When you’re being pushed to move faster, how do you know you’re still improving the experience?
Liz Pinfold Reed joins Elias Kanaris on the Kiwi CX Collective podcast from CCNNZ to explore CX, EX and leadership in 2026.
If you work in customer experience, employee experience, contact centres, or people leadership, chances are you already feel this tension. Pressure to adopt new tools, automate more, and keep improving outcomes (while quietly wondering whether the most human parts of the work are getting harder to hold onto).
The Kiwi CX Collective podcast tackles exactly that kind of question. And this episode is a good one.
Hosted by Elias Kanaris and brought to you by the Contact Centre Network New Zealand (CCNNZ), the Kiwi CX Collective continues to create space for the conversations the NZ experience community genuinely needs. Elias has a thoughtful, grounded style that lets ideas unfold properly, and in this episode he’s joined by our own Liz Pinfold Reed to explore what’s actually working in CX and EX strategy heading into 2026.
We were really glad to be part of it.
What the Kiwi CX Collective podcast gets right – time and time again
What CCNNZ has built here matters. The New Zealand CX and contact centre sector needs a home for honest, practical conversation, and the Kiwi CX Collective delivers that consistently. In particular, Elias Kanaris brings out the thinking behind the thinking, and this episode is a strong example of why it’s worth a follow if you haven’t already.
The conversation: why the best AI tool for 2026 might be a pencil
The episode opens with a provocation that’s simple but worth sitting with. Before you automate an experience, you need to understand it. Before you optimise a journey, you need to think carefully about the human being moving through it. And before you ask your people to deliver better outcomes, it’s worth understanding the conditions they’re working within.
That’s the pencil: not a rejection of technology, but a reminder that deep thinking has to come first.
Customer experience and employee experience are the same conversation
One of the more useful ideas in this episode is what Liz calls the X view (experience as an umbrella that holds customer experience, employee experience, leadership, and purpose together).
In other words, if something is breaking down at the customer level, it’s often worth asking what your people are carrying. Your customer experience is very often a reflection of your employee experience. They’re not parallel tracks. They’re the same one.
For contact centre leaders and people managers especially, that reframe shifts the question from “how do we fix the customer metrics?” to “what is the daily experience of the people delivering those moments?”
The science underneath the strategy
The episode also touches on psychological safety, nervous system states, and why people respond so differently under pressure: not in a heavy way, but in a way that explains something many leaders already sense intuitively. As a result, people think better, relate better, and serve better when they feel genuinely safe enough to do so. That’s not a culture initiative. It’s biology.
If you’re working in CX, EX, service, or leadership and you’ve been looking for a conversation that brings the human side of experience back into focus, this is a strong place to start.
