15 Predictions That Will Redefine Customer Experience in 2026 – ��ԭ��

15 Predictions That Will Redefine Customer Experience in 2026

Noel Hardesty-DeMenge — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:41:00 +0000

Discover the customer experience trends that brands need to know about to deliver more business value in the new year.

For years, customer experience (CX) teams have taken the temperature: checking scores, tracking sentiment, reporting trends.

But 2026 is the year CX grows up. Listening isn’t enough. Reporting isn’t enough.

The organizations that win will be the ones that treat customer experience like the central nervous system of the business. A system that senses what is happening, diagnoses issues, triggers action with speed and precision, and proves value that leadership cannot ignore.

These are the trends that will separate the reactive from the resilient.

Here is what ��ԭ�� experts say will define the leaders in 2026.

Click here to jump to any prediction

5 Key Takeaways from the Modern CX Playbook

Noel Hardesty-DeMenge — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:51:00 +0000

The old customer experience playbook was built on a foundation of customer feedback surveys and NPS® scores. But with surveys capturing only a fraction of customers’ experiences and good survey response rates getting harder to come by, that isn’t working anymore.

Enter the modern CX playbook. This new approach to customer experience is built on a foundation of real-time omnichannel customer experience signals. And it’s what’s driving success for many of today’s leading organizations.

Modern CX is a real-world framework our ��ԭ�� Experience Advisory experts are using in practice as they work with the world’s most-loved brands to create top tier omnichannel customer experience programs. It helps teams eliminate guesswork and prove impact fast by tying customer experience to real business outcomes.

The strategies our CX advisors have developed are working and we want to get them into the hands of as many customer experience professionals as possible. So we’ve brought them together into one actionable playbook: for moving beyond surveys with confidence and sustainable success.

It’s available to anyone to use, and you can get started with it right away and make an impact ASAP and over time.

For insights on why it’s time to rewrite the old CX playbook and how an omnichannel customer experience strategy can help teams across industries deliver more value, we connected with the CX advisors behind this playbook: , VP, Experience Advisory; , Principal CX Advisor; and , Senior CX Advisor.

They shared their five takeaways from the modern CX playbook and how using this framework can help advance your organization’s CX maturity.

1. Companies unlock the most value from CX when it’s tied to business outcomes

Insight: “One of the biggest challenges for CX leaders is being able to position CX not as a cost center, but as a profit center, capable of driving key results for the organization,” says Leary.

How the playbook helps: You’ll get guidance for tying CX to financial outcomes that matter the most to your leadership team, whether that’s boosting cost savings, fueling revenue growth, or minimizing risk, explains Anders.

2. CX leaders are only as effective as their relationships

Insight: “Organizations that lead the pack when it comes to customer experience are those where CX professionals have really strong relationships across the company,” says Leary.

How the playbook helps: It offers a clear roadmap for navigating your organization, securing sponsorship for your CX initiatives, getting alignment on priorities, and connecting CX improvements back to organizational priorities in ways that set you up for the highest levels of success, she adds.

3. Impactful, actionable CX signals are hiding within plain sight

Insight: “Now more than ever, budgets are tight and customer experience professionals are being held accountable for achieving financial outcomes. A challenge for CX teams is moving beyond surveys and NPS® scores—CX measures that have been the go-to CX tools for brands for over a decade—and figuring out how to capture the full breadth and depth of the customer experience to show the impact of CX improvements,” says Dolan.

How the playbook helps: You’ll find out how to evolve beyond running customer feedback survey programs and monitoring NPS® scores and use customer journey mapping to uncover other signals that are impactful and will help your organization understand what’s happening for customers wherever they’re interacting, whether that’s in the contact center, digital channels, social channels, and or other touchpoints across the customer journey, adds Leary.

4. Success in CX isn’t immediate, and it isn’t one and done; the work needs to be continuous

Insight: You may know what you want your customer experience program’s end state to look like, but more likely than not, you’re not going to get there on your first try, says Dolan. You’ll make progress by starting small, testing, racking up quick wins, learning, adapting, pivoting as needed, and building a groundswell.

How the playbook helps: This guide will help you break down the steps you need to take from A to Z to get to your desired end state, she adds.

Real-world example: Leary used the framework presented in the modern CX playbook to help one client develop a three-year CX roadmap to move from a surveys-based program to an omnichannel customer experience program. They began integrating data from across the customer journey one step at a time, eventually incorporating digital listening, digital analytics, call transcripts, and customer complaints.

As a result of taking these steps, they’ve grown their customer base, improved their customer experience rankings among their competitor set, and won numerous awards for customer experience.

5. Mature organizations prioritize initiatives based on effort and impact

Insight: Many teams get overwhelmed when they’re at the point of bringing their customer data together, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Instead of attempting to boil the ocean by integrating every system that contains customer data (think: web analytics, CRM, social tools, customer service systems, etc.) at once, teams can use quick wins as proof points to gain buy-in for larger efforts.

Real-world example: One organization Anders worked with was struggling to advance their CX maturity. They were letting the loudest part of the organization advance the initiatives they cared about, rather than prioritizing based on effort or impact. Once they secured cross-functional alignment and got everyone on the same page about priorities, they focused on quick wins, requiring minimal effort and delivering high impact.

“That was the biggest leap forward in their maturity, because it was no longer about which part of the organization was loudest in wanting their initiatives accomplished; it was about advancing in a way that really maximized impact based on effort,” she explains.

How the playbook helps: You’ll get guidance for keeping data integration from getting too messy and unmanageable as well as a prioritization matrix for achieving progress early on and building momentum over time.

Use the Modern Customer Experience Playbook

If survey-based CX has taken your business as far as it can go, it’s time to see what the omnichannel customer experience framework can do to boost growth, revenue, savings, and operational efficiency for your company.

Get your copy of for expert guidance on connecting every customer experience signal, aligning teams and leadership around measurable outcomes, and unlocking ROI from customer experience across revenue growth, cost savings, operational efficiency gains, and more.

Breaking the Benchmark Reflex in Healthcare

Noel Hardesty-DeMenge — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 20:39:00 +0000

Here’s why health systems should shift their focus from static national percentile rankings to hyper-contextual measurement aligned with meaningful progress, trust, and outcomes specific to their own patients and communities.

Many of us have seen the trap of comparison — especially parents. You can look at a growth chart and feel proud of progress… and then watch that pride evaporate when percentile curves are compared against another child. One number can suddenly override context, nuance, and what is actually true.

Healthcare has been conditioned into a similar mindset. For years, traditional benchmarking approaches tied success to national percentile rankings — peer comparisons that shift constantly with who is in the dataset. Percentiles became the shorthand for “How good are we?” even when they tell us very little about whether patients are truly doing better.

We understand how we got here. Comparison feels objective. It creates the illusion of certainty. But percentile rankings can distract from what matters most: meaningful improvement for the patients, clinicians, and communities we serve. Not whether we are outscoring someone else, but whether patients are actually doing better. Whether they trust us. Whether they feel seen, heard, safe, and supported in their care.

This is not an indictment of leaders. It’s an invitation to reframe success around the progress our own patients can feel — and to align measurement with that purpose.

Why Percentile Rankings Flatten What Makes You Unique

Every health system is different: patient mix, community needs, payer footprint, social context, historical baseline, digital ecosystem, and staffing realities. Within a single system, NICU priorities differ from Orthopedics, Behavioral Health, or Ambulatory Surgery. Trust signals surface differently in rural clinics than in urban EDs. Percentile rankings erase this nuance. They flatten uniqueness into averages.

Three unintended consequences follow:

Progress gets masked. You can materially improve communication or discharge clarity and see little movement in a percentile rank influenced by shifts in the peer set.
Energy gets misdirected. Chasing the 90th percentile rewards conformity, not context-specific innovation.
Action gets delayed. Benchmarks arrive long after the moment to intervene has passed.

And this matters even more now because the future state of healthcare is increasingly consumer-driven. Patients are no longer comparing their care experience only to other hospitals; they’re comparing it to the digital ease, transparency, speed, and personalization they receive in retail, hospitality, banking, and e-commerce. Benchmarking only against healthcare risks optimizing for yesterday when the expectations curve is being set everywhere else.

Benchmarks can provide context, but they do not guide improvement. If the goal is to strengthen trust, reduce friction, and elevate outcomes, we need measures that reflect your patients, your context, and your trajectory.

Redefining Success: Progress You Can Feel

Success should be defined by progress over time, within your population and service lines, and tied to outcomes that matter clinically, operationally, and reputationally.

Ask sharper questions:

Are communication breakdowns decreasing during handoffs?
Are more patients leaving with clear, confident recovery plans?
Are staff barriers being removed so clinicians can focus on care?
Are historically marginalized populations reporting higher trust and access?
Are digital and call center experiences reducing friction, confusion, and avoidable utilization?

When measures align to goals like these, leaders and frontline teams can see their impact — and sustain it.

The ��ԭ�� Difference (Without the Drama)

We’re not here to make traditional benchmarking the villain. We’re here to help the industry evolve beyond it.

��ԭ��’s approach centers on hyper-contextual improvement: measuring and improving what matters for your population, your service lines, and your frontline realities. From there, we support the mindset and operating model shift required to sustain change. And finally, we accelerate it with real-time multi-signal listening and AI so you can act before issues calcify.

In practice, that means:

Your patients, your context, your progress. Listening and measurement structured around your goals — not generic national peer sets.
Culture change, not just metric change. ��ԭ�� Advisory partners with leadership to reframe performance from “Where do we rank?” to “What outcomes matter most for our patients and community?”
Speed to clarity. Our platform brings together patient voice, operational data, staff voice, digital feedback, call center transcripts, and unstructured signals — and our AI capabilities surface themes, predict risk, and spotlight next best actions in near real time.

And because we look across patient, member, and employee experience signals together, leaders can see patterns that only emerge when signals intersect. Often, the root cause of patient friction shows up first inside employee feedback, and vice versa. Unstructured feedback becomes the connective tissue that reveals both sides of the experience… and accelerates a more precise response.

What “Hyper-Context” Looks Like in Practice

Hyper-context isn’t just a concept. It’s a set of intentional choices leaders make:

Population-specific trust. If building trust with Veterans experiencing co-occurring mental health and chronic pain is critical, success is tracked in that specific population’s voice — access, respect, clarity, follow-through — versus diluted national aggregates.
Service-line specificity. If Surgical Services struggle with pre-op communication and day-of-surgery delays, goals and signals narrow to those moments of truth so improvement is surgical, not generic.
Channel-aware action. If digital scheduling friction increases call volume and missed care, digital telemetry and contact center signals are analyzed together to target the top fixes that reduce downstream burden.
Community alignment. If language access or transportation are trust barriers, measures reflect those realities — and progress is defined by real reduction in friction, not just higher top-box scores.

This is how measurement becomes a lever, not a lagging scoreboard.

Advisory Support: Making the Mindset Shift Stick

Changing the metric is the easier part. Changing how people use metrics is where transformation actually happens.

��ԭ�� Advisory helps leadership teams install the habits of goal-driven improvement:

Reframe the narrative — from rank to purpose.
Set actionable goals tied to trust, harm reduction, throughput, U.S. News aims, Stars/HEDIS targets, and market growth.
Align incentives & routines so insights flow to the people best positioned to act.
Make progress visible so momentum compounds instead of stalls.

When leaders measure what matters — and make progress visible — culture shifts from comparison to continuous learning.

Real-Time Signals and AI: Turning Insight Into Action

Once you’re aligned on what to improve, speed becomes the differentiator. This is where ��ԭ��’s real-time, multi-signal platform and AI capabilities help you move faster:

Surface what matters sooner. Analyze patient comments, staff feedback, call transcripts, and digital behaviors to find root causes surveys alone miss.
Predict and prevent. Identify patterns that signal quality risk, uneven access, low trust, or compliance exposure — and intervene early.
Personalize next steps. Recommend targeted actions and playbooks that fit each unit’s context, instead of broad directives to “raise the score.”

This isn’t more data. It’s the right signals — together — at the right moment.

Proof in Practice: The VA

This evolution is already happening.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — serving one of the most diverse and mission-critical patient populations — has been advancing listening and improvement models anchored in context, trust, and population-specific insight. By bringing multiple signals together and focusing on outcomes Veterans can feel — clarity, respect, access, and follow-through — leaders are closing gaps faster and strengthening confidence in care.

It shows what becomes possible when we move beyond static rankings toward purpose-driven progress.

A Practical Roadmap for the Next 12–24 Months

Like any long-term human development experience (parenting included), progress compounds over time. Here’s a pragmatic arc that works:

Months 1–3: Awareness
Recognize the limitations of percentile rankings and identify the outcomes that matter most.
Months 4–6: Alignment
Define goals with sponsorship, link signals to outcomes, assign owners.
Months 7–12: Activation
Act on real-time signals, close loops faster, make improvement visible.
Year 2+: Acceleration
Expand hyper-context into more service lines and populations, treat improvement as a habit, not a project.

What You’ll Gain by Shifting the Framework

When organizations anchor improvement to context-aware, actionable goals, results show up everywhere:

Reputation & growth through clearer communication and safer transitions
Patient safety by lowering preventable harm
Operational excellence by resolving friction in access, billing, digital, and scheduling
Workforce resilience as teams see their work producing visible impact

Benchmarks show where you stand today. Actionable goals chart where you’re going — and how you’re going to get there.

Bringing It All Together

Imagine success measured not by a percentile rank in a quarterly report, but by the confidence patients feel when they leave your care. Imagine frontline teams who can see, in real time, how their actions reduce friction and build trust. Imagine communities who recognize your system as a place where communication is clear, access is equitable, and care is coordinated.

That’s the future we’re building with our partners across healthcare.

Reframe success around purpose, not percentiles
Listen more broadly, across patient, employee, digital, and operational signals
Align goals to what actually matters for your population
Measure progress visibly so momentum sustains
Accelerate with real-time insight and AI so you act before issues calcify

Healthcare doesn’t need to win the comparison game. It needs to pursue its highest potential, and measure success by the progress that truly matters.Those who have seen this pattern in parenting recognize the truth: growth is healthiest when it’s personal, contextual, and supported. The same is true in healthcare. Let’s move past the reflex of percentile rankings and toward a future defined by trust, outcomes, and experiences people can feel every single day.

Beyond Touchpoints: Mastering the Customer Journey Mindset

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:56:34 +0000

Here are real-world examples of how CX leaders overcome barriers like data silos and accountability gaps by focusing on high-impact journeys.

Customer experience measurement is broken. For years, companies have chased feedback but struggled to turn data into meaningful change. Why? Because measuring isolated moments misses the bigger picture.

Businesses that unlock real value have shifted from focusing on individual touchpoints to understanding end-to-end customer journeys.

, journey performance correlates more strongly with business metrics than touchpoint performance. For example, revenue growth, repeat purchases, and churn reduction. Yet, despite the clear benefits, many organizations struggle to make the shift. Common barriers include:

Journey complexity: deciding which journeys to measure and improve.
Accountability: creating structures for shared ownership across the journey.
Measurement methodology: understanding how the journey truly unfolds, including hidden or missed touchpoints.

Let’s explore how leading businesses are overcoming these barriers, turning the journey mindset into operational reality.

Which Journeys Should You Measure?

, Lloyds Banking Group reorganized its operations around 10 key customer journeys, a prime example of a shift to journey measurement. They moved beyond optimizing individual digital channels to overhauling end-to-end customer experiences. This involved creating cross-functional “journey labs” composed of teams of product owners, CX designers, digital technologists, and business architects working collaboratively to accelerate delivery and improve customer outcomes.

But how many journeys should you measure? And where should you start?

A best practice is to identify and focus on key journeys that represent the major goals customers are trying to achieve. For example, in banking this may be: I onboard, I own a home, I seek finance, I engage support, or I prepare for retirement. In telecommunications (telco), the number of journeys may differ, but they can include I explore, I consider, I purchase, I get started, I engage support, I use, monitor, manage, and pay, I improve, I leave.

There is no single rule on the number of journeys.

Here’s another example: A large European utilities provider had long collected touchpoint feedback. Initially, it was actionable—retail customers reporting long wait times led to staffing adjustments. But the limitations soon became clear. Touchpoint owners only controlled part of the experience. For example, the billing team received poor scores for invoice accuracy, but the root issue was incorrect data from the metering system, outside their remit.

The company shifted to an agile model with “tribes” aligned to end-to-end journeys like I join, I use, I need help, I leave, I complain. This laid the groundwork for journey measurement.

The business focused on the costliest journey first: I complain. Complaints were draining both cost and goodwill. Customers described multiple calls to resolve simple issues, being passed between departments, and long delays for corrections. Each extra step increased handling costs, regulatory risk, and churn.

By viewing complaints as a journey rather than isolated interactions, the team identified breakdowns in handoffs and redesigned the experience. Once leaders saw the impact on cost and churn, they expanded journey-based measurement across the business.

The takeaway: There’s no single path to adopting journey measurement. Impact is key. Start with high-impact journeys and share success stories to gain traction.

Who Owns the Journey? How Leading Brands Break Down Silos

Journey measurement means little if no one is accountable for improvement. Most journeys span departments (e.g. sales, product, billing, support) creating fragmented ownership and limiting action.

Take a UK telco’s onboarding journey. It starts at sign-up and continues through delivery and the first bill. Sales closes the deal, product handles delivery, and billing manages invoices. Without end-to-end ownership, no one resolves issues between steps: delays, miscommunications, or customer frustration. Each team optimizes its part, but the customer still experiences the issues.

Few organizations have formal structures for shared journey accountability. Moving from “optimize my path” to “optimize the entire path” demands cross-functional collaboration, clear ownership, and cultural change. That needs to be led from the top.

A Scandinavian bank tackled this directly. Previously, teams owned products or channels. But when customers moved between online and in-branch experiences, it became unclear who was responsible. The friction was real.

The turning point? Leadership declared, “We’re moving to a journey mindset.” They focused on campaigns to make people across the business feel comfortable. The CX team supported the transition with internal education, change management, seminars, webinars, CX Days—even a podcast. They ran employee surveys to track understanding and alignment. The Chief Customer Officer also made sure that quarterly reviews among senior management involved a review of “journey experiences.”

Key takeaway: Accountability doesn’t happen by default. Leading companies assign journey owners and invest in communication, education, and leadership alignment to rally the business and support them. Journey owners are often senior colleagues, decision-makers, and influencers. They need to work cross-functionally to resolve structural issues and influence the board for budget.

Measurement Methodology, Data Silos, and Fragmentation

Even with ownership in place, many organizations struggle to measure journeys effectively. Most rely on surveys at the end of the journey. That approach can often fall short.

Why? Because it misses critical signals. Key interactions like browsing, drop-offs, or call deflections aren’t captured by traditional surveys. Worse, most feedback comes from customers who complete the journey, ignoring those who abandon it.

A global telco company faced this issue recently. Their journey NPS (jNPS) only surveyed customers who completed the journey. They missed signals from those most at risk of churn because they did not complete the journey; not to mention that their survey response rates were declining.

They closed the gap by combining operational and web analytics. Using ��ԭ�� Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), they mapped digital flows and assigned Page Experience Scores, which were rolled up into Journey Experience Scores. This surfaced friction points earlier in customer journeys and enabled proactive fixes.

Similarly, a global insurer improved insights by feeding ��ԭ�� feedback into their enterprise data lake. By combining CX data with operational metrics, they built dashboards for each journey (Purchase, Claims, Support, Renewal, Maturity, Cancellation), giving journey owners actionable, end-to-end visibility.

Fidelity International is another great example.Their analytics team combines behavioral metadata with NPS feedback, allowing them to more accurately identify where to focus journey improvements. This results in deeper customer insights than in previous years.

The real challenge is that touchpoint data lives in silos: CRMs, support tickets, marketing tools, and more. Journey measurement requires stitching this together. Without integrated data, it’s nearly impossible to understand how issues escalate or cascade across channels.

Key takeaway: Measuring journey performance demands more than just reviewing survey results. It requires an integrated view to capture the full picture. That involves combining touchpoint feedback, journey analytics, operational data, and digital behaviour, including silent drop-offs.

Turning Measurement into Meaningful Change

Customer journeys reflect how people actually experience your business—not how it’s structured internally. While many companies still measure isolated interactions, the real leaders are shifting to journey-based thinking for deeper insight and greater impact.

They’re not just redesigning surveys. They’re building cross-functional accountability, integrating operational and behavioral data, and embedding journey ownership into the culture. They treat journey measurement not as a CX project, but as a core organizational capability.

Where to start? Choose one high-impact journey—emotionally charged, financially costly, or frequently experienced. Appoint a clear owner. Map the full experience, including those who drop out. Integrate feedback, operations, and analytics data.

Use early wins to build momentum and prove the value internally.

The bottom line? Measurement alone doesn’t improve experiences. But when you treat journeys as the unit of change—and empower teams to act—you turn insights into outcomes.

For more guidance, be sure to download . This practical playbook breaks down modernization into clear, achievable steps—from defining your “why” and securing sponsorship to mapping journeys, integrating data, and building a culture where insights lead to real action.

Is Your Company Ready for a Chief Experience Officer?

Samantha Finken Rayner — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:31:29 +0000

Let’s explore the ideal time to hire a Chief Experience Officer, how to overcome this role’s common challenges, and the expert strategies that guarantee early success in this role.

Previously, we discussed what a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is and what qualities to look for when hiring this role.

But businesses must also consider: when is the right time to appoint a CXO? What are the potential challenges that a CXO stepping into a newly-created role may face? And, most importantly, what recommendations can we make to ensure a new CXO succeeds?

What are the signs that your company is ready to appoint a CXO?

Your company may not need a Chief Experience Officer if it already has a deeply ingrained, cross-functional culture of customer-centricity. This is rare, but if your company is one of the few that already thinks and operates this way, congratulations—you’re already doing what a CXO would set out to do.

On the other hand, a CXO is not a panacea. If your company’s leadership views customer experience (CX) as a check-the-box activity, appointing a CXO alone won’t have a meaningful impact. A CXO requires strong buy-in from leadership to first connect, then break down, silos and build a culture rooted in customer-centricity.

So when is the right time to make the case for a CXO? According to and , you may have the right context to do so when you tick at least one of the following boxes:

Your company is undergoing a significant transformation, such as a merger or acquisition, or a significant change in your servicing channel strategy.
CX and Employee Experience (EX) signals are siloed, causing cross-functional issues to slip through the cracks.
Your company is struggling to compete in a crowded market where all players have similar products.
Your business invests time and money in CX/EX improvements and your leadership sees CX/EX as a long-term strategy.

What benefits can a CXO bring?

A CXO can bring value to a business on several fronts:

Strategy: A CXO can influence the corporate strategy by guiding leaders on what to prioritize to deliver better CX and EX. They unify the CX and EX program strategies and align them with the brand promise, the employee value proposition and the corporate strategy to ensure experiences meet customer and employee expectations while delivering on business outcomes.
Culture: A CXO works relentlessly to give customers and employees a “virtual” seat at the table in every key meeting where decisions are made. Making the company more customer- and employee-centric can provide a competitive edge in both customer and talent acquisition and retention.
Cross-functional ownership: Experience doesn’t live in silos, so a CXO’s role is to ensure all functions work together. They create forums for different departments to discuss, decide, and act as a cohesive group, rather than as separate silos.
Data: The CXO places a new focus on insights, analytics, and data-led decisions to prove ROI and impact. They unify CX and EX data, ensuring all teams have access to relevant information and insights.

All these efforts contribute to concrete business outcomes like higher revenue, increased market share, improved customer and employee acquisition and retention, and operational efficiencies.

Still need convincing? Here are a few tangible examples of the positive impact a CXO has brought to large organizations:

Verizon: Brian Higgins became Verizon’s CXO a couple of years ago. , the company has strategically launched AI-based tools for employees and customers, and opened 400 new retail locations to make it easier for customers to access the services they need. From 2024 to 2025, revenue increased by 3.4% (vs 2.9% on average for its US competitors) and the company was the first telecommunications company on Forbes’ America’s Best Large Employers list.
NRG: As NRG’s CXO, Suzie Dieth supported this energy company’s acquisition of a smart home solution firm and made it adopt a “hub and spoke” model, with the Experience Org acting as the hub. In 2025, by the US Customer Experience Awards, becoming the Silver Award Winner in two areas: Customer-Centric Culture and Best Use of Customer Insight and Feedback.
United Airlines: Linda Jojo is United Airlines’ Chief Technology and Customer Officer. (Granted, she’s not a CXO, but hearing her speak about her role makes it sound a lot like what a CXO would do.) , United constantly innovates to surpass customer expectations and differentiate itself. This includes app-based gate navigation, real-time flight delay updates, connecting flight hold information, agent assistance from other airports to minimize wait times, and increased overhead bin space for all carry-on luggage. Between 2024 and 2025, United revenue increased by 3% (vs less than 1% for comparable US competitors).
Adobe: , after Donna Morris, Adobe’s CXO, unified CX and EX, the company reported a 25% annual revenue gain and was listed among Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

I know what you’re thinking: “How can you be sure that these business outcomes are directly tied to the experience organization’s actions?” The simple answer is I can’t. But, while it’s impossible to tie these outcomes to a single org’s efforts, it’s clear that a CXO can bring a dynamic, experience-focused perspective that drives business success.

What challenges might a new CXO face?

Even when a company is ready for a CXO, the organization might still face a few common challenges:

Role overlap: If a company already has a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), there’s likely no need for a new CXO. Instead, the CCO’s role could be expanded to cover employee and prospect experiences as well. A CXO’s responsibilities must be clearly defined from day one to prevent overlap with existing roles.
Trying to boil the ocean: The sheer size of the task—changing culture, systems, processes, and policies—can feel daunting. A CXO needs to start with quick wins and build momentum before tackling bigger, more impactful projects.
Focusing on metrics over stories: Some companies get too focused on metrics like Net Promoter Score without looking for what drives low scores. A CXO must teach other executives and the wider business to seek the “why” and the “so what.”
Budget constraints: The CXO may face budget or resource pressures that delay impactful activities. Again, focusing on quick wins, but also on pilots is key. If a CXO can prove immediate, tangible results, they are more likely to unlock the resources needed for larger initiatives.

Chief Experience Officer success strategy

Setting a CXO up for success starts with a few key recommendations:

Start cross-functional collaboration immediately: As , “Pulling in other leaders and functions early in the CXO’s tenure can help generate and prove the value of experience early in the project lifecycle, building a solid foundation from which to expand.”
Prioritize data and insights: Data, insights, and journey maps must be central to a CXO’s decision-making process. This ensures they prioritize the right problems. They can then use human-centered design methodologies to solve them the right way.
Build the right team: The CXO’s team should include employees with a diverse set of skills and responsibilities:
- CX and EX Program Management
- Insights and Analytics (including AI prompt writing skills!)
- Market Research and Competitive Intelligence
- Journey Mapping and Experience Design
- Change Management
- Project Management
- Communications
Listen: This is easier said than done, but it’s crucial. A CXO must collect VOCE, listen to peers, talk to customers and frontline staff, and pay attention to escalations. The real insights—and the real stories—are found in these conversations, not just in metrics.

Now that you have the keys to assess whether you’re ready to appoint a CXO, why you should, and how to set them up for success, why not take the next step toward unlocking better experiences?

Is Your Closed-Loop Feedback Program Falling Flat? Try This Framework

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:46:34 +0000

Many CX leaders launch closed-loop feedback (CLF) programs with a goal of driving action, only to later discover that their programs aren’t delivering the expected insights or impact. Here’s what brands get wrong and how to unlock better results.

Key takeaways

• Properly implemented, a closed-loop feedback (CLF) program can help brands prevent churn and grow customer loyalty.

• A common issue with CLF programs is a disconnect between effort and results. Many companies fail to define clear objectives and track the right data, which leads to a lack of meaningful insights and unresolved customer issues.

• The CLF Soundness Check framework focuses on four key steps to help companies properly manage their programs to achieve stronger business outcomes: Set Objectives, Define Required Behaviors, Capture Relevant Data, and Track Results

As a Principal CX Advisor at ��ԭ��, I’ve heard countless clients express concerns about closed-loop feedback and how their programs aren’t delivering anticipated results, leaving them with unfulfilled expectations. Often they find their CLF programs become mere “check-the-box” activities that fail to provide valid input for continuous innovation.

Closed-loop feedback programs can and should be transformative. CX teams can use them to collect valuable customer feedback and harness these insights to solve customer issues at the 1:1 level, the inner-loop part of the program. They then share aggregate learnings within the organization to drive structural improvements from root cause analysis, the outer-loop part of the program.

Properly implemented, a CLF program can help brands prevent churn by recovering at-risk customers in real time. CLF alerts can be set up so the right team members — those who have the ability to take action — get notified about a customer in distress. They can then intervene in a timely manner, resolve their issues, and retain or potentially even grow their relationship and loyalty. After all, customer retention is a key business outcome that helps show the value of your CX program.

The problem is, many brands end up discovering months — or even years — after launching their CLF programs that their efforts aren’t delivering the insights they expect and that they aren’t seeing the results they’re looking for. As a partner to CX leaders across verticals in both B2C and B2B, I have found that this conversation usually begins with, “We need better reporting for our closed loop program to understand if it’s having an impact.”

Having carefully reviewed the CLF data for countless clients, I’ve identified four critical steps necessary for achieving success with closed-loop feedback programs. I’ve brought them together into a framework I call the “Closed-Loop Feedback (CLF) Soundness Check” — a structure you can use to lay the groundwork for a closed-loop feedback program that drives stronger business outcomes.

Get Better Results Using the CLF Soundness Check Framework

The CLF Soundness Check contains four key steps: Set Objectives, Define Required Behaviors, Capture Relevant Data, and Track Results. This methodology works whether you are starting a program from scratch, or reassessing a program that’s been active for months or years. Let’s look at each step in detail.

Set Objectives

CLF programs should not be created in isolation. CX leaders must align with cross-organizational stakeholders on the CLF program objectives from the beginning. Without early stakeholder buy-in and collaborative program building, teams will lack the commitment needed for implementation, training, and coaching.

Collectively identify and assign alert owners. These should be employees with supervisory roles, escalation experience, authority to resolve issues, and strong soft skills such as patience and empathy. Also assign coaches, typically the alert owners’ supervisors, who are responsible for ongoing monitoring, training and support.

Depending on your business, common objectives may include recovering at-risk customers in real time, identifying the root cause(s) of common pain points, and building stronger relationships for referrals and/or sales.

Ultimately, CLF programs should provide insights for a governance body like a CX Council or steering committee to guide decisions and drive action.

Define Required Behaviors

Next, collaborate with stakeholders to define expected behaviors that support the agreed-upon objectives.

For example, if real-time customer recovery is an objective, two-way conversations are crucial. Establish business-appropriate guidelines. Specify contact methods, such as phone, email, or video conference, and the number of attempts they should make. For instance, a team might mandate first outreach within 48 hours, and expect that at least two but no more than three attempts are made to reach the customer, using alternative contact methods.

It is also important to define acceptable use cases for one-way communication, such as using ��ԭ��’s to easily send personalized thank-you messages that invite but don’t require a response. This may be appropriate for outreach customers who do not have an unresolved issue, or for those who gave higher scores in their survey.

Capture Relevant Data

Once the team identifies desired behaviors, ��ԭ��’s CX platform offers a case management form to track them. This form captures data including contact attempts, successful outreach and problem resolution rates, CLF volumes, SLA adherence, escalations, and outreach quality.

Consider the collectively agreed-upon behaviors. Ensure the form clearly captures them, such as “Two-way communication – Yes/No,” “Number of contact attempts”, and “Communication methods used.” And of course the employee will need to capture root cause(s), problem resolution status, actions taken, etc. To avoid overwhelming alert owners, design the form with conditional logic. For example, only display “Problem Resolved Yes/No” if two-way communication has occurred.

This data now serves two purposes. First, it gives coaches insights to what is actually happening with CLF, and it allows them to provide support and training to help alert owners manage their processes against the set objectives. Second, aggregation of this data will provide insights across the organization to support the outer loop.

Track Results

With the right data now being captured, we can address the original request for better reporting. Be sure your reports clearly reflect the alert owners’ responses.

Pro tip: If data is captured in the case management form, report it in ��ԭ��. I frequently uncover reporting gaps during CLF reviews. Simple additions like a comment stream for “Other” responses (e.g., Key Problem Area, Action Taken) or a donut chart for communication types can be invaluable and provide coaches with actionable information.

Real-World Examples: The CLF Soundness Check Framework for Better Outcomes

When one B2B financial services firm took a closer look at their CLF program, they realized there was a huge discrepancy between what was reflected in their program’s reporting and what customers experienced. They discovered that when their survey identified customers who indicated they had issues, 86% of the time alert owners used an automated email as the only form of client outreach. And a meager 6% of the time clients responded back to that email. Despite never having two-way communication with the vast majority of customers, the team was closing out 94% of cases as “Problem Resolved – Yes”.

After two years of running a CLF program, another B2B brand took a closer look at their reporting and found out that over 80% of issues that had been marked as “closed” had a note that said “TBC — awaiting client feedback,” meaning they weren’t actually resolved, they were “to be continued.” This was not identified as a pattern since the “Other” comments were only available in each individual record. Creating a comment stream showing “Other” inputs made the issue immediately apparent.

In another example, a retail bank reviewed their CLF program, identified gaps in their training and processes, and rolled out a new e-learning program so that every alert owner and coach involved in the CLF program would be on the same page and have the same understanding of expectations. The bank set clear direction regarding procedures and behaviors to ensure more consistent efforts across the organization. They also introduced new reporting that allowed coaches to focus on the quality and effectiveness of the team’s outreach.

Organizations often measure CLF success by case closure speed, but fast closure doesn’t equate to optimal resolution. The CLF Soundness Check framework provided these brands with tools to reset programs and drive true inner-loop improvements.

Take Your Closed-Loop Feedback Program to the Next Level

Brands with the most effective CLF programs don’t just react; they act with purpose. By embracing this framework, they transform feedback into actionable insights, driving not just individual resolutions, but systemic, organization-wide change.

It’s time to unlock your CLF program’s true potential and talk to a ��ԭ�� expert.

Monkey Loves You: The Peril of Oversimplified Customer Feedback

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 18:41:39 +0000

What can a Black Mirror episode teach us about CX and NPS? Let’s dive into the troubling nature of minimizing the range of customer emotion to one basic metric.

If you’re not a fan of or haven’t been inclined to pay for a Netflix subscription, please bear with me, especially if you’re interested in customer feedback management.

The episode that stuck with me was the , and in particular, one of the sub-stories: Monkey loves you. It lays out the unsettling scenario in which the protagonist’s late wife’s consciousness is transferred into a teddy bear-like mechanical monkey, through which she can only express herself using two basic phrases: “Monkey loves you” or “Monkey needs a hug.”

Through this concept, the episode explores how human expressions are limited and distorted through technology, reducing human connection to something mechanical and absent of any real depth.

The intention of this episode was certainly not to address how we collect and analyze survey feedback, but it made me wonder: to what extent are we reducing our customer’s experiences in our analysis?

The NPS trap, promoter blindspot, and other survey analysis pitfalls

Net Promoter Score is a standard benchmark used by companies worldwide, making it a good way for businesses to gauge their performance compared to their competitors. However, the downside of this oversimplification is that it creates tunnel vision, also referred to as . Essentially, it warns us of the dangers of oversimplifying the complex landscape of customer experiences.

Too often, survey analysis centers around detractor feedback alone, overlooking the subtle frustrations hidden in otherwise positive metrics. This can lead to what we might refer to as promoter blindspot, where valuable insights from loyal customers go unnoticed simply because their scores are high. Often, these customers still describe friction, disappointment, or missed opportunities, but their voices don’t get the same attention.

It’s important to recognize that dissatisfaction doesn’t always come with a low score, and loyalty doesn’t mean silence on what needs to improve.

We face similar challenges with our contact center data. Post-call surveys are often our main lens into the customer experience: CSAT scores, resolution rates, or even open-ended comments. But all of these come after the moment has passed. They offer only a partial view of what actually happened and even less insight into why.

What we tend to overlook is the most human part of customer service: the conversation itself. Contact centers are not just support operations. They are full of real-time questions, confusion, frustration, needs, and moments that matter. But how often do we truly listen? A customer might give a positive survey score because the agent was kind, while the real issue that caused the call is buried in the words of the conversation, not in the survey box.

How to listen to customers more deeply

Now that we’ve explored some of the blindspots and limitations inherent in customer experience data analytics when focusing solely on metrics, let’s delve into how we can overcome these challenges with Text Analytics.

Text Analytics helps with structuring and prioritizing your unstructured data, the conversations themselves or the open-ended comments in surveys since they hold the richest insights beyond traditional metrics, really allowing us to listen to what the customer expressed.

Topics

Let’s start with the basics: the topics you apply to your unstructured data. A topic is essentially a set of keyword combinations, designed to capture specific comments within customer feedback. For example, a topic might flag phrases such as “the person that helped me was impatient with me”. This approach allows you to organize unstructured text into meaningful categories that we call Topics.

The foundation of effective text analytics lies in building a topic list that reflects your core business operations. Industry-specific topics help ensure that the insights you gather are relevant and actionable within the context of your products, services, and customer journeys.

Once a proper topic list is in place, the goal isn’t that you can still read it comment by comment. Instead, we organize it so we can help you surface quickly which topics require your attention. We highlight topic volumes, NPS averages, and metrics based on sentiment (which we’ll get into later).

Beyond these essential industry specific topics, topics with a unique angle to the data offer an additional layer of insight. For example, our Emotion Topics, Mental Crisis topics, and Customer Suggestion topics. These unique topics can help you tremendously trying to find valuable layers into your existing topics. Let me explain how!

Topic Co-occurence

The Topic Co-occurrence module in ��ԭ�� Text Analytics helps reveal how different topics or issues surface together in customer feedback. Rather than looking at topics in isolation, this tool identifies patterns where two or more topics appear within the same piece of feedback, either across the full comment or even within the same phrase. This level of detail helps uncover connections that may not be obvious through standard topic analysis.

For example, pairing your core, industry-specific topic list with emotional signal topics allows you to see which common problems, like product setup, billing, or agent support, are frequently associated with strong emotional responses. Your “Billing Ease of Understanding” topic might often co-occur with the Emotion topic “Anxiety.” You can also filter co-occurrence by sentiment, or even by speaker (agent vs. customer) when analyzing conversation data. This allows you to pinpoint whether a specific issue is being raised by the customer, addressed by the agent, or both, when analyzing your contact center conversations.

This kind of layered insight is key to identifying root causes, tracking emerging issues, and understanding how different experiences affect the customer’s overall perception. By using topic co-occurrence, businesses can make more targeted, informed improvements to products, services, and communication.

Sentiment Analysis

Another layer of how unstructured data can be untangled is by using the sentiment model at the topic level.

��ԭ��’s sentiment engine evaluates the tone of each phrase in feedback, whether from survey comments, chats, or transcribed speech, and classifies them from strongly negative to strongly positive, with categories in between.

In Text Analytics reporting, this phrase-level sentiment is rolled up to show how each topic is performing on a sentiment level. For example, you might quickly discover that the topic “Find Products Online” has a negative percentage of 60%.

But sentiment does more than highlight negative experiences. It plays a key role in helping you prioritize. One key metric is the Net Sentiment Score (NSS), which is simply the percent of positive sentiments minus the percent of negative sentiments. This score helps you quickly understand whether a topic leans more positive or negative.

The NSS is an extremely valuable and easy-to-use metric, but it doesn’t account for how often a topic comes up. To help you prioritize, especially when comparing a highly negative topic with thousands of comments to one with only a few, we use the NSS Impact Score. This metric combines the sentiment score with the volume of that specific topic, to calculate its overall influence on your Net Sentiment Score. In short, it tells you how strongly a topic is pulling your customer sentiment up or down — so you can focus on the issues that matter most.

Beyond the NPS

Just as the Monkey loves you or Monkey needs a hug phrase in Black Mirror represents a limited expression of human sentiment, we must ensure that our analysis of customer feedback doesn’t fall into the same trap.

It’s not enough to just understand that a customer “loves” us. We need to dig deeper to understand why they feel that way. Using the multiple text analytics analysis, we gain a richer, more complete picture of both our strengths and the areas where we can improve.

The world of text analytics is incredibly rich, offering countless ways to listen more deeply and more meaningfully. What I’ve shared here only scratches the surface; with new AI capabilities like summarization and theme detection, we have more tools than ever to go beyond sentiment and uncover the real stories behind the scores.

But the bigger picture here is that it’s not just about hearing that Monkey loves you; it’s about learning how to keep that love growing and evolving.

Psst…have you noticed that survey rates are rapidly declining? Here’s our guide on how to navigate this new reality.

How “Live Retail” Transforms the In-Person Shopping Experience

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:39:38 +0000

Innovative retailers are using real-time data from their apps — in other words, when customers use in-store mode on retail apps and frontline employees use their companion apps for assistance — to understand, shape, and optimize what’s happening for customers in physical locations.

Key takeaways 

• With live retail experiences, the physical, in-person shopping experience itself becomes more like a website or app. 

• Retailers are augmenting their employee apps with AI to help team members improve their product knowledge and solve problems faster on the spot. 

• Thanks to the data now available through consumer and employee retail apps, retailers have better insight into the in-person retail customer experience than ever before.

One of my favorite books, some might call it the bible of retail, is a book called by . Before this book came out in 1999, retailers didn’t have much insight into what drove shopper behavior. Executives were curious, and brands conducted research in this area, but Underhill really took our understanding of what shapes consumer activity inside stores to the next level.

How he did this was simple: He set up a bunch of cameras and observed people in the act of shopping. And then as a follow-up, he conducted interviews to learn not only what consumers were doing, but why.

His work has been instrumental in delving into the thought process of shoppers as they navigate and make purchases in physical stores. And it has informed store layout, shelving height, product placement, signage, employee engagement, cash wrap efficiency — you name it. But since then, for years, our understanding hasn’t progressed much. Even after ecommerce took off, we learned a lot about digital behavior, but the stores themselves have remained data-poor.

While it’s easy to see where online customers come from — what types of products and brands they view, what they add to their digital carts, what they end up buying, how long their visits are, and when they come back — for the most part, we’ve lacked visibility into the ways in which customers interact with things like products, employees, and signage in a physical store environment.

But that’s changing.

And the reason that’s changing is because of this concept I like to refer to as “digital in the analog,” “digital in the physical store,” or simply live retail.

The Advent of Live Retail (Digital Experiences in Physical Retail Stores) with App In-Store Mode

Originally, websites and mobile apps enabled consumers to complete transactions online without having to visit physical stores — supercharging the ecommerce side of the business. But with the popularity of buy online / pickup in-store, curbside pickup, and same-day delivery, the lines between digital business and brick and mortar stores have been blurring.

Early mobile innovators within the retail industry saw an opportunity to create a new strategy. They leveraged their mobile apps as companions for the in-store experience to create a new “store plus digital” experience — what some in the industry have dubbed “, or what I call live retail experience.

That’s how the in-store mode in retail apps came to be. They offer features that pop up in the app when consumers are in a physical location, such as store navigation, product comparison product reviews, self-checkout, and interactive virtual reality features that allow consumers to take a picture of a product, such as a couch, and see what it would look like in their homes.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek II: The Search for Spock, there’s a technology that enables planets that were once dead to be brought to life through a process called terraforming, and that’s what’s happening with these kinds of live retail experiences — they’re bringing the once data-poor world of analog retail to life with new data.

What does that mean? That means that the building itself — the physical, in-person shopping experience itself — becomes more like a website or app.

Retailers now can track when app users visit a store, how long they stay, how they navigate the store, which products they search for, whether they purchase, what items they end up converting on — the in-store mode of mobile apps has truly opened up a wealth of customer signals for retailers.

And this is only the beginning.

The Next Wave of Live Retail, with the Rise of Companion Apps for Frontline Employees

The other side of live retail is helping brands upgrade what’s traditionally been an analog employee experience with digital data and AI.

As part of my job as a retail industry executive advisor at ��ԭ��, I’ve had the chance to speak with frontline store employees to learn about their experiences firsthand.

As part of these discussions over the last several years, what I used to find was that the employees were downloading the consumer version of the retail app on their own and using it to better serve customers at their local stores, turning to the app to answer questions such as where products were located or whether an item was in stock.

Their employers eventually caught on and started introducing employee apps to serve as digital companions for frontline employees, giving them a whole new way to provide customers with better experiences. It was now possible to do things like look up their store’s inventory and ship out-of-stock items available nearby or online to customers’ homes right from their handheld devices.

These days, retailers are augmenting their employee apps with AI to help team members improve their product knowledge and solve problems faster on the spot.

Take home improvement stores. Now when customers ask a question related to plumbing, any associate with a wearable device and an earpiece can get answers by either asking the employee app that contains a generative AI-powered knowledge base, or by getting connected to an available product support specialist in real time. There’s no need to physically track down an employee with more in-depth knowledge to provide support.

What Live Retail Means for the Future of Customer Experience

Historically, we’ve seen that when customers engage with employees, they’re more likely to spend more. In other words, employee engagement drives higher average order values. But now the in-store mode of the app can do the same, serving as a silent associate.

Thanks to the data now available through consumer and employee retail apps, retailers have better insight into the in-person retail customer experience than ever before. With these learnings comes the power to influence and, ultimately, orchestrate the customer experience for the better — driving conversions and higher average order value, the same way retailers have been able to on the ecommerce side of the business.

If I go to a retailer’s website, my homepage experience is going to look different than yours, based on what the company knows about each of us. That insight drives recommendations to deliver a more curated experience, and now that can start happening in the store as well. For instance, retailers can take digital browsing and engagement data and use that to retarget users, sending notifications about items they’ve seen but not purchased. Or they can recommend related items when they visit a physical location.

Another potential use case: If the average browsing time for a given store visit is typically 10 minutes, retailers could use digital feedback tools to send a message to customers when they’ve been in the store longer than 10 minutes to ask them if they’ve been able to find everything they’re looking for. If the customer responds no, that could trigger an alert to notify an in-person or digital associate to proactively offer help, either in the store or in the app.

Now there are some exceptions, of course. Luxury retailers, and retailers that benefit from offering a high-touch experience, may not want to lean too heavily on using their apps. These kinds of digital interactions can’t compare to the experience of engaging with highly trained, personable employees.

But for most retailers, the combination of the employee companion app and the consumer retail app will make it possible to augment the experience, scale personalization at the one-to-one level, and lead to an uplift in sales for stores. Going forward, once retailers have the data, they can build out conversion funnels on the in-person side of the business the way they’re able to on the ecommerce side to more accurately forecast demand and revenue.

On the experience analytics side of things, companies will be able to score a customer’s visit to a store. Similar to the digital experience score, retailers could develop a retail experience score that sheds light on a consumer’s likelihood of conversion. At a macro level, visits could either be rated as green, yellow, or red. And brands could dig into red and yellow trips to uncover the reasons for that rating.

Let’s say out-of-stock items or navigation issues are driving dissatisfaction. Brands could use these learnings to modify their replenishment models or in-store wayfinding signage. Just as websites offer alternatives when customers can’t find what they’re looking for, retail apps could be leveraged to give customers alternatives, highlighting where the item is available online or at nearby locations or showcasing similar substitute items available in store.

Live Retail: The New Way of Doing Business

We’re at the early stages of this new era of live retail. Some of the companies we work with are beginning to use their in-store mode data and employee app data to measure, analyze, and influence the customer experience in real time, and it’s only a matter of time before this becomes standard practice and the way business is done. And not just for retailers: all brands with a digital app and physical presence (think hotels, airlines, cruises, and more) have the opportunity to harness their location-based digital experience insights to orchestrate journeys, optimize the in-person experience, and achieve stronger business outcomes.

Looking to embrace the power of live retail for your in-person shopping experiences? Our customer experience experts can help — let’s get started.

The Leak in the Roof: Catching Small Customer Experience Issues Before They Flood the House

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:39:48 +0000

Tiny customer experience issues rarely stay tiny. Here’s how to catch them early — before they become operational nightmares.

A hurricane doesn’t have to strike for a house to suffer serious damage. Sometimes, all it takes is a drip. A slow, silent leak, hidden behind a wall. Until suddenly, you’re ripping out drywall, replacing your floors, and questioning how things got this far.

Customer experience works the same way.

Your seemingly “small” customer experience issues aren’t that small — they could lead to significant risk for your business

Maybe it starts with a tiny product design flaw. An awkward website menu. A slow-loading app. The kind of everyday annoyances that seem harmless enough. Until they escalate. Leaving your team to deal with a deluge of support tickets and negative reviews. Increased operational strain. And, ultimately, lost revenue.

Turns out, these are more than drips. They’re the wakeup call your team needs. They’re an early warning sign of something that has the potential to become a much bigger problem and cost you more than you realize: A powerful leak that could take down your entire customer experience strategy and create measurable business risk.��

Even the smallest CX challenges, if undetected and unresolved, can translate to:

Financial losses from abandoned carts, missed transactions, lost referrals, and negative reviews.

Operational inefficiencies as low-level, recurring issues drive up contact volume and employees’ workloads.

Reputational damage: What may seem like no big deal to the business could be a really big deal to your current and prospective customers.

The drip effect in the real world: How just one leaky customer experience touchpoint can flood the entire system

“A tiny rattle on an airplane engine, if ignored, can turn into a massive failure. Same goes for your CX strategy,” says , Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at ��ԭ��, who has held management and operational roles with Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and more.

A single, undetected breakdown, whether it’s a digital touchpoint, human interaction, or an automated operational process, can quietly ripple across your business, leaving customers lost, employees overwhelmed, and leaders in the dark until it’s too late.

If a company fails to address these types of customer experience issues, letting them form into persistent drips, that oversight and lack of action can lead to structural damage in the form of turnover, diminished loyalty, and a tarnished brand reputation.��

Ryskamp saw this firsthand when a hotel brand that was looking to roll out a guest-friendly update to their app and inadvertently introduced a new problem — a confusing app menu — that led to even more customer experience hassles.

“What appeared like a minor issue ended up creating significant challenges. Guests started calling the front desk more often, which increased the staff’s workload and delayed their response time for other inquiries. Negative reviews started popping up online, which hurt the brand’s reputation, caused more stress for the team, and impacted bookings,” he explains. “And this was all from a feature that was meant to improve the customer experience.”

The worst part? No one saw it coming. Because no one was looking for the drip.

So many CX challenges go undetected, enabling leaks to become floods — here’s what brands need to do

Most customer experience issues start off as slow, steady drips hidden in customer comments, call logs, and digital behavior analytics.��

And just like the hotel brand in the example above didn’t realize what they should be looking for until the damage had already been done, most CX teams don’t know what to look for either. Companies send surveys after the fact. But surveys don’t tell the whole story, especially now that survey rates are declining. Brands monitor and analyze a sampling of contact center conversations. But sampling is just that: incomplete. Organizations don’t bring everything together and make sense of it in time.

That’s how important customer signals get lost and costly problems develop. Detecting these customer experience challenges early can add up to massive savings, but spotting snags when it really matters takes more than intuition.��

Even the most advanced AI can’t catch what it can’t see.

If you’re only listening in a few places — surveys, sampled call recordings, post-interaction feedback — you’re getting an incomplete picture. Customer signals are everywhere: in frustrated chat messages, abandoned clicks, offhand comments to frontline staff, even public posts.

That’s why omnichannel capture matters. It’s what gives AI the full context it needs to work its magic. Without it, you’re asking your team to find leaks in the dark. With it, you’re giving them a flashlight, and a full view of what’s at risk.

It takes the kind of pattern recognition and scale that AI excels at, finding important themes hidden in the noise when there’s still time to intervene.

That’s what ��ԭ��’s AI-powered Text Analytics and Speech Analytics do. They act like a CX home inspector. They listen across every channel — reviews, voice, chat, and digital behavior — and flag signs of trouble before they turn into full-scale operational chaos.

“T�� ԭ�� platform is really good at catching those tiny little rattles, things that look small but are actually systemic, happening at different locations, and not bubbling up yet, but happening enough to deserve attention,” explains Ryskamp.��

Preventing flooding in CX isn’t about responding faster. It’s about acting smarter, across every touchpoint and every team. With AI, businesses are able to move from reactive to predictive, resolving issues before they escalate and improving experiences before customers even notice something’s wrong.

By using platforms like ��ԭ�� to surface and address threats early on, businesses can save money, reduce risk, and protect customer loyalty. This isn’t reactive CX. It’s predictive, connected, and strategic.

Don’t wait for a flood — detect your minor customer experience challenges before they escalate

Where are the leaks in your customer experience? Is there an overly complicated checkout flow that’s fueling churn? A chatbot that’s driving calls instead of deflecting them? A digital redesign that looks good but is causing a spike in complaints?

These aren’t isolated annoyances. They’re early warnings telling you where friction is, where experiences are breaking down, and where your opportunities lie.

Don’t just listen more — listen smarter. With AI-powered insights, you don’t have to rely on guesswork. ��ԭ��’s system is capable of highlighting where friction is forming before any underlying problems flood your entire customer experience. Because the best CX strategy isn’t about damage control. It’s about detection, prediction, and precision.

Want to learn what steps leading brands are taking to move at the speed of customer behavior? Get our guide for our best practices for using real-time data to enable high-impact actions that drive desired customer and financial outcomes.

Prioritize the Right CX Improvements: An Expert-Backed Action Plan

Samantha Finken Rayner — Thu, 15 May 2025 18:04:26 +0000

Discover three challenges that get in the way of improving the customer experience in meaningful ways, and how to overcome them to implement CX improvements that make a difference.��

For customer experience (CX) professionals across industries, a few key challenges are universal. In our latest guide, , our industry experts weigh in on the top issues that prevent brands from improving the customer experience and how to solve them.��

Here we present the highlights of the action plan included in the guide to get you started.

The Challenges That Prevent CX Improvements — and How to Solve Them

Challenge #1: Focusing on the Right Data

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so the saying goes. But the loudest voice or most frequently mentioned issue, isn’t necessarily what brands need to pay the greatest or most immediate attention to, says , Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at ��ԭ��, who has held leadership roles with Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and more. Instead, organizations would be best served to spend their time and energy in areas in which they can have the highest impact.��

Solution #1: Prioritizing high-impact issues

Savvy brands are using AI-powered Speech Analytics and Text Analytics to analyze unstructured data from customer interactions across social media, customer support channels, online reviews, open-ended survey questions, and more to uncover issues that might otherwise be overlooked using traditional surveys and customer feedback methods but have the potential to have a greater influence on the overall customer experience and business outcomes. ��ԭ��’s CX platform helps conduct this analysis automatically and assigns impact scores to the findings.

“Our impact score blends Text Analytics with a quantitative score, pinpointing top CX drivers and often linking directly to financial outcomes,” explains , Vice President and Executive Advisor for Retail at ��ԭ��, who previously led customer experience and digital innovation at 7-Eleven.

For instance, when a bank turned to analyzing employee feedback in addition to customer feedback, they learned about a high-impact issue that had previously slipped through the cracks. When the bank had stopped playing music at their in-person locations to save money, customers felt their conversations were no longer private because the branches were silent. This was something they were able to quickly course correct by focusing on the right data, explains , Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at ��ԭ��, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB.

In the travel and hospitality industry, a hotel brand first thought that addressing long check-in lines was the most important issue to solve, but a less frequently occurring problem — related to bathtub drainage — turned out to be the high-impact issue that had a bigger influence on real business outcomes, says Ryskamp.��

Challenge #2: Moving Beyond Data Paralysis and Dated Insights

On either end of the spectrum, having too little or too much data can hinder decision-making. This kind of thinking can lead to inaction as teams wait for more data to be available or become overwhelmed by being faced with too much information to sift through and analyze. Another issue that can prevent brands from moving in lockstep with shifting customer preferences, behaviors, and sentiment, is a reliance on rear-view looking data, that is customer feedback that’s captured and acted upon after the fact, rather than in real time.��

Solution #2: Capturing real-time customer signals

Brands have the ability to listen to what’s happening to customers across their customer journeys in the moment — by gathering customer signals from customer support interactions, social media conversations, and app and website interactions — to understand what’s shaping experiences and what CX improvements can be made.��

“Capturing experience data as it happens helps businesses spot friction points and resolve issues before they escalate — or before customers disappear for good, taking their loyalty with them,” says Ryskamp.

Challenge #3: Taking Action When It’s Needed Most

Too often, brands stall at the insights gathering and analysis stages. They don’t have a defined roadmap to guide their next move.��

As Debnar asks: “What happens after you discover a game-changing insight? Is there a clear path to turn it into action?”

Solution #3: Going from insights to action

To avoid this common pitfall, organizations need to develop a governance structure that holds teams accountable. Doing so will ensure meaningful insights don’t slip through the cracks, avoiding missed opportunities and wasted efforts.

In addition to establishing a process for action, advanced brands are evolving their CX tech stacks for faster, more strategic moves. Some of the key features they’re investing in are behavioral intelligence tools, conversational intelligence solutions, predictive analytics, and generative AI.��

These capabilities help companies understand what’s happening behind every customer interaction and enable high-impact CX improvements that boost engagement, revenue, and loyalty at scale.

“With the right strategy and technology, you can proactively resolve issues through automated case management, trigger workflows that drive seamless resolutions, and fuel action plans that lead to lasting customer loyalty,” explains , Vice President of Product of CX Solutions at ��ԭ��, who has spent over 15 years in CX and founded ��ԭ��’s digital practice and solutions.��

The Cost of Not Making the Right CX Improvements

Ultimately, customer loyalty is what is at stake when brands fail to implement changes that customers want and expect. And, unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to turn customers away. ��ԭ�� customer loyalty research reveals 1 in 8 customers will abandon a brand forever after one poor experience. underscores the positive impact of customer loyalty: 97% of CX professionals say that customer loyalty plays a major role in driving key business outcomes and 92% of high-growth companies plan to increase their investment in loyalty initiatives this year.��

Is your brand getting stuck when it comes to determining the CX improvements to focus on that your customers will really care about and that will make a difference when it comes to your bottom line? Our complete guide, , presents an action plan to help you eliminate these roadblocks and drive customer loyalty with smarter CX decisions.

15 Predictions That Will Redefine Customer Experience in 2026 – ����ԭ��