Check out this week’s video summary below:
Three weeks ago, I traveled to Nashville, TN, to attend my first customer experience conference organized by the renowned research and advisory company Forrester.
This annual event brought together over 25 companies, including Survey Monkey, Fullstory, Medallia, Qualtrics, and Journey Track, all of which sponsored and showcased their services at the CX Summit North America 2024.
The conference shed light on Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) rankings with customer quality perceptions at their lowest point since the inception of the CX Index. In 2024, 39% of brands saw significant declines, compared to 17% in 2023.
So, despite the excitement around GenAI, the true essence of customer centricity remains rooted in human interaction. Let’s face it, many people still prefer speaking to a real person to resolve issues, especially when chatbots or IVRs can’t provide effective solutions.
Align to Win: CX, Digital, And Marketing
Although I spent most of my time on “booth duty,” I had the chance to attend a keynote on the third day of the event presented by Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester.
He emphasized the importance of business alignment with an example from Air Canada, which had to honor a refund policy invented by the airline’s chatbot.
Here are my top 5 key takeaways from the keynote:
- Business Alignment: Ensures that an organization’s operations, strategies, and resources are all directed toward achieving set goals and objectives, ensuring all parts of the organization are pulling in the same direction.
- Visualizing and Measuring Touchpoints: The importance of tracking every touchpoint in a customer journey.
- Revenue and Profit Growth: Aligned firms grow revenue 59% faster and earn 56% higher profit (Forrester’s State of Customer Obsession Survey, 2024).
- The Formula: One brand vision + cohesive journeys + aligned metrics.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Vital for companies like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks, as it emphasizes long-term customer relationships, enabling tailored strategies, optimized marketing spend, and sustained revenue growth.
Spending time with the team!
On a more personal note, I had a fantastic time with my colleagues Manjiri, Arti, Ken, and our newest team member, Raj. Usually, I see them once a year at our annual conference, XDay, but this year, I’m fortunate to interact with them more frequently.
It definitely gave me the opportunity to meet them outside of “business as usual” and connect at a more human level. Plus, our yo-yo challenge was far more entertaining in person than it ever could have been remotely!
I also met really cool people like Jaegen and Ashley. Jaegen, if you’re reading this, thank you for showing me the way to the conference the first day when we met at the elevator! Eres lo máximo 😀
Ashley, the winner of Emily Henry’s Funny Story bestseller book of the year, I hope you enjoy/ are enjoying the reading!
What I take home
As a marketer of a customer experience feedback management platform, I found it intriguing how most CX professionals really want to transform data into actionable insights but get stuck in the numbers reporting.
Beyond creating, deploying, and collecting customer feedback surveys, they’re aiming to tell a compelling story to their organization and systematically close the loop for their customers.
One attendee remarked, “Sure, our latest CSAT score was over 80% and our NPS was 9. Benchmark-wise, we’re doing great! But how do we know which specific actions our promoters love and what we can improve to decrease the churn rate?”
To that end, people were particularly interested in hearing more about how to ace their existing voice of the customer programs and we shared how our latest customer journey tool, SuiteCX 2.0, helps teams visualize and measure customers’ thoughts, actions, and feelings at every touchpoint with their company.
I’m looking forward to next year’s conference, hoping more companies truly understand the essence of customer experience and recognize that GenAI is here to upgrade, not replace, human interaction.
P.S. Shout out to United Airlines for providing a great customer journey from start to finish. Their in-app messages and feedback requests come at the right moments.
Plus, you can track your checked-in baggage directly from their app, which is a great feature for customers like me who want to know where their belongings are, not just guessing!
Is there something wrong with your customer experience?
When you complete an honest assessment, the outcome can be beneficial, particularly for your Customer Experience program.
Take five minutes and complete an audit for your organization here.
You may discover a gap in measurement, an opportunity to improve a process, the place where an organizational shift needs to take place or an opportunity to win a greater share of your customers’ wallets.
We all want that bigger “return”. In this situation, the worst case scenario is that you’ll get some information that will help your organization since there is no cost or obligation in completing this audit.
