Your contact center agents are not the only people responsible for your customer experience. Every person in your company who touches a product, a process, or a decision is shaping how your customer feels about your brand, whether they realize it or not. Chris Morrissey, General Manager of Customer Experience at Zoom, calls this horizontal CX, and it starts with one question every leader should be asking every employee, every quarter: how did you use what you learned from customers to make a better decision? When that question becomes routine, “not my job” stops being an option. This episode covers what it takes to build that accountability across every role, every channel, and every technology decision your company is making right now.
What You Will Learn About Earning Customer Loyalty:
- Why measuring individual interactions instead of full customer journeys causes teams to celebrate outcomes that are actually failures
- Which voices of the customer most companies are collecting but never routing to the teams making product, marketing, and service decisions
- Why keeping customers is a bigger revenue lever than acquiring them at scale, and why most recognition and compensation structures have not caught up to that reality
- What it takes to make store staff, product owners, and agents to act as one brand to a customer who does not care about your org chart
- Why the pressure to adopt AI fast may be creating a problem worse than the one companies are trying to solve
Actionable Customer Experience and Loyalty Takeaways:
- Audit your CX structure this week. Draw a line between what your contact center owns and what every other department touches. If the contact center is the only team accountable for customer outcomes, that is a structural problem, not a staffing one.
- Change the question you ask in leadership meetings. Stop asking how the CX team is performing. Start asking every department head how they used customer feedback to change a decision this quarter. Ask it every quarter until the answer changes.
- Map where your AI is deployed across the full customer journey. List every touchpoint where AI is handling a customer interaction. Decide which of those moments require human judgment or emotional connection, and reassign them to people.
- Check whether your voice-of-customer data is actually leaving the contact center. If survey results, chat transcripts, and service call insights are sitting in one team’s dashboard, they are not driving product, marketing, or service decisions. Fix the routing, not just the collection.
- Evaluate who gets recognized for keeping customers versus acquiring them. If your incentive and recognition programs reward new customer acquisition but not churn reduction, your culture is signaling that retention is a lower priority. That signal travels.
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Doing CX Right Podcast Topics with Timestamps
0:00 Zoom’s CX role and “care for customers” as a culture principle
2:00 What “Doing CX Right” means: rising expectations and lower switching costs
3:00 Personalization and proactive updates using customer data
5:00 Why single-call metrics miss the real journey
7:00 CX as a horizontal practice, not just a “contact center”
8:00 Voice of customer beyond surveys: social, reviews, and service notes
10:00 “Borderless CX” and making every role accountable
12:00 Churn, referrals, and why retaining customers beats one more new logo
15:00 When AI should handle transactions and when humans must lead
17:00 AI overload, leadership pressure, and employee fear
20:00 Making accountability real through the questions leaders ask
22:00 Data silos, AI silos, and human silos across the journey
23:00 Journey mapping with cross-functional teams
24:00 Shared KPIs and ending “not my job” thinking
25:00 Leadership advice: curiosity, confidence, and humility
Read Full Episode Transcript
Stacy Sherman: Hello, Chris. Welcome to the Doing CX Right Show.
Chris Morrissey: Thanks, Stacy. Great to be here.
Stacy Sherman: I am excited for our conversation. First of all, you work for a fabulous brand and I’m a customer and many people listening are a customer and that is Zoom. What we share in common is a love and a practice around customer experience. So we’re going to dive deep into many topics, but before we do, Chris, can you tell a little bit about who are you, what do you do professionally?
Chris Morrissey: Sure. Well, thank you for being a Zoom customer. Zoom is a very customer-focused organization that comes from Eric, our CEO, all the way down. Care for our customers is actually one of our culture principles, which is good for me because I’m in the customer experience business, so I get to actually practice internally what we preach externally. My role at Zoom is General Manager of our customer experience business. That’s everything to do with what products we bring to market, how we bring it to market, how we support our customers, how we sell it. Pretty much everything to do with a customer experience business at Zoom.
Stacy Sherman: You wear a lot of hats, obviously.
Chris Morrissey: Yes. I think a lot of people at Zoom do, but that’s what makes it fun.
Stacy Sherman: Tell me a fun fact people might not know about you.
Chris Morrissey: I am an identical twin. I have an identical twin brother who lives on the West Coast, too. We both grew up on the east coast in Syracuse, New York, and now we’re both on the west coast, just different ends of the state. I’m in Southern California; he’s in Northern California. We both have two children, a boy and a girl, and they were both born in December and July, and they’re the exact same number of days apart. Not the same age, but still interesting.
Stacy Sherman: I love coincidences, although some might say there are no coincidences.
Chris Morrissey: For sure.
Stacy Sherman: This show is about doing customer experience right. So when I say Doing CX Right, what does that mean to you?
Chris Morrissey: I would start with the era we’re in as consumers. We take the best experiences we have with any brand in any industry and apply it to every brand in every industry. There is no longer tolerance for a particular industry not giving a good customer experience. The water is rising for all brands in all industries, which is a good thing. The switching costs are becoming easier and easier for consumers, which challenges brands in many ways. In many ways the experience becomes the competitive differentiator, equal to or more than the product or service you offer. Two things I would say matter most. As consumers we give up a lot of our information to the brands we work with. They know our shopping habits, our buying habits, how we have engaged with them. So use that. Treat me like Chris, not just another customer. Make it personalized. Brands like Netflix or Uber do this well. Netflix does not ask you every time you log in what kind of shows you like. It knows. And Uber tells you the Blue Lander is on his way, it is five minutes away, your driver is John. Anticipate what I am going to need and proactively reach out so you take the burden off me as a consumer.
Stacy Sherman: I worked at telecom companies and one of the things you are describing is showing we know that you are an iPhone user, so show iPhone accessories, not Android. You have to know your customer. Now many companies say to me, we are so focused on customer experience, we are deploying surveys and investing in support teams and we have AI and automation, yet they are still losing customers and top talent too. They are doing CX but not Doing CX Right. When you close that gap, it is a huge differentiator. From your perspective, what is the root cause of that gap?
Chris Morrissey: One, and this is contact center-centric, but it expands: do not view an interaction as isolated in an engagement. There has been a trend toward many measures in contact centers being very single-engagement-focused. Average handle time, average talk time. That one particular call. I think you move away from that and look at journeys. What is the customer journey over the lifespan of the relationship? It is no longer about a transaction. It is about the journey, and that journey can span multiple years. An example: if a customer called and an agent answered their question very quickly and they were happy, the contact center could celebrate. That was a great call, short, and the question was answered. But not knowing the full journey, that customer may have tried a chat bot, been through the IVR, called a storefront, done a lot of things to finally get there. That is the difference between a journey and an engagement. The other thing I would say is to move away from looking at a contact center as a vertical point of deflection. That should not be the strategy. Customer experience should be a horizontal strategy. Two things that means: customers can engage with you in more places and it should be the same experience whether they go to a storefront, a branch office, a chat, a voice bot, or a human. Make it the same everywhere. More importantly, take all those insights and make sure other departments like your product team, services team, and marketing team are incorporating what your customers tell you every single day into how they make decisions. Do not keep those insights locked in your contact center. Spread them across the company and have them at the center of all your strategic decisions.
Stacy Sherman: You are talking about voice of customer. Many companies are tunnel-visioned. They are only thinking about the surveys they collect and not looking at that holistic view from social media, from ratings and reviews, from contact center chat notes. Is that what you are seeing as well?
Chris Morrissey: Yes. It is where they communicate to you, with you, or about you. In person, online, digital, all of that needs to come together. It is hard because technology lives in silos. But the data should not be in silos. The data should come together and you use that data across all those places to get better insights.
Stacy Sherman: You said the data lives in silos, unfortunately, and so are the humans.
Chris Morrissey: Yes. And sometimes it makes customers feel like they do too.
Stacy Sherman: I say all the time that the customer does not care about your org chart.
Chris Morrissey: I say the same thing. They do not think of you as a department. They do not think of you as billing or finance or marketing or product. You are a brand. Let me connect to anyone I need to connect to in order to solve my problem.
Stacy Sherman: You said a statement that is intriguing. You said customer experience is horizontal. For those who are first learning about CX and even those who have been in it a long time, share more about what that means and a real example someone will understand.
Chris Morrissey: The analogy I give is: if you went to our CEO Eric and said, Eric, who is accountable for making sure our customers are happy, in his wildest dreams he would never say we have a call center that takes phone calls, that is them. Everyone in our company is accountable to making sure every customer is happy. That is the philosophy. But how do you take that to practice? If your philosophy is that you keep customers happy by having great agents in the contact center, your decisions are going to be about deflection. But if your philosophy is truly horizontal, then you make sure customers can engage with everybody in your company and it is the same experience. The person best suited to answer a customer problem may not be an agent. It might be a product owner. If you are a hotel, the person who can best solve the problem is probably someone actually in the hotel. Connect those communication channels beyond the walls of the contact center. I call it borderless CX. Then challenge other departments. How are you using the voice of the customer in the past two months to make a decision? It should be part of every conversation. The insights are there, more readily accessible today because of AI. Ask people how they are using them.
Stacy Sherman: You used the word accountable and I want listeners to understand that it is much more than individuals being responsible because that is tied to a specific role. Accountable is where people go up and beyond.
Chris Morrissey: Absolutely. It has to be accountability and it comes from the top down. If your leaders believe it and talk about it consistently and make it clear, behaviors will change across the company.
Stacy Sherman: People listening often say we do not have the budget for customer experience. We have a contact center and it is on them, and everybody points fingers. When the ROI conversation comes up, what do you say to people who think CX is fluffy?
Chris Morrissey: It is a culture shift. Sales gets a lot of recognition for acquiring customers, award trips, all of that, and they should. I grew up in sales and I am a huge fan. But there are roles like agents and CSMs and people who interface with customers to make sure that once someone is a customer, they stay a customer. I think you need to elevate that. Because once you reach a certain size, what impacts your revenue more than anything is not necessarily acquiring one more customer. It is keeping the 7,000 you have. Churn reduction. When you get to that phase of maturity, you start putting more emphasis, more recognition, and whether it is compensation or awards, on the people maintaining your customers and making sure they do not leave. Churn reduction has a bigger impact on your business than acquiring one more new customer at scale. You look at churn, CSAT, how much business are you getting through referrals. If you are referred to a brand, I think you refer more based upon the experience you had than what that brand actually does.
Stacy Sherman: You said referrals. That is such a missed opportunity for companies. What have you seen as successful tactics to get referrals and get people talking about you positively?
Chris Morrissey: It is harder because there is a stat, and I will get the numbers wrong, but an unhappy customer is more likely to share than a happy one. If you are super unhappy they will tell everybody. If you are very happy they might tell one person. So it is equal parts making sure they are not unhappy, because that goes viral quickly, and making sure that if you are happy and have had a great differentiated experience, you will share. Customers do share. All of us have had experiences where we thought that was amazing, and sometimes the experience is what you remember more than the food at a restaurant or what product you bought. It was the experience. We are humans. We are emotional creatures. If you are mining social media and other places where customers communicate about your brand, not just with your brand, you should see those things trend in the right direction if you are doing it right. You reduce churn and get more customers through referrals. That is the theory.
Stacy Sherman: I love that you said we are emotional creatures, because research I am doing that is coming out in a couple of weeks is actually revealing that companies are designing experiences that are transactional and logical, but consumers are buying and referring and staying loyal based on emotions, and there is a real disconnect.
Chris Morrissey: I think it is both, actually. There are some very simple transactional questions a consumer may have where all they want is a quick answer, low friction, channel of their choice, same experience every time. That is still a good experience. But there are other moments in the journey where you have to get past treating it like a transaction and treat it like an engagement. Treat the customer differently. This is where human agents versus AI agents will differentiate more in the future. Transactional ones, let your AI agents handle quickly. Complex ones, let your human agents take over and really focus on creating a relationship and an experience with the customer.
Stacy Sherman: Going back to the customer journey, when you are designing it, how customers learn, buy, get, use, pay, get help, there is a spot for AI and a spot for the human, and you have to know the difference.
Chris Morrissey: Please know the difference, because you can get it wrong. Some people out there, and not Chris personally or Zoom as a company, have taken the position that AI means there are no humans engaging with customers ever again. I think that is a bad philosophy. I have heard people go extreme: you will not need human agents anymore because AI agents will do everything. That is not our belief. We do think AI plays a significant role in transactional engagements and in making your human agents better so they can focus on complex engagements. Do not treat those like transactions. Treat them like engagements.
Stacy Sherman: Build those relationships where those opportunities arise. Before I get to AI further, you are talking to tons of customers and prospects for Zoom solutions. What is keeping people up at night lately?
Chris Morrissey: Speaking with customers and prospects and partners is the favorite part of my job. Right now it is AI. AI is, like it or not, the biggest tech revolution we have seen in our lives. And it changes faster than ever before. Literally weekly there is a new AI engine. So they are overwhelmed. But to make it more complicated there is immense pressure from leaders to adopt AI. You read about it constantly. So they are saying, how do I adopt something I cannot fully grasp, that is changing very fast, and where I hear different messages from different people constantly? It is creating a different kind of stress. They understand it is not going away and there is tremendous value in it, but it is happening very fast with a lot of conflicting messaging and a lot of vendors popping up overnight. And then there are all the security and privacy issues that come along with it. All of that at once, at the speed at which they are expected to act on it.
Stacy Sherman: My advice to those listening is that more is not more. We do not need to keep throwing technology at every problem because it is causing more data silos and more human silos. It is the right technology at the right time, uncovering the core problem, and finding the few solutions that can give you insights to make better decisions and support the customer. The more-is-more mentality is what is stressing business leaders. And there is also a FOMO, a fear of missing out. The last thing I would add is that employees have fear and leadership is ignoring that.
Chris Morrissey: That is a true statement. The bottom-up fear is that AI is going to take my job. Employees are reading about large companies letting go of thousands of people. That is happening in real time in front of them. There is already an unease and then they come to work and hear we have to adopt AI faster. What they hear is: you are telling me to adopt what is going to replace me faster. You have to have empathy for the employees. It is a very natural reaction and you have to lead your company through those conversations.
Stacy Sherman: We are getting close to the end. Give me a couple of steps for how to drive more accountability across the company, from back office to front line.
Chris Morrissey: It is not an event. It is a cultural change. It is how you speak and the types of questions you ask on a regular basis. If your question on a regular basis is: how did you incorporate what you learned about our customers in the past month into a decision you made this quarter, and you ask every employee that every quarter, the behavior will follow. People sometimes look for the easy button. If I just tell everybody that customers are important, the company will change. Sadly it does not work that way. It depends on the consistent conversations you have. Consistent repetition is the key. Change that one question you ask all your employees all the time and the behavior will follow suit.
Stacy Sherman: I would add: make sure customer experience feedback is on everybody’s agenda. Start your meetings that way. That is so easy.
Chris Morrissey: It is in the conversations every day. That will change more than buying a new technology stack. If you change the conversations you have with your employees, behavior changes.
Stacy Sherman: Any other key takeaway you want people to go do?
Chris Morrissey: With AI right now, what is happening is we have AI projects going on all over the place because of the pressure to use it. But in many cases you are not creating data silos. You are creating AI silos. What that means for the customer is: if I talk to a voice bot on one AI engine it behaves a certain way, but if I talk to a chat bot with your same brand using a different AI engine, I get a different experience, maybe different answers. If I go to your FAQs using AI, that is a different experience again. If I call a human agent and they have a co-pilot guiding them in real time, that is yet another AI engine and a different experience. Be careful we do not get into AI silos the same way we got into data silos.
Stacy Sherman: And the human silos.
Chris Morrissey: And the human silos for sure.
Stacy Sherman: Break the silos now. Journey mapping is a great way to do that. When you bring cross-functional teams together and literally map out the experience the customer has, and validate with real customers that the way you are supporting them is the way they want to be supported. Where is every AI in this journey? Where is the human? That is how you really start, and it is a domino effect because people do not even realize where one role ends and another begins.
Chris Morrissey: It goes back to the conversations. One of my least favorite answers in any company is not my job. If everybody knows that customer experience is your job regardless of your title, you can never say I did not do something right for the customer because it was not my job. Make it very clear: that is 100% your job. You might have a different title, but customer experience is your job.
Stacy Sherman: To make sure everyone understands that regardless of job title, there need to be shared values, shared KPIs, shared metrics, shared goals. Because if one department is just about expense reduction, and another is just about profit, and another is just about NPS scores, you are going to keep creating silos.
Chris Morrissey: Exactly right.
Stacy Sherman: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received or given?
Chris Morrissey: Be curious. Genuinely curious about everything, and certainly at work. Question everything in a good way, with true genuine curiosity. Why is that? I do not understand. Dig in. Not to be a critic but to understand. If you are curious, you will ask a lot of questions about a lot of areas of the business that will surface a lot of areas for improvement.
Stacy Sherman: My final question. I want you to envision 20-year-old Chris. If you could go back in time and talk to younger Chris, what would you say to him now that you did not know then?
Chris Morrissey: Beyond invest in Apple and Amazon and Zoom, I would say be more confident. I was insecure. Just be confident. That is not arrogance. It is humility with confidence. Be bold and convicted. If your gut is telling you something is right, chase it with passion. Trust yourself. If you are confident, go after it hard. Do not watch it from a distance and think you probably cannot do it. Believe in yourself and then go after it with passion. But stay humble.
Stacy Sherman: And radically accept that you are going to have supporters and critics. Not everyone is going to accept and back you, so do not let that knock you down.
Chris Morrissey: If everybody likes you or everybody dislikes you, you are probably doing something wrong. You are going to have both.
Stacy Sherman: Thank you so much for being here. I will include your information and Zoom in the show notes so people can find you.
Chris Morrissey: It was great chatting, Stacy. Thank you so much.
Customer Experience Questions & Answers To Boost Business Results
1. Why are companies still losing customers even after investing in surveys, AI, and support teams?
Because most of that investment is pointed at the wrong unit of measurement. Companies are measuring and optimizing individual interactions while customers are experiencing a full journey. A customer can complete a call that an agent resolved quickly and correctly, while having had four failed attempts to reach help before that call. The contact center celebrates. The customer remembers the whole sequence. Chris Morrissey calls this the difference between an engagement and a journey. Until companies shift their measurement from individual touchpoints to the full arc of the customer relationship, they will keep reporting positive metrics on experiences customers are quietly abandoning.
2. What does horizontal CX actually mean in practice?
It means customer experience accountability does not stop at the contact center walls. Every department, product, marketing, billing, operations, makes decisions that a customer will eventually feel. Horizontal CX means those departments are actively using customer insights to inform those decisions, not waiting for the contact center to flag a problem after it has already cost a customer. Chris Morrissey’s test for whether a company has built this is direct: ask any leader how they used what they learned from customers to make a decision this quarter. If they cannot answer, the insights are not leaving the silo.
3. How do you build real CX accountability across an entire company, not just the customer-facing teams?
It is not an announcement and it is not a training program. It is a behavioral change that comes from the questions leaders ask consistently over time. Chris Morrissey is direct: if you ask every employee every quarter how they incorporated customer feedback into a decision, and you keep asking it quarter after quarter, behavior follows. Stacy Sherman adds a practical starting point: put customer experience data on the agenda at every department meeting, not just CX reviews. When every team starts with what customers are saying, the idea that CX belongs to someone else becomes harder to sustain.
4. When does AI help the customer experience, and when does it hurt it?
The distinction Chris Morrissey draws is between transactional engagements and complex ones. Transactional interactions, account questions, order status, basic troubleshooting, are well suited to AI because speed and consistency are what the customer wants. Complex interactions, billing disputes, onboarding confusion, and complaints are where AI creates damage if it becomes a barrier between the customer and a person who can actually resolve the situation. The risk right now is that companies deploying AI under pressure to cut costs are removing human access from precisely the moments where relationship and trust matter most. A second risk Morrissey names directly: inconsistent AI deployments across voice bots, chat bots, FAQs, and agent-assist tools are creating a new generation of silos that produce contradictory customer experiences within the same brand, repeating the exact mistake companies already made with data.
5. What is the revenue case for prioritizing customer retention over new acquisition?
At scale, retaining existing customers drives more revenue than adding new ones. Chris Morrissey makes the point without hedging: when a company reaches a certain size, churn reduction has a bigger impact on the business than acquiring one more new customer. The compounding effect of retained customers, referral business generated by satisfied customers, and reduced acquisition cost makes the math straightforward. What is less straightforward is why most companies still weigh recognition and investment toward acquisition. The answer is cultural. New sales have visible, measurable wins. Retention is invisible until it fails. Changing that requires leaders to actively elevate the roles responsible for keeping customers and measure them with the same rigor applied to those who bring new customers in.
About CHRIS MORRISSEY
Chris is the General Manager and Global Head of CX Sales & Go-To-Market at Zoom, where he drives strategy and execution for the company’s customer experience business. With over 25 years of expertise in business strategy, sales, and partner development, Chris brings a wealth of experience to his role at Zoom, which he joined in 2023.
Prior to Zoom, Chris spent more than seven years at NICE, where he led multiple sales and channel partner teams across both U.S. and international markets. He joined NICE in 2016 following their acquisition of his company, VPI, a leading workforce engagement solutions provider, where he served as President. His earlier career includes valuable experience at Deloitte in their valuation services practice, laying the foundation for his comprehensive understanding of business operations and strategy.
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About Stacy Sherman:
An award-winning international Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) who has delivered more than 100 standing ovation keynotes and workshops and co-authored best-selling books on Experience Management for sustainable success. She developed a proprietary framework that enables leaders and teams to enhance revenue and brand reputation. Her proven methodology is based on her MBA degree and 25 years of leadership in sales, marketing, employee, and customer experience across diverse industries, including Verizon, AT&T, Schindler Elevator Corporation, Wilton Brands, Martha Stewart Crafts, and LiveOps, generating $2.4 billion in savings and hundreds of millions in revenue. Stacy Sherman has earned widespread recognition for her award-winning “Doing CX Right” podcast, ranked in the top 2% globally with over 200 episodes, and for her courses on LinkedIn Learning, which have garnered hundreds of 5-star reviews. A multi-year Global CX Guru awardee and 2026 ICMI Hall of Fame inductee, Stacy’s insights have been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, Yahoo News, and other leading publications.
