CX Files

CX Files runs on a simple weekly rhythm: two analysts, one guest, one topic drawn from the working end of the customer experience and outsourcing industry. Mark Hillary and Peter Ryan host. They tend to open by locating themselves, sometimes Sao Paulo and Montreal, sometimes Tbilisi, Berlin, London, Manila, or Munich, which quietly reinforces how geographically spread the business is. The banter is brief. One host then introduces the week's interview, explaining how the guest came across their radar and what question the conversation is meant to answer. Questions are long and carefully signposted. Guests get room to finish a thought, and the hosts often paraphrase before moving on. The subject matter is comparative by instinct. An episode with Sarah Leff of Interact Contact Centres considered the Eastern Cape as a delivery region and why the UK remains the dominant demand market for South African services, with shared media, communication style, and time zones all part of the answer. Chris Chance of CCI Global walked through the launch of the Outsourcing Alliance of Kenya and a framework that splits Africa into mature, emerging, and nascent delivery markets. Channel strategy comes up regularly. Gareth Bray of Premier CX, who worked on the team that rolled WhatsApp out across Europe, discussed asynchronous support and why immediate response is not always what a customer wants, while Ryan noted that Canada has not moved that way yet even as Europe and Latin America have. Technology gets a measured rather than breathless treatment. Roger Barlow of LATAM Translations described AI handling the bulk of translated text competently while still stumbling on names, nuance, irony, and material that would read as inappropriate to a human eye. Melanie Disse of Melanie Disse Consulting raised a structural problem: feedback now arrives from many more sources than surveys, but the contact centre and insights teams who receive it usually cannot fix what it describes. Kwame Agyei, founder of a BPO delivering out of Ghana, talked about serving smaller businesses from Accra. Several of these guests were first found on LinkedIn, and the hosts say so, which tells you something about how the show is put together. Nothing here is dressed up as a trend report. It is closer to a series of practitioner briefings, useful if you need to know what a particular market or channel actually looks like from inside. Episodes close the same way each week, with thanks and an invitation to reach the hosts directly.