What if the most overlooked part of customer experience isn't digital at all — but the physical room your service happens in? In this episode of The CX Algorithm, Dr Eslam Afifi and design researcher Dr Jacqueline Baker (Head of Research, COX Architecture) unpack the servicescape: the idea that space, light, sound and layout are part of the service itself, shaping how customers and staff behave before anyone forms a conscious thought.

Servicescape is a decades-old concept from service research, yet most CX, service design and customer journey work still treats the environment as a backdrop. This conversation puts it back at the centre — bridging architecture, environmental psychology and neuroscience to show how the built environment drives behaviour, emotion and commercial outcomes.

You'll hear how our nervous system appraises a space in seconds, how designers tune the "dials" of ambient and spatial conditions on purpose, and why the room shapes employee experience as much as the customer's. Jacqueline shares the airport study linking natural light, greenery and quiet zones to longer dwell time and higher spend — achieved by improving wellbeing, not exploiting it — and draws a sharp ethical line between enhancing an experience and manipulating it.

If you work in customer experience, service design, CX strategy, retail, healthcare, hospitality or the built environment, this episode gives you a new, measurable variable to design with: the room.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What "servicescape" means and why CX keeps ignoring it
• How your nervous system reacts to a space before conscious thought
• The levers of environmental design — light, sound, temperature, layout, sightlines, signage
• How space shapes staff behaviour, not just customers'
• How to measure experience with eye-tracking, EEG, sentiment and choice modelling
• The airport case study that tied good design to dwell time and revenue
• Where enhancement ends and manipulation begins — the ethics of designed space
• How to make the business case to a CFO for environment and experience

ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr Jacqueline Baker is a design researcher at COX Architecture, where she leads the research team. Drawing on multidisciplinary training in architecture, environmental psychology and marketing, her work bridges design, psychology and neuroscience to create places, spaces and precincts that promote human flourishing. Her career spans consulting, research, teaching and design across architecture and engineering practices and universities in Australia and the United Kingdom. She speaks, writes and collaborates with researchers, architects and specialists locally and abroad to address the complex challenges facing society and our cities.

ABOUT THE SHOW

The CX Algorithm, hosted by Dr Eslam Afifi, explores how people, data, technology and design combine into customer experiences that actually work — moving past the hype to the engineering underneath.

Full episode notes, transcript and chapters: thecxalgorithm.com

Think about your last payment. The screen, the colours, how it felt. Chances are you remember almost nothing — and that's exactly the point. In this episode of The CX Algorithm, we unpack the art of invisible customer experience design: how the best payment experiences succeed by disappearing, and why trust — not speed — is the real product.

Host Dr Eslam Afifi sits down with Alexei Krasnov, a customer experience and product design leader in payments across Asia Pacific, for a practitioner's look at designing what people never consciously notice — engineering trust, calibrating friction, and building experiences for a customer who is increasingly not even in the room, because an AI agent is transacting on their behalf.

In this conversation:

• Why "frictionless" is a myth — and when friction is actually good design
• How to research behaviour people can't put into words: trust what users do, not what they say
• Why the payment is table stakes — and where the real value lives beyond the tap
• Designing for your customer's customer in a B2B2C world
• What Asia Pacific's fragmented, leapfrogging markets teach every CX leader
• Agentic commerce and AI payments: consent, control, and "did I do that — or did my agent?"

Whether you work in customer experience, product design, UX, fintech, payments, or financial services — or you're just curious how the invisible systems around you are built — this episode will change how you see every tap, swipe, and checkout.

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Guest — Alexei Krasnov

Alexei Krasnov is Director of Product Experience Design at Mastercard, leading CX and design innovation for payments across Asia Pacific. His work shapes the invisible systems billions of people use every day without noticing. With over two decades across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific, he specialises in one of CX's hardest problems: designing for what people are never meant to think about.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akrasnov/

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Host — Dr Eslam Afifi

Dr Eslam Afifi is the host of The CX Algorithm and a customer experience, data and insights leader who treats CX as a system to be deliberately engineered — built on the right balance of people, process, technology and data. With a PhD in Human-Centered Design & AI and an EMBA from IE University, he brings a practitioner's, anti-hype lens to every episode: less magic, more method.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eslam-afifi/

Most organisations have a channel strategy. Very few have a journey strategy. And that gap — invisible from the inside, painfully obvious from the outside — is quietly undermining customer experience in banking, telecoms, retail, and beyond.

In this episode of The CX Algorithm, Dr Eslam Afifi sits down with Oleksandr (Sasha) Zablotskyi, Head of Digital Channels at Openbank (Santander), to challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in CX design: that channels are the right unit of measurement, investment, and organisational structure.

Sasha's argument is direct. Customers have never thought in channels. They think in tasks, in needs, in moments. The channel is a delivery mechanism — invisible when it works, painful when it doesn't. The journey is the product. And until organisations restructure around that idea — not just in strategy decks, but in their org charts, their metrics, and their AI roadmaps — the gap between intent and experience will persist.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why customers have never thought in channels — and why organisations still do
• How the org chart is the real obstacle to journey-centric experience
• Why channel metrics are necessary but not sufficient — and what journey metrics actually look like in practice
• How cross-functional squads change not just how teams work, but what questions they ask
• Why AI is accelerating the death of channels — and the risk of automating fragmentation instead of solving it
• What leaders should stop designing immediately, and what they should start

Whether you lead CX, product, digital, or customer strategy — this episode will challenge how you think about the systems your organisation has built, and who they were actually built for.

About the Guest

Oleksandr (Sasha) Zablotskyi is a digital experience and transformation leader with deep expertise across e-commerce, telecommunications, and financial services. Currently serving as Head of Digital Channels at Openbank — Santander's digital-first banking platform and the largest European digital bank by deposit volume — Sasha leads the evolution of customer journeys across operations in Spain, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, the US, and Mexico.

His career spans the full arc of digital transformation: from building omnichannel commerce at Eldorado in Ukraine, to launching the country's first eSIM solution at lifecell (including a cross-company one-minute activation flow in partnership with Monobank), to shaping digital channel strategy at one of Europe's most ambitious digital banks. He holds an Executive MBA from IE Business School in Madrid.

Passionate about simplifying complexity, Sasha designs digital experiences around customer outcomes rather than organisational structures — and believes the future of banking is a single intelligent interface where the channel becomes invisible and the journey becomes everything.

Connect with Sasha on LinkedIn — link in the comments.

About the Host

Dr Eslam Afifi is a customer experience and data leader whose work sits at the intersection of human behaviour, technology, and decision-making. He currently serves as CX, Data & Insights Senior Manager at Acenda (MLC Life Insurance) and holds a PhD in Human-Centered Design & AI and an Executive MBA from IE University.

Eslam created The CX Algorithm to explore how customer-centricity actually works in practice — not in theory. Through conversations with leaders from different contexts and industries, the podcast unpacks the choices, trade-offs, and design decisions that quietly shape customer experience over time. Every episode is built around a single, sharp idea. Because great CX is designed, not declared.

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