5 Things We Learned from the Customer Experience Speakers at the Sydney XI Forum

After 14 customer experience speakers, 250 delegates, two hands-on workshops, and hours of networking on the Sydney Harbour cruise, the 2022 Sydney XI Forum is done and dusted. That means it’s time to take what you’ve learned and start doing the work to elevate your experience program! 

We heard from award-winning customer experience speakers from some of Australia’s biggest brands—Craveable Brands, The NRMA, Rest Super, Foxtel, and JAX Tyres & Auto—not to mention two of Pearl-Plaza’s global leaders. The day was filled with practical tips that you can apply to your program from day one.

If you missed out on the event, don’t worry—here are five key takeaways you can use to apply to your experience program today! 

5 Pieces of Advice from Our Customer Experience Speakers

#1: Managing Experiences Is Not Enough—The Future Is Experience Improvement

Pearl-Plaza’s Global CMO, Kristi Knight, took us through the evolution of customer experience (CX). CX started out in the golden age of advertising, market research, and understanding consumers. Then, the internet was born, and online surveys were created to collect customer feedback in a timely manner. Next, we started managing experiences, and we recognised that the total experience a customer has is a collection of moments and interactions along their journey. The idea of simply “managing” metrics tells your business where you are and where you’ve been, not necessarily where you’re going. The future of CX is moving past managing experiences, to actually improving them through experience improvement. 

#2: Instead of Collecting More and More Data, Take Action On the Data Your Already Have

The CX industry has made big promises to brands; Essentially, if you listen to customers and act on that feedback, you’ll see results like loyalty, retention and other positive business outcomes. The XI Forum challenged our perspective on the traditional model of listening to feedback and collecting endless data. The ultimate goal for brands is to move beyond collecting operational and customer feedback, toward building differentiation from competitors, and ultimately designing and innovating new revenue streams and customer segments for the future. Make sure your CX platform is equipped to layer all types of feedback, whether that be direct (surveys) data, indirect data, or inferred (CRM) data.

#3: Make a Plan to Leverage AI in Your Experience Program

Like most industries, customer experience leaders are currently challenged to integrate AI into their programs to free up some of the manual tasks of improving experiences. If done correctly, AI can power your natural language understanding capabilities to show your business which actions to take to move the needle.  Ideally, every CX  platform should tell brands WHAT to do next.

To do that—survey data is not enough for AI to work properly, and there isn’t a robot sitting behind the platform making sense of your customer data and creating business insights for you. What you can do today is create bespoke AI models that will help make your platform smarter—for one, you can train your platform on what a churning customer looks like, and set up triggers to reach out to valuable clients when they are signaling dissatisfaction. 

#4: When It Comes to CX and the C-Suite, Optimise Your Dashboards

The C-Suite of any business is typically one of the most important stakeholders in your CX program. They need to be informed about what kind of CX initiatives are happening, where the CX problems are, and the plan to tackle them—AND they are extremely time poor. 

To solve this, optimise your C-Suite CX dashboards using these principles: 

• Purpose: make the purpose of the dashboard crystal clear
• Relevance: make sure each element of the dashboard will resonate with your audience, which may require bespoke configuration 
• Engaging: these data visualisation on a C-Suite dashboard, should be simple and straightforward—take the guesswork out of convoluted charts and diagrams. Add branding, colours, and themes to make it visually appealing. 
• Story: create and place the widgets in isolation and then decide the consumable order—the ultimate goal should be an overarching CX story that your C-Suite can easily understand 

#5: Level Up Your Experience Program by Marrying Together Multiple Voices

In the last keynote of the day, the CEO of JAX Tyres & Auto, Steve Grossrieder, described how their business is layering together voice of customer, voice of employees, and even voice of franchisees for a complete view of the customer journey. In doing so, the entire culture of the business is focused on the customer. For true customer centricity, it might be time for your brand to consider adding in another data set to further understand your employees, franchisees, partners, or other stakeholders.

The Pearl-Plaza Team