2026 Annual Conference: Customer Service

Customer Experience by Design, Not by Chance

Blake Morgan, 3X Author, Host of The Modern Customer Podcast

Customer Experience by Design, Not by Chance

Blake Morgan, 3X Author, Host of The Modern Customer Podcast

Customer experience isn’t built through a single initiative, annual survey, or executive mandate. It is shaped by the thousands of decisions employees make every day. Organizations that consistently deliver exceptional experiences don’t leave those decisions to chance, they build habits, leadership practices, and organizational cultures that make putting customers first the natural choice.

In this engaging keynote, customer experience futurist and bestselling author Blake Morgan introduces her WAYS framework, a practical approach for embedding customer-centric thinking into everyday operations. Through compelling stories, research, and real-world examples, Blake demonstrates how leading organizations develop a deeper understanding of their customers, create cultures of accountability, embrace honest feedback, and drive meaningful improvement through consistent daily action.

Rather than treating customer experience as a department or a score to manage, attendees will explore how leadership behaviors and organizational habits influence every interaction customers have with a brand. Whether you’re leading a customer service organization, designing products, marketing your brand, or shaping business strategy, you’ll leave with practical ideas for creating an organization where customer experience becomes a shared responsibility, and a deliberate decision made every day.

Key Takeaways:

• Experience the WAYS framework for making customer experience an organizational habit rather than a one-time initiative.
• Learn practical leadership behaviors that strengthen accountability and customer-centric decision-making.
• Discover how to uncover honest customer feedback and transform it into meaningful action.
• Explore how small, consistent improvements create lasting customer and employee impact.
• Build a stronger organizational culture where every employee understands their role in delivering exceptional experiences.

Blake Morgan

3X Author, Host of The Modern Customer Podcast

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist and the author of three books on customer experience, including her latest, The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: New Rules for Building Business Around Today’s Customer. She was dubbed “The Queen of CX” by Meta and named one of top 40 female keynote speakers by Real Leaders magazine.

Blake is the host of The Modern Customer Podcast, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor whose courses have reached thousands of professionals. She regularly contributes to Forbes and serves as a guest lecturer at Columbia University and the University of California, San Diego. She’s also adjunct faculty for Rutgers’ executive education MBA program.

Blake has worked with leading brands including Amazon, Home Depot, Marriott, Coca-Cola, AT&T, and the Federal Reserve Bank. She lives in Southern California with her husband, their two children, and two dogs.

Cleaning the Organizational Junk Drawer

Patrice James, Director of Customer Experience Operations, SunStrong Management

Cleaning the Organizational Junk Drawer

Patrice James, Director of Customer Experience Operations, SunStrong Management

Every organization accumulates clutter over time. Processes are added but rarely retired. Responsibilities shift without clear ownership. Valuable institutional knowledge becomes buried beneath years of workarounds, exceptions, and “the way we’ve always done it.” Like an overfilled junk drawer, organizations often struggle to distinguish what still creates value from what simply takes up space.
In this thought-provoking session, Patrice James introduces a practical framework for helping organizations uncover the hidden complexity that develops as they grow and evolve. By examining how organizational tenure, accumulated knowledge, unclear ownership, and legacy practices influence the way work gets done, attendees will learn how to simplify operations while preserving the expertise that makes their organizations successful.

Rather than treating every process as permanent, Patrice will demonstrate how leaders can identify outdated practices, clarify accountability, and reconnect teams around shared goals and intentional ways of working. The result is an organization that is easier to navigate, more adaptable to change, and better equipped to capture, share, and build upon its collective knowledge.
Whether you’re leading a long-established organization or a rapidly growing team, you’ll leave with practical tools for reducing organizational clutter, strengthening operational clarity, and creating a foundation that supports better decisions, continuous improvement, and future innovation.

Key Takeaways:

• Identify the hidden organizational clutter created by legacy processes, unclear ownership, and institutional habits.
• Learn a practical framework for evaluating what should be preserved, improved, simplified, or retired.
• Strengthen accountability by clarifying ownership and aligning work around shared outcomes.
• Preserve valuable institutional knowledge while eliminating unnecessary complexity.
• Build a more adaptable organization that is better prepared for continuous improvement, organizational change, and future technologies.

Patrice James

Director of Customer Experience Operations, SunStrong Management

Patrice James is the Director of Customer Experience Operations at SunStrong Management and a care operations leader with more than 12 years of progressive experience across customer service, contact center operations, training, and vendor management. Her career includes leadership roles with evermore, Walmart, and Restoration Hardware, where she has helped organizations strengthen operational performance, improve customer outcomes, and build scalable teams in complex, fast-moving environments.

Patrice specializes in enterprise operations strategy, multi-vendor and BPO governance, cost optimization, and data-driven decision-making. Known for bringing structure and clarity to operational complexity, she has led technology transformations, developed high-performing teams, and translated performance insights into practical business improvements. Her leadership approach combines financial accountability, cross-functional collaboration, and a strong commitment to creating customer experiences that are both efficient and human-centered.

Finding RHYTHM: Turning Purpose into Everyday Practice

Justin Robbins, Metric Sherpa

Finding RHYTHM: Turning Purpose into Everyday Practice

Justin Robbins, Metric Sherpa

Your mission statement may be clear. Your values may be displayed everywhere. But if those ideas don’t show up in meetings, decisions, recognition, and day-to-day priorities, employees notice.

In this session, Justin Robbins, author of More Than a Motto, will help you close the gap between what your organization says it stands for and what employees actually experience. That disconnect has a cost: people become cynical about culture initiatives, disengage from their work, and struggle to deliver the kind of experience customers remember.

Drawing on research and real-world examples across industries, Justin will show you how everyday leadership habits either reinforce, or undermine, your culture, and how finding a repeatable RHYTHM can make purpose visible when work gets busy.

You’ll leave with practical ways to make purpose actionable and keep work from working against your team. No matter where you lead, you’ll be equipped to build greater ownership, meaning, and stronger employee and customer experiences.

Key Takeaways:

• Diagnose where your stated values break down in the day-to-day employee experience.
• Identify the leadership behaviors and workplace patterns that build trust, commitment, and accountability.
• Design team RHYTHMS that bring purpose into conversations, decisions, and recognition.
• Replace one-time culture initiatives with practical habits that employees can experience consistently.
• Connect a stronger employee experience to more meaningful customer interactions.

Justin Robbins

Metric Sherpa

Justin Robbins is a keynote speaker who helps leaders connect employee experience and customer experience to improve performance.

Organizations struggle when they treat EX and CX as separate efforts. Justin shows how everyday decisions about workload, expectations, and incentives directly shape both the employee experience and the customer experience.

With over 20 years in leadership, operations, and customer experience, he brings a practical perspective that resonates across functions. His keynotes help leaders align how work gets done with what the organization promises, leading to better execution, stronger engagement, and more consistent results.

HumanX: Why Better AI Starts with Better Experiences

Bill Price, Author and Founder/CEO, Intendra AI

HumanX: Why Better AI Starts with Better Experiences

Bill Price, Author and Founder/CEO, Intendra AI

Artificial intelligence is reshaping customer experience at an unprecedented pace, but many organizations risk applying AI to experiences that were never designed to succeed. Rather than improving outcomes, they simply accelerate customer frustration.

Drawing on insights from his latest book, HUMANX, and his work helping organizations implement AI to improve customer and business outcomes, Bill Price challenges conventional thinking about the role of AI in customer experience. Instead of viewing AI as a replacement for people, he demonstrates how leading organizations are using it to uncover friction, diagnose root causes, strengthen relationships, and create new opportunities for growth.

Through real-world examples, Bill will explore why a significant share of customer demand stems from broken processes rather than work that should be optimized with AI, and how organizations can use AI to identify and resolve those issues before they scale them. He will also examine how AI can augment employee decision-making, uncover actionable insights from customer data in days instead of weeks, and create capacity for more meaningful human interactions.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for applying AI in ways that improve customer outcomes, empower employees, and build experiences that are both more effective and more human.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how AI can identify and eliminate the root causes of customer friction before those issues are amplified.
• Distinguish where AI delivers the greatest value and where human expertise remains essential.
• Explore practical ways AI can augment employee decision-making and uncover insights that drive growth.
• Apply Human²X principles to create experiences that strengthen relationships while delivering measurable business impact.
• Build an AI strategy that enhances, not replaces, the human side of customer experience.

Bill Price

Author and Founder/CEO, Intendra AI

Bill Price is a CX industry veteran who has led strategies and operations at Automated Call Processing Corporation, MCI Telecommunications, and Amazon, as its first Worldwide VP of Customer Service. Bill and his team at Driva Solutions have helped more than 150 clients to achieve the delicate balance between costs and CX. He co-founded the 9-country LimeBridge Global Alliance and the 30-company Global Operations Council. Bill has co-authored five books (The Best Service is No Service, 2008; Your Customer Rules!, 2015; The Frictionless Organization, 2022; Zero Complaints, 2025; and HumanX, 2026).

Last year, he formed Intendra AI with his development team in Bangalore and marketing team in Bogota to “Eliminate friction and activate insights”, with 5 early customers already onboard. Bill lives in Bellevue, Washington, outside of Seattle.