies improve their CX through our tool and the knowledge we’ve built into it and to keep getting better at that. So in the truest sense of the word, we see the candidate our customer’s customer as the real customer. They’re one step removed from us, and yet their experience is our benchmark for whether we’re doing a good job. When we help a company treat candidates better, both sides win: the candidate and the company. That tension is exactly where our work lives.

Recruitis actively measures candidate experience through NPS. But how is it that most Czech companies still don’t even bother sending a rejection message? Is it laziness, or a systemic problem?

Great question. On one hand, it’s something I genuinely can’t get my head around. It’s been discussed and mocked so many times that it’s still happening is honestly baffling. I can’t imagine a sales team discovering that a certain practice was driving away a large group of quality customers and just carrying on regardless.

It’s a systemic problem, but one with several layers.

The first is purely operational and capacity-related. If a company doesn’t have a recruitment tool that can generate a decent, human-sounding rejection template with a single click, every rejection message means extra manual work. So someone decides to “solve” it by stuffing the following into the very first message a candidate receives after applying that now-legendary line: “If you haven’t heard from us within 14 days, we’ve moved forward with another candidate.”

The second layer is motivation and metrics. Recruiters are typically measured on how many roles they fill and how quickly. Rejected candidates are completely irrelevant to their KPIs. The cost of never getting back to those people isn’t visible and it’s deferred. It shows up later in poor employer branding, lower conversion in future hiring rounds, or in the fact that the frustrated candidate is also your customer. And what doesn’t show up clearly in a report rarely gets prioritised.

But this isn’t just on HR. It goes all the way up to senior leadership those who either don’t see it or choose not to.

That’s exactly why we were one of the very first ATS platforms to implement NPS. For us, measuring candidate experience through NPS makes complete sense. It makes that deferred, invisible cost finally visible and measurable. The moment leadership can see in black and white how much this behaviour is dragging down their score and how they compare to competitors it stops being a “nice to have” and becomes a key metric.

You came into the CX world from systems engineering and data automation. What was the moment you decided people were more interesting than systems?

I’d gently reframe that I came to the conclusion that the most interesting thing is the intersection of people and systems.

Early in my career, I focused purely on the technical solution: efficiency, speed, reliability. But the more contact I had with customers and end users, the more I started to notice the impact on their day-to-day work and the deeper I could go into the nuances of what they actually needed.

The moment that probably shifted things most for me was seeing the difference between two approaches. When a customer says, “I want a button that does XY,” you can just build the button give them the appearance of satisfaction. Or you can ask a set of questions that get to the root of the need: the underlying business case or the pain point they’re trying to solve. You’ll very likely deliver something entirely different from the button they asked for but with far greater satisfaction over the long run, and a much stronger relationship.

That feeling of having a satisfied customer someone whose problem you’ve solved and whose thinking you’ve expanded in the process has always been more rewarding to me than any perfectly functioning data automation system.

With “Personalistika Zet” alongside Štěpán Bartyzel, you regularly discussed modern HR on Radio Zet. What brought you to doing HR education so publicly, and what did it give you personally?

It was really a response to where the market was at the time. When we were starting out with Recruitis ATS, very few people in the Czech Republic even knew what an ATS was and even fewer cared about candidate experience, talent pool building, multiposting, sourcing, or referrals. Unemployment was at a very different level, and companies were essentially in the driving seat: post the job, wait, and pick from the CVs that came in. There was simply no urgency to compete for candidates or think about how they felt.

But we could see from abroad where recruitment was heading that candidates would eventually take control, and that challenges already common elsewhere would arrive here too. We saw it as a competitive advantage. There was just one catch: you can’t sell a solution to someone who’s never heard of the problem. We needed to get these topics into the consciousness of HR professionals first cultivate the conversation and only then offer our tools as the answer. We essentially had to educate the market before it could start demanding what we do. Radio Zet and the meetups we organised gave us the perfect platform for that.

But personally, it gave me something I never expected. Beyond meeting a lot of genuinely interesting people from all kinds of fields, it was the very practical realisation that there’s no reason to be afraid of stepping outside your comfort zone into territory you’ve never tried whether that’s hosting a radio show or organising an event. That’s exactly where enormous added value and competitive advantage are created. The key is being willing to claim the position of leader or authority in a space that hasn’t been claimed yet. That space is almost always there someone just has to be the first to step into it.

AI is changing recruitment faster than anything before it. Where do you see the greatest risk that, under the pressure of automation, the human dimension of candidate experience gets lost?

I don’t think recruitment today is dramatically different from how it was a year or two ago which you can’t say about other fields, software development being an obvious example. The real wave of AI in HR is still ahead of us. 🙂

That said, there’s a huge amount of public conversation about AI and HR, and that creates enormous pressure on HR teams inside companies to “do something with AI.” And that’s where I see the first risk. That pressure often leads to rushed decisions deploying AI on processes where, in the best case, it adds minimal value and, in the worst case, actively causes harm.

That’s not me arguing against AI changing HR it should and it will. But it’s worth stepping back and asking: why are we doing this, and how does it help or hurt the CX that the whole thing is ultimately about?

Recruitment brings together two worlds: the “backstage” everything that happens out of the candidate’s sight and the “front stage” what the candidate actually experiences directly. And there’s the second risk. Many companies want to deploy AI primarily on the front stage, typically in direct communication with candidates, while completely ignoring everything happening backstage.

Over time we’ll also see what AI does to the labour market itself unemployment levels, legislation, and so on. And many companies will eventually realise, for example, that an AI tool for tagging candidates by CV becomes worthless when those CVs are themselves AI-generated and tailored to individual job posts and the number of applications per role multiplies tenfold or a hundredfold, as we’re already seeing in the US. By contrast, AI solutions that offer sophisticated sourcing helping companies break free from their dependency on job ads and the flood of irrelevant applications that come with them will create real competitive advantage.

Your profile says what you enjoy most is watching others succeed with your support. How do you know when a customer no longer needs you and is ready to go it alone?

It’s a bit like being a good teacher or a parent. With a slight dose of irony the whole point of my work is ultimately to make myself unnecessary.

You can tell mainly by how the questions change. In the beginning, they’re almost all operational: “How do I set up feature XY?”, “What does this button do?“, “Where do I find the feature you mentioned in the newsletter?” And so on.

When our support has worked, those questions gradually transform. We move from operational to tactical and then strategic conversations about streamlining existing processes, thinking ahead. At that point, the customer isn’t calling me to be rescued. They’re calling to bounce an idea off me, or to talk through a vision for how they want to develop their hiring in the future. That’s a huge shift.

The other reliable signal is when a customer starts teaching their own colleagues when they become an internal ambassador for Recruitis. The moment they’re passing on what we’ve worked through together and building on it, it means they don’t just understand it. They’ve made it their own, enough to explain it in their own words.

So I track one quiet little metric: how long we speak and what we actually talk about. When contact naturally shortens and the topics move from putting out fires to “we’d like to take our use of Recruitis further” I know we’re on the right track.

You’ve lived in both the UK and Israel. What did that breadth of experience give you that you could never have gained inside the Czech HR bubble?

Above all, perspective. When you work abroad for a sustained period, you realise that the way things are done at home how you work, how you communicate with colleagues and customers, how processes run isn’t the only way. And often not the best way either. You stop treating it as a given and start seeing it as one of many possible approaches.

The contrast between the UK and Israel illustrated this beautifully. In Britain, I learnt to read feedback between the lines. People rarely tell you directly that they don’t like something you have to pick up on the fact that a polite “interesting” or “we might consider it” often means the exact opposite. Israel was the complete other end of the spectrum: direct, matter-of-fact, no softening. People say what they think, and you get feedback straight and immediately. After a heated argument over a substantive point in a meeting, the two people involved would grab a coffee in the canteen and chat calmly about how their sons were heading to football practice that afternoon. Both styles have their charm and their challenges and both taught me a great deal.

The second big realisation was this: not everyone thinks the way you do. You have to learn to adapt quickly, read your environment, listen more carefully, and work with feedback whether it’s direct or indirect. And most importantly, stop automatically assuming that what works at home will work the same way somewhere else.

At the same time, I came to understand the flip side: there’s absolutely no reason to feel inferior because of the very Czech tendency towards self-deprecation. If I can generalise for a moment we are exceptionally strong in many areas: education, work ethic, creativity, and the ability to solve problems without a manual. We just rarely admit it, and even more rarely sell it. And that’s a shame, because abroad I saw time and again that what we take for granted, others see as a competitive advantage.

Can you remember a moment when you did something for a client that wasn’t in any manual or process but you just knew it was exactly the right thing to do?

This might sound like an exaggeration, but that happens almost every day. 🙂

I’ve been lucky, from my very first work experiences, to be around people who shaped customer support culture with genuine care not by following a manual or a call script. I also had the opportunity to work directly and closely with various CTOs and CEOs, which gave me a window into seemingly ordinary support or customer communication situations from their perspective both technical and commercial. I could see the strategic elements that were invisible at my level. And I’m grateful I get to pass that on now.

At Recruitis, it regularly happens that I’m reminded of a similar situation from a previous company and I’m always struck by how practically every one of those past experiences, even from completely different industries, is still actively useful to me today. That’s partly down to the startup culture at Recruitis, which demands a kind of full-stack range. But it’s also, for me personally, confirmation that I’m in the right place.

Your world is full of acronyms and terms that only insiders understand. If you had to explain your job to your grandmother at a family gathering, what’s the one thing you’d most want her to understand?

The first thing I’d want to explain is the concept of customer experience itself. And I think it would actually be easier than it might seem.

I’d remind her of the corner shop from when she was young the one she used to talk about fondly and especially the shopkeeper who knew everyone by name, remembered that she liked a particular chocolate, asked how her grandmother was getting on, and when he ran out of what she came in for, set some aside for her under the counter next time.

My job is essentially about helping companies treat people that way again. Except the shop isn’t round the corner anymore it’s on your phone or your computer.

At that point, she’d probably realise she understands it better than many managers do she just never had a name for it. And that’s exactly the magic of it. At its core, it isn’t a science for a select few insiders. It’s ordinary human decency and attentiveness that we’re trying to scale and measure how well we’re doing.

If you could redesign the entire recruitment process in the Czech Republic from scratch as a systems engineer what would the ideal candidate experience look like in 2030?

The best candidate experience in 2030, for me, would be one the candidate barely notices because they’re not applying for anything. The entire current model of recruitment is built on the premise that you have to find a job and fight for it: write a CV, fill in forms on careers pages and multiple job boards, complete follow-up questionnaires, go through several rounds of interviews, submit a set of tasks, wait for a verdict and sometimes someone gets back to you, sometimes they don’t.

If I were designing this from scratch, I’d start with an uncomfortable truth: today’s recruitment process is fundamentally designed asymmetrically in favour of the company, not for the candidate’s experience.

Now imagine a market where no one writes job ads and no one writes CVs. There’s a single source of truth: one profile that the candidate owns. Something like a “professional citizen identity” a rich record of skills and experience that candidates grant companies access to with a single click. Companies don’t post roles; they reach out to specific people with specific offers.

Selection wouldn’t rely on keywords in a CV or reading between the lines, but on verified skills and demonstrated experience. And crucially, candidates would have full visibility of their status at all times on their own portal, the way you track a delivery from an online shop. I know exactly where I am, which company I’m with, what comes next, when they’ll be in touch, and how and why it turned out the way it did.

In the ideal world of 2030, automation and AI wouldn’t be the bouncer efficiently rejecting candidates based on incomplete and unfiltered CV data which is, ironically, what many companies today are asking for as a key AI feature. Instead, AI would be the backstage assistant I mentioned earlier: searching the market for suitable candidates, mapping and accurately describing team structures and skill sets so companies can find the right additions or replacements, making sure everyone is followed up with promptly and given relevant information.

And here’s the elegant part: most of today’s candidate experience pain points would simply cease to exist because you’ve removed the very process that creates them.

Do you have a CX story that’s stayed with you? A moment when someone genuinely surprised you as a customer and you thought: that’s exactly it.

At its heart it’s a fairly simple story, but it opened my eyes when I was not yet twenty even though I had no idea at the time that what I’d witnessed would one day be called CX. And it happened sometime in the late nineties, when the concept of customer experience in this country simply didn’t exist yet. 🙂

I was sitting in a restaurant, and at the next table was a couple who were clearly unhappy with the food, and with the way the staff had treated them. Eventually they asked to speak to the owner. I was expecting the classic performance: defensive posturing, the “that sort of thing doesn’t happen here” explanation. Instead, the owner calmly heard them out, apologised, and offered them a coffee and a pastry on the house. The couple left smiling.

But the real moment came shortly after, when I overheard a staff member insisting to the owner that what the guests had complained about simply wasn’t true. The owner simply replied, calmly, with something along the lines of: “I know. But they’re leaving happy and that’s what matters.”

The lesson for me then and honestly still now is that arguing about facts is almost always a losing battle, because a customer doesn’t walk away with the minutes of a meeting. They walk away with a feeling. And that owner knew perfectly well that couple would tell the story. Either as “they were difficult and argumentative,” or as “they made a mistake but handled it beautifully.” For the price of two coffees and two pastries, she bought the second version.

At first it seemed like a nice gesture. Today I see it as a beautiful demonstration of something fundamental: the best CX isn’t about being right it’s about how the customer feels after every interaction with us.

Radka Maršálová: CX Isn’t About Measurement. It’s About Running the Business.

Ales Roucek — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:00:45 +0000

Radka Maršálová started out at a time when CX in the Czech Republic was barely a concept. She joined Direct Insurance as an NPS Specialist when almost nobody in the country had heard of the term, with no local resources and no community to lean on. She had to figure it out on her own. And that experience taught her what she considers the most valuable lesson in CX: before you implement anything, you need to truly understand it not from a slide deck, but from practice.

Over more than five years within the Direct group, she progressed from specialist to programme manager to Head of CX and Complaints, building strategies, teams, metrics, and company culture along the way. Then came a new challenge at Direct Fidoo, where she built CX from the ground up for a B2B fintech and contributed to launching a digital bank for the SME segment. Along the way, she also lectured on customer experience at the Prague School of Creative Communication and volunteered with Femme Palette experiencing CX from the other side, as a participant.

Since April 2026, she has been writing a new chapter as CX Manager at MultiSport Benefit. A product people choose not because they have to, but because they want to move. For someone who spent years in insurance, that’s a refreshing change.

In this interview for X Pulse, she shared what CX really is and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.

You’ve described your career in one word: “transformation.” What does that mean to you in a CX context and where has the single biggest transformational moment been, the one that pushed you furthest as a professional?

Transformation in CX isn’t a buzzword for me. It describes what has to happen inside a company before a customer can feel anything on the outside. Renaming a department or introducing a new metric isn’t enough. You have to change the way people think about the customer. It’s slow, sometimes painful work.

The biggest transformational moment for me was joining Direct Insurance as an NPS Specialist. I accepted the offer and only afterwards found out what the acronym actually meant. At the time, almost nobody in the Czech Republic was writing or talking about NPS. No local resources, no community. I had to learn from international sources, experiment a lot, and make a lot of mistakes. But that’s precisely what taught me the most valuable thing in CX: before you implement anything, you need to truly understand it not from a presentation, but from practice.

You’ve worked across B2C and B2B, in insurance and fintech. How different is the underlying philosophy of CX in those worlds and what do you think each can learn from the other?

When I moved between those worlds, I expected a fundamental difference. B2C works with emotion, B2B with rationality and process at least, that’s how the textbooks describe it.

Reality surprised me. At the end of every decision whether it’s an insurance policy or a corporate financial product there’s a person. With the same basic needs: they want to understand what they’re buying, they want to feel they can rely on the other side, and they want communication that makes sense.

The biggest difference I genuinely felt was in the level of expertise required in communication. At Direct Insurance, it was possible to work with relatively accessible language. The products, even when complex, could be explained in human terms. At Direct Fidoo, I encountered a completely different league. Clients were experts who knew exactly what to ask and expected the same level of knowledge on our side. Empathy alone wasn’t enough you needed substance too.

What can these worlds learn from each other? B2C knows how to work with emotion and simplicity. B2B brings depth and credibility. The best CX happens when these approaches borrow from one another.

CX is full of metrics NPS, CES, CSAT. You’ve worked with all three. If you had to pick just one and defend it as “the one,” which would it be and why? And where do you think we let the numbers carry us further than they should?

Which metric is best? It depends. And that’s not a dodge.

It depends on what stage the company is at and what it intends to do with the number. NPS, CES, CSAT each makes sense in a different context. I’ve seen companies with great NPS scores that were still losing customers, because they confused the goal with the tool.

So the first question isn’t “which metric should we use?” It’s “why do we want it, and what will we do with the result?” Only then does it make sense to choose.

Customer journey design always involves balancing what the customer ideally wants against what the business can or must do. Where do you see the biggest points of friction and how do you deal with them?

Customer journey design is always a balancing act. It would be naive to claim the customer always wins. Companies have their constraints regulatory requirements, commercial priorities. That’s reality.

But the biggest friction I repeatedly see isn’t between the customer and the company. It’s inside the company itself when the team can’t agree on what actually matters to the customer.

The most powerful tool is simple: ask. Customer data is an argument that’s very hard to ignore. When ten out of ten customers tell you something isn’t working, it’s difficult to defend the opposite. Data doesn’t make decisions for you, but it gives you the courage to make the right one.

You’ve also taught CX at the Prague School of Creative Communication. What did you enjoy most about teaching and what did students say that stopped you in your tracks and made you think differently?

Teaching taught me something I’d probably underestimated before. CX can’t be taught in isolation. To truly understand customer experience, you need to understand the context around it project management, the financial logic of a business, commercial priorities. Without that, CX remains an abstract concept.

And then there was a recurring moment that made me think. Students very often didn’t distinguish between customer experience and customer service. For many of them, the two were the same thing. And yet they’re fundamentally different disciplines. Customer service deals with a situation that has already occurred. Customer experience works to ensure that situation doesn’t occur in the first place or that the whole journey leading to it is different. I ended up spending far more time on that distinction than I had originally planned.

Some product categories are ones customers don’t seek out with enthusiasm they simply need them. How do you build an emotional connection to a brand in that environment, when the starting point isn’t excitement but necessity?

Insurance is an interesting case. Customers typically show up either when something has gone wrong or because they simply have to. Enthusiasm is hard to find.

But that’s precisely why CX matters so much in this segment. When products are essentially comparable, the way you treat your customer is one of the few places where you can genuinely differentiate. I’ve seen customers call in angry and leave as brand ambassadors not because we solved the problem quickly, but because we took them seriously. That’s the kind of magic no product can deliver on its own.

People don’t remember how much they paid for their policy. They remember how the company treated them when it was hard.

You’ve said that great CX only happens when the whole company is involved from sales to customer support. In practice, that’s one of the hardest things to achieve. What’s the single most effective mechanism or ritual you’ve seen for making CX everyone’s responsibility, not just one department’s?

One mechanism isn’t enough. CX across the whole company is more about layers.

The most fundamental is bringing the customer inside. Through focus groups or interviews, and opening those up to anyone in the company who’s interested. When someone from finance or IT hears a customer directly, their perspective shifts.

One thing that worked particularly well was getting leadership involved in gathering feedback. When a senior leader personally calls customers and asks about their experience, it sends a signal through the organisation that no internal campaign can replicate.

And then there are things that build culture gradually regular open meetings that anyone could join, or a CX Heroes programme where anyone in the company could be nominated. The goal was to show that customer experience isn’t delivered by one department. It’s delivered by everyone.

The SME segment is a relatively underexplored topic in CX. Retail customers bring emotion, enterprise customers bring budget. Where does the SME client actually sit and what makes them distinct from a customer experience perspective?

The SME segment is more complex than it first appears. And that’s precisely why it gets underestimated so often.

One person buys the product, but someone else entirely uses it day to day. And each of them has different needs, different expectations, a different definition of what a good experience means. The person making the purchasing decision is thinking about ROI and implementation. The person using the product every day is thinking about simplicity and reliability.

In practice, this can look like a smooth onboarding, a happy manager and then a month later you discover that frontline users are barely touching the product, because nobody explained to them why they should. That’s not a product problem. It’s a CX problem that stopped at the point of signing the contract.

CX in the SME segment can’t be built around a single persona. You need to understand the whole chain of people inside that business but that’s work many vendors skip. They focus only on whoever signed the agreement.

If you had to place one bet on the single biggest shift in CX over the next two to three years something concrete, not AI as a buzzword what would it be?

I’d bet on personalisation. Not as a buzzword, but as a genuine shift in how companies work with customer data.

Today, most companies know quite a lot about their customers and behave as though they know nothing. They send the same message to everyone, clutter channels the customer doesn’t want, and ignore signals the customer sent a long time ago.

I hope we’ll finally reach a point where personalisation doesn’t mean “we’ll address you by first name in an email.” It will mean that if you prefer to communicate by phone, nobody will message you. That if you need one click, you won’t get a five-step process. That the offer you receive will be relevant, because the company genuinely understands where you are in that journey.

It’s already happening at a global level. In the Czech market, we’re still waiting but I think that shift is coming.

And finally what genuinely frustrates you about the CX industry? What’s the biggest piece of nonsense or cliché that keeps getting recycled at conferences but simply doesn’t hold up in practice?

You know what really gets to me? The entire industry has got used to confusing the tool with the outcome.

At every conference, people talk about metrics, about how to word a survey question, about how to nudge a score up by a few points. And all of it misses the point entirely.

CX isn’t about measurement. It’s about running the business. Customer experience has to be part of the strategy not as a nice add-on, but as the way a company thinks about its direction.

There are plenty of people out there calling themselves CX experts. But when you get into the detail with them, you find they’re focused on survey wording. Not on what to do with the results. Not on how to convince leadership to change. Not on how to actually move the business forward.

We confuse the tool with the outcome. And then wonder why nothing changes.

Renata Novotná: The real problem is usually somewhere else entirely

Jana Rouček — Fri, 15 May 2026 06:55:51 +0000

Renata Novotná has been working in customer and employee experience since the days when CX was barely talked about in the Czech Republic. At Ipsos she works as a Strategic Processes and CX Consultant, helping major brands weave customer and employee data into something that actually works as a whole. Alongside that, she’s been running her own consultancy since 2017, where she helps owners and managers of small and mid-sized businesses set up processes so they can free up their hands and their heads for what really matters.

At Ipsos she’s worked her way up from coordinating data collection to leading a team that specialises in customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty research. Her own long-standing focus is on employee experience and on bridging two worlds that, in her view, talk to each other far less than they should: HR and CX.

In her conversation with X Pulse, we talked with Renata about why the real problem in a company is almost never the one you’re called in to solve, why delegation won’t save any process if the boss can’t mentally let go, and where AI genuinely helps in customer care versus where companies are overshooting.

You’re running two parallel roles that look quite different on the surface. Holistic CX consultant at Ipsos, where you work with big brands, and your own practice, where you set up processes for small companies and law firms. What do those two worlds do equally well, and what can they learn from each other?

Small companies have one huge advantage: everything moves faster and more simply. Changes aren’t as demanding organisationally and you see the impact very quickly. That’s not the case in corporates. There it takes enormous effort to nudge that massive ship off course, and from the moment you turn the wheel to the moment it actually changes direction, quite some time passes. The decision-making is also considerably more complex.

On the flip side, corporates naturally have more money. And more money lets you do bigger things, and decisions there aren’t as emotionally charged. In many ways that can be easier.

Each world has its pros and cons.

When you walk into a company that’s brought you in for “customer experience”, what’s the real problem you usually end up uncovering? In my own practice it tends to be something completely different from what was expected. Do you find the same?

The real problem is often somewhere else than the one that was named. One of my first tasks is to find the actual bottlenecks and propose solutions. In smaller companies it tends to be a process issue, whereas in corporates it’s a very complex matter, much more political, because you can only manage customer experience there if you have buy-in across the company. So first you need to build allies and put the whole system in place.

In small companies you can get straight to the point and build things up step by step. The impact shows incredibly fast.

You talk a lot about delegation and about freeing up your hands and your head for the important things. What do you think is the most common mental block stopping owners and managers from genuinely delegating, and how do you get past it?

Always the same thing. The feeling that no one will do it as well as they will, that’s the first one, and the second is the feeling that they have to have absolute control over everything, because if they don’t, the system will fall apart. But with those two beliefs you’ll never delegate. At best you’ll micromanage, and that’s never reduced anyone’s workload. The only way past it is to genuinely let yourself release the grip. There are various techniques for it, but no technique will change how you think. They’re process matters: how to assign tasks, how to set checkpoints, how to give feedback, and so on. You can set it up well. But if the owner or manager can’t mentally hand it over, no process will save it.

When we measure employee satisfaction, people often talk about the link to customer satisfaction. Do you genuinely see it as that clear-cut in practice, or is the relationship more complicated than it looks?

The link is there and it’s very direct. More satisfied employees really do lead to more satisfied customers. What’s trickier is how to pull both of those numbers up. Employees are looked after by HR, customers by CX in the better case, by marketing in the worse case. And those teams don’t really share their strategies. Each area is also influenced by other areas, so if you want to lift both, the work is highly complex. If a company is serious about it, you have to look at it holistically, talk to each other, and ideally have your data set up so it can be evaluated together.

Is there an “aha moment” from some research or project where the numbers or employee feedback genuinely surprised you and changed your view on something you’d considered obvious?

Not much surprises me anymore :) But there’s something I found interesting and have shown a few times because it sets a nice context: 65% of employees say customer satisfaction matters to their company, 43% say their employer cares as much about employee satisfaction as customer satisfaction, and 34% feel their employer takes a regular interest in their satisfaction. Those numbers come from a regular Ipsos survey on a representative sample of Czech employees. And they really do capture the picture of most companies. Leadership wants happy customers because they know that brings in more money, but interest in their own people, who are actually doing the heavy lifting, is much lower. And honestly, it doesn’t matter whether a company does something about it or not, if the employee doesn’t register it, the effect is the same as if the company did nothing.

When you help a company set up a new process, designing it is one thing and getting people to actually stick to it is another. In your experience, what works to stop the change from fizzling out after the first two months?

The key is getting people involved in creating the new process. So they take ownership of it and, crucially, so it reflects how they actually work and what their day-to-day reality looks like. That’s the design phase. In the maintenance phase, the key is having a clear process owner who watches that people are working according to the new process, and if they’re not, actively does follow-ups and gives feedback. With bigger processes I do follow-ups myself, where we improve the process in iterations based on feedback. You’ll never get it bulletproof the first time. The important thing is not to think you’re done once you’ve put the process on paper. That’s actually when the real work begins.

In CX there’s been a lot of talk about AI in recent years. Chatbots, automation, call summarisation, predictive models and much more. Where do you think AI genuinely helps customer experience, and where are companies overestimating what it can do today?

They overestimate the process side and underestimate the human factor. You can see it in various examples from abroad, where companies got excited about AI, scrapped their customer support and automated everything. Process-wise it kind of worked, but people weren’t happy. And in reality it did more damage than good. That’s why we’re now seeing a return to a more hybrid approach. Let AI handle part of it, but keep the human factor in there. The data also shows that your relationship with a brand breaks down the moment you, as a customer, need to deal with something out of the ordinary. I get that it’ll take some time and so on, but if a company helps me solve my problem, the relationship gets stronger. If it doesn’t, it cools off. AI is great for initial screening and simple operations, or on the other end, for follow-up evaluation. But the customer needs to be able to reach a real person easily and quickly. Because they often need help with things that aren’t standard, and that’s where the system has no autonomy.

If you had to bluntly recommend five things a good company does so its employees value their work, and through that their clients, what would they be?

I don’t think it’s so much about whether they value their work but how they feel in it. Whether they’re content, have a good team and manager, whether they see meaning in their work, whether they’re proud of their work and the company they work for. Most people need a degree of autonomy, independence and growth. And it’s always about finding balance and working with each person individually. You need to spark in people the desire to do their work well and channel their energy in the right direction. So they actually have the capacity to help clients. The worst kind of employees are the resigned and disengaged ones.

At X Pulse we have one favourite question we ask all our guests. How would you explain to your grandma over Sunday lunch what you actually do for a living?

That’s a good question and I never know how to answer it :-) I’d probably tell her I write recipes for work inside companies, so anyone standing at the stove can cook, and Sunday lunch doesn’t depend on a single cook who happens to know how the dish is made. That just like with cooking, it’s the same with what people do at work.

How do you think customer expectations in the Czech Republic will evolve over the next few years? What will they expect from us, and what are most companies still not prepared for?

No one dares predict several years ahead, because we’ve seen how much has changed in just the past few months. But the fundamentals will probably stay the same. It’ll still be about finding the balance between efficiency and being human. Customers want companies to ride the AI trend, but “not too much” :-) and finding that “not too much” will, in my view, be the hardest part, because I’m convinced customers will become more and more ambivalent and finding the sweet spot will simply be difficult. It’s also a fact that the relationship with a brand will increasingly be about a fair deal. The combination of brand, people, product, care. You’ll need to have these areas more connected and consistent with one another. For now they’re still areas handled by separate teams that don’t really collaborate.

And to wrap up, the classic. Do you have a favourite CX story, whether as a consultant or just as a customer, that’s stuck with you and you love to share?

I’m a well-known collector of bad customer experiences, my notebook there is rather colourful :-) But my favourite CX story has got to be dm. Who doesn’t love “dm” :) I happen to know that company from the inside too. I’ve trained dozens of store managers, regional managers and leadership, and if there’s anywhere that consistency I mentioned earlier actually works, it’s right there. Whoever you meet from dm, they’re the pure essence of the brand. Whether it’s people from head office, the warehouses or the stores. And as a customer you really feel it. You might not even know exactly why, but you enjoy going there, you feel comfortable and welcome.

Martin Švamberg: I make sure our customers have a great experience today, and an even better one tomorrow.

Ales Roucek — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:00:17 +0000

Martin Švamberg isn’t the type to lecture on customer experience from a distance – he’s spent twenty years pulling it apart process by process, number by number. From banking and energy, he made his way into insurance: an industry where the true quality of CX only reveals itself when something goes wrong. In this interview, he talks about how to separate signal from noise, why speed isn’t always the priority – and what his early dead ends with AI taught him.

Insurance and great customer experience – that sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. How did you end up deciding to work in CX at an insurance company?

My path to CX was actually shaped earlier by banking, where I learned to work with data and relational NPS categorisation. From there, a stint in the energy sector showed me just how fragile customer trust can be during times of market upheaval – like the collapse of Bohemia Energy.

I see insurance as a natural next step. It’s an industry that combines the stability of banking with the sensitivity of energy. But what really drew me in was the technological shift that’s happening right now – the opportunity to use AI to turn “just insurance” into something genuinely simple, intuitive, and efficient for the customer. That was a challenge I simply couldn’t walk away from.

When did you first realise that customer experience isn’t just about “being nice to customers” – that there’s serious analytical work behind it?

There were several moments, but probably the most powerful came with mortgages, about fifteen years ago. We realised that even the most empathetic branch adviser couldn’t ease the frustration of a customer waiting a month – sometimes longer – for mortgage approval. When you’re buying your first flat or building a house, you need support that’s fast and reliable.

That’s when CX became pure analytics for me. We had to break down the entire customer journey into individual processes, identify the critical bottlenecks, and compress what took weeks into days. That’s when it clicked: real CX isn’t about being nice to customers – it’s about process analytics that removes the barriers standing between a customer and their goal.

What does a typical day look like when you’re “hunting” a problem in the customer experience? Do you have a ritual or a process?

I start the morning by checking new items in the system we use to analyse customer feedback – a quick scan to see whether anything unusual is happening and how much of it there is. If anything in the queue needs more attention, I connect with the relevant team and we work out the next steps together. I also keep an eye on our CX metrics in Power BI. During the day I’ll dip into the CX community on LinkedIn to see if there’s anything worth reading 👍.

On the longer-term side, I’m always working on three or four development areas where we’re trying to move the needle significantly on customer experience.

How do you know when customer feedback is a genuine signal and when it’s just noise?

When you’re looking at customer feedback every day, you develop a feel for what’s routine and what’s new – it becomes almost instinctive. When it comes to a specific customer, you need to dig into their story: what products they have, how long they’ve had them, how they use them, and what their recent interactions with us looked like. Sometimes you start investigating a piece of feedback and realise the customer actually had that experience with a different insurer – or they’re reacting to something a friend or family member told them 😉.

What was your biggest “aha moment” in data analysis – a moment when the numbers told you something completely counterintuitive?

Everything around us is speeding up, so you’d expect speed to be the primary driver of customer satisfaction today. And in many cases, it is. But the human element still plays a significant role. When an adviser properly sets expectations upfront for a case that might take longer to resolve, customers end up just as satisfied as they would have been if the issue had been resolved quickly.

Direct pojišťovna has a reputation for taking CX seriously. What do you think is behind that – culture, processes, or specific people?

Essentially a mix of all three, and then some 😉.

It’s a culture where the company has built its success on several pillars, one of which is the client experience. In the insurance market, we stand out through an innovative approach – simplicity, flexibility, friendliness, and technological maturity.

Insurance is unique in that customers only really *need* you when something has gone wrong. How do you design a great experience around a moment nobody wants to have?

In that “moment of truth,” empathy is essential – alongside speed, process simplicity, and clear communication. The customer wants to get back to where they were before the unexpected event, as quickly as possible.

And when – despite every effort – you hit a snag, you owe the customer a clear explanation and, where necessary, an honest look at what went wrong: a risk not covered in the policy, a windscreen undervalued, breakdown assistance not included in the cover…

I know you well, Martin, and I know you’re constantly coming up with new ways to do CX better. Can you share an example of something you tried that turned out to be a dead end – and what it taught you?

Nothing comes to mind more readily than our first steps with AI 😉. The initial attempts at categorising CX comments using ChatGPT about two years ago involved… quite a few dead ends 😀:

The early assistants in ChatGPT didn’t work the way we expected. We had to learn how to write prompts and think carefully about how to build an effective assistant.
The new AI capabilities set our expectations very high – we assumed we’d be creating dozens of new categories and constantly finding new connections between them.

The reality at the time was that we were learning on the go. We discovered that rather than crafting individual prompts for everything, it was far simpler to use a universal approach and train the system to categorise based on validated, tested taxonomies – grouped into two to four categories that can vary slightly depending on the touchpoint.

We don’t use ChatGPT for categorisation anymore, but as an introduction to what AI can do, it was a brilliant school 👍.

How do you convince people in the organisation that a CX change is worth the investment – especially when results aren’t immediately measurable?

When it comes to process changes, concrete examples work best – showing where things are grinding to a halt. For instance, if customers are struggling with photographing their cars correctly during onboarding, your conversion rate drops, you’re losing business, and you’re creating dissatisfied customers all at the same time.

The ideal scenario is when people inside the organisation are also customers of the company – so they can live the CX story themselves 😉.

What’s the thing that frustrates you most as a CX analyst – something you see over and over and think, “this really isn’t that complicated”?

I have very little patience for recurring open feedback items – an unresolved query, a policy left incomplete, an email that never reached the customer. If we don’t get it right first time, it costs us far more effort later – effort that could have gone into something genuinely meaningful.

What do you think everyone who wants to do CX well should be able to do – regardless of industry?

Know your customer and be able to identify the key personas you’re serving.
Be a customer of your own company – experience the CX first-hand and live the customer journey (the brilliant parts and the imperfect ones alike). Visit a competitor occasionally 👍. Draw inspiration from everywhere 😉.
Understand your company’s processes – what works brilliantly and makes you stand out, and where the gaps are.
Propose changes, innovations, and simplifications.
Use common sense – and don’t be afraid to 👍.

If you had to explain what you do to your grandmother at a family gathering – how would that go?

I make sure our customers have a great experience today – and an even better one tomorrow 💚.

How do you see the expectations of today’s customers, shaped by other industries?

Customer expectations are rising in line with the ambitions of the most progressive players out there. Take Alza: “Order by evening, pick it up from the box in the morning.” That sets the bar extraordinarily high – and it influences every other sector of the economy, not just consumer electronics and delivery services.

Insurance can be progressive too. Getting insured based on a single photo of your car’s number plate is no longer just a distant dream 😉.

And finally – do you have a favourite CX story?

I’m sure I could find one – how about a dating story 😉? Every now and then, a comment appears in call centre feedback from a customer inviting an operator out for coffee – or straight out on a date 😀. The key ingredient behind those comments is usually the operator’s empathy, or simply a very pleasant voice. We make sure the feedback gets passed on – whether anything ever came of it, we honestly have no idea 😀.

Ales Roucek: We are launching X Pulse! A new digital magazine about CX and EX

Dan Bauer — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:00:36 +0000

Interview with Ales Roucek, founder of InsightSofa and initiator of the X Pulse magazine. When InsightSofa was founded fourteen years ago, it was primarily a tool for measuring and managing customer experience. Today, a new project is emerging around it – the digital magazine X Pulse, which aims to educate the Czech market in the area of Customer and Employee Experience. Why does the founder of a technology company start a media outlet? And does it even make sense to create a magazine in the age of AI?

What led you to establish X Pulse?

Honestly? Long-term frustration. In the Czech Republic, Customer Experience is often talked about in a very simplified way. As if CX were just about NPS or about the idea that “the customer is important.” But the reality is much deeper – it is about strategy, company culture, leadership, and working with data.

At InsightSofa, we got access to dozens of companies and saw that the market needs more than just software. It needs understanding. It needs inspiration. It needs examples of people who are doing it well. X Pulse was created as an answer to the question: What if, instead of another sales campaign, we started building a platform that will cultivate the entire environment in the long term?

What actually is it?

X Pulse (short for Experience Pulse) is a digital magazine focused on Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX).
But we do not want to be another “marketing blog.” X Pulse is a platform for deeper interviews with people who truly live CX and EX, specific case studies from both the Czech and international environment, commentary on trends, perspectives on leadership, culture, data, and technology, and yes – also critical reflection on what is often done wrong in the field.

We want the reader to take away not only inspiration, but also a specific idea that they can start applying in their company tomorrow.

How are you dealing with today’s AI? Does it make sense to create a magazine?

This is a very good question. Today, AI can generate an article within a few seconds. But that does not mean it can create an opinion, experience, and context. AI is a great tool. It helps us with research, structure, the articles themselves, or editing. But the idea itself, the question, the confrontation of opinions, and personal experience – that is still a human matter. Moreover, precisely in the age of AI, it is more important than ever to have curated content. X Pulse does not want to compete in quantity. It wants to compete in quality and perspective. And in well-chosen CX topics.

What can people expect from it?

Selected and relevant topics. Not random articles. Interviews with people who have actually built something in the field of CX and EX – whether they are business owners, CEOs, HR directors, or specialists who have results. We want to open questions such as: How is employee experience measured in a manufacturing company? How to connect CX with financial results? What to do when your NPS is growing but revenues are stagnating?
X Pulse will not be only inspirational. We want it to be slightly uncomfortable as well. Because it is precisely uncomfortable questions that move companies forward.

What do you want to achieve with it?

In the long term? To change the level of the debate in the Czech Republic. I would like it to become normal in a few years that CX is talked about as a strategic pillar of a company – not as a “soft topic” of marketing or HR.

In the short term, we want to build a community of people who share similar values: that both the customer and the employee are not items in Excel, but a source of the company’s long-term stability.

And yes – if, thanks to this, people better understand why it makes sense to systematically work with experience data, then it will naturally help our business as well.

Are you not concerned about the connection of this magazine with the InsightSofa product? Won’t people perceive it as advertising?

That is a legitimate concern. But we decided on transparency. X Pulse is created under InsightSofa, because we stand behind it financially and organizationally. We do not hide it. The difference is that the content will not be sales-driven. We will not write articles like “5 reasons to buy InsightSofa.” On the contrary – we want to invite even people who use other tools. We want to open discussions that are not one-sided.
If we bring value in the long term, people will very quickly recognize the difference between advertising and content with added value. Trust cannot be forced. It can only be built.

Where do you see X Pulse in two years?

I would like X Pulse to be a natural reference point for anyone in the Czech Republic who is interested in CX and EX. For it to have a strong community of readers, to regularly bring interviews with top people from the market, and perhaps in the future to have its own offline meetups or conference. If we manage to contribute to the fact that Czech companies will think more about experience as a strategic capital, then it would all make sense.

Final question – what would you say to companies that are not yet paying much attention to CX and EX?

That they may think they are saving time and money. But in reality, they are taking their future on credit. Customer and employee experience will always manifest itself in some way. The question is not if – but when. And the earlier you start managing it consciously, the greater advantage you will gain.