Building the future CX team: why intention beats efficiency.

On the latest episode of Puzzel Talks, host Frieza Brooks sat down with CX consultant, author and founder of Cultivate Customer Experience by Design, Katie Stabler, to unpack what it really takes to build a customer experience team fit for the age of AI.

As agentic AI takes on more of the routine, frontline teams are left holding the conversations that are harder to handle: the complex, the emotional, the ones involving customers in real distress. So how do CX leaders build a team that can still show up with intention, rather than just efficiency?

Intention starts long before design

For Katie, the answer begins well before a single workflow is built. "Intention starts much before design. It starts in understanding," she says. Most organisations treat customer experience as interaction-focused, but she points to something deeper: the customer experience chain. Every interaction creates an emotion. Every emotion creates a memory. Every memory creates a perception. That chain, not the interaction alone, is what customers actually walk away with.

Designing for that takes real understanding of psychology and behaviour, not just process mapping. Whether the experience is AI-led or human-led, the same discipline applies: understand first, design second, manage third.

Break the silos before you build anything

Katie's clearest warning is about organisations that skip straight to building. She shared an example from a round table discussion: an energy company's IT department launched a customer-facing chatbot with the best of intentions, but without the CX department ever hearing about it. The result was a missed opportunity to get the service design right from people who understood it best.

Her advice for any organisation trying to be more intentional comes down to three practical steps. First, involve the CX function from day one, not after the fact. Second, listen to the frontline. Agents hear what's working and what isn't in real time, and that insight is, in Katie's words, "gold dust". Third, bring in external expertise where the internal picture is incomplete.

Let the customer choose the channel

When it comes to handing a conversation from a virtual agent to a human, Katie is clear that there's no universal answer. "Every single customer is different," she says. Rather than mapping fixed interjection points, she argues the decision should sit with the customer: their channel, and whether they want a human or a virtual agent at all.

That choice also becomes a strategic signal. If more customers opt for virtual agents, that's a green light to expand capacity there. If demand for human agents stays high, it's worth asking why: is it habit, a gap in the technology, or something in how it's being used? Either way, the principle holds. Not human-first, not AI-first: customer first.

Priming agents for a seamless handover

Katie is direct about the one thing that undoes a handover instantly: asking a customer to repeat everything they've already told a virtual agent. Avoiding that means making sure agents have full context the moment a conversation reaches them, along with the empowerment to act on it without being boxed in by rigid process.

The goal, as she puts it, is an ecosystem where technology and agents are complementary, each doing what it does best, so the customer's issue gets resolved, whether that's through AI, a human, or both.

Change management, not technology, is the real blocker 

Referencing recent Forrester research, Frieza raised a familiar finding: change management, not the technology itself, is one of the biggest blockers to scaling AI in CX. Katie agrees, and traces it back to a skills gap. Many CX leaders are promoted for being good at CX, not for being trained in leading through change. 

Her core recommendation is to genuinely understand stakeholders before rolling anything out. Different people need different things: some want data and numbers, others need the story. Bringing stakeholders into the decision-making process, rather than announcing change to them, is what smooths a transition that would otherwise stall. 

Looking ahead, Katie hopes the CX leader's authority grows, but not their workload. Her vision is for CX to sit high in the organisation, shaping strategy, policy and hiring, while the actual delivery work is spread across departments rather than owned solely by the CX team. As she puts it, real progress looks like a CX leader no longer having to buy the platform or build the process themselves, because another department now has the confidence to do it. 

Asked for her single best piece of advice for CX leaders building their teams, Katie doesn't hesitate: get the support that's out there, whether that's a leadership course or simply staying genuinely connected to the people around you. "CX should not be a solo discipline," she says. Talk to your frontline, your leadership team, and the wider CX community. New perspective, she notes, often comes from stepping outside your own routine. 

Catch the full episode of Puzzel Talks to hear more from Katie on building intentional, human-centred CX teams here.