When most businesses think about customer experience, they think about customer support. Praval Singh, VP of Marketing and Customer Experience at Zoho, opens the episode by drawing a clear line between the two — and explaining why conflating them is one of the most common and costly mistakes a business can make.
In this episode, Shelley and Graham speak with Praval about how CX touches every stage of the customer lifecycle, why silos between sales, marketing, and service are the enemy of a good experience, and what the practical path from spreadsheet to CRM actually looks like for a growing business.
His point about employee experience is one worth sitting with. Good CX is delivered by engaged employees who have access to the right information about customers, can see the full picture, and are empowered to act on it. Siloed teams with fragmented data can’t do that. It’s not a philosophy problem, it’s an information architecture problem.
The conversation is unusually grounded for a topic that often veers into abstraction. Praval’s advice about what small businesses actually need — not an enterprise platform, but a tool that works out of the box, onboards in weeks, and provides that single source of truth — is practical and applicable.
Worth 17 minutes if you’re responsible for customer experience, CRM, or any part of how your business acquires and retains customers.
