Colin Carter, Divisional Director, CX USA Exchange 

In this keynote, Dennis Wakabayashi, The Global Voice of CX, shares his extensive expertise and practical insights from over 30 years of collaboration with leading global brands and government organizations. Attendees will receive a comprehensive roadmap for adapting and aligning their CX strategies to meet the challenges of the evolving international economic landscape.

Key topics include:

• The Definitive CX Blueprint: An essential guide to refining and aligning CX strategies with business goals.
• Building High-Impact CX Teams: Strategies for structuring teams that drive meaningful results.
• Aligning Incentives with Strategic Goals: Approaches for fostering motivation that supports long-term CX success.
• Operational Excellence and KPIs: Effective methods for moving from strategy to seamless execution with relevant performance measures.
• The Technology Matrix: An essential framework for navigating legacy and modern technology to keep organizations agile and competitive.
• Case Study Insights: Lessons from real-world examples that reveal critical successes and everyday challenges.
• Takeaway Playbook: Practical tools and a step-by-step guide for immediate application.

Dennis Wakabayashi

The Global Voice of CX
The Global Voice of CX

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Whatever your line of business, it’s understood that delivering great CX is critical. In a competitive world, CX which offers exactly what the customer wants can be a genuine business differentiator, and naturally, is a key area any organization needs to pay a laser-sharp focus to.  

Given the importance of CX, the practical aspects of how to deliver differentiating customer experience is at the heart of most discussions on the subject. To this end, a myriad of tools exist which can help create more impactful customer experience strategies, and numerous methods exist to measure the impact these strategies have for the firms who use them. These are critical aspects of the development of this sector – the tools which exist now allow better, quicker, and more personalized customer experience to be delivered, and the methods which measure their effectiveness give invaluable insight into the impact these investments have had.  

However, fundamentally, there is a risk of confusing the means with the end; demonstrating the effective use of a new solution or the delivery of great CX strategy by analyzing customer outcomes is often the end goal and runs the risk of missing the purpose of CX – driving profitability for your business. Within this leadership keynote session, Eric Smuda, CXO of Likewize, will discuss the importance of staying true to the purpose of any investment of time / money / resource into this field: tying CX to business growth. 

Eric Smuda

Chief Experience Officer
Likewize

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Customer expectations are constantly evolving so NPS and CSAT scores aren’t enough on their own to paint an accurate picture of end-to-end customer experience. While NPS and CSAT scores can give you a general sense of how your customers feel, they can’t tell you why they feel this way. Having a continuous customer feedback loop will encourage a more holistic approach to how you can utilize VoC data. This session will explore: 

• How to maximize the value of NPS and CSAT scores 
• Creating an ecosystem for VoC to indicate end-to-end customer experience 
• Analyzing unstructured data to gain a more accurate understanding towards customer behavior 

In a world where CX priorities and approaches are constantly evolving, it’s important to give your team the tools they need to be able to adapt accordingly. Despite technological innovation, let’s not get distracted and lose sight of what customer experience is really about: the customer.  

Leveling the playing field when it comes to new technology adoption or a change in strategy direction can promote a more engaged and open-minded team.  This session will consider: 

• How democratizing technology can create equal opportunities within your organization through accessibility and capability 
• Why providing context for technology introduction can help overcome the generation bias 
• The importance of getting to know your team on a human level and making them feel empowered as brand representatives 

Laura Chamoun

Head of Customer Experience
Polestar Automotive, North America

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Voice of the Customer has a direct impact on customer retention, loyalty and growth and neglecting diverse opportunities for customers to provide feedback can only jeopardize customer retention and satisfaction. VoC goes beyond giving your customers the space to share their feedback and should equally encompass your organization’s ability to listen. Join this session to explore: 

• How analyzing direct channel engagement, as well as brand reputation, will create a full cycle of customer feedback, allowing you to adapt accordingly 
• Utilizing sentiment analysis to understand what your customers are saying without saying it to encourage a continuous feedback loop 
• Implementing VoC tools and best practices to enhance your ability to collect and analyze feedback 

Customers value being able to connect with brands through a variety of different channels depending on their needs and priorities. An organization’s ability to offer a personalized service consistently across their channels shows that they understand their customer’s needs and preferences. This promotes brand engagement as well as increased advocacy and loyalty over time. However, there is often a lack of proactivity when it comes to data analysis across all channels which jeopardizes the potential to create a truly personalized user experience. 

By analyzing past interactions and historical customer behavior, organizations can anticipate individual customer needs which improves customer satisfaction by delivering the right solutions at the right time. 

It’s essential to capitalize on your data across all channels to be able to increase personalization to improve customer satisfaction in a time where brand loyalty is crucial to longevity. This session will explore: 

• Harnessing customer behavior patterns and historical interactions to learn individual preferences  
• How to maximize your data’s potential across all channels to create a personalized user experience 
• Implementing tools to process your data and automate personalization 

Reactive data utilization in customer service involves analyzing and responding to customer interactions and feedback after they occur. By leveraging data from support tickets, customer inquiries, and past interactions, it’s possible to identify patterns and trends in problems, pain points and areas to improve. 

While proactive strategies are beneficial because they anticipate customer needs, reactive approaches enable organizations to address real-time concerns more effectively, providing timely resolutions and enhancing customer satisfaction. This session will explore: 

• Centralizing data collection to enable consolidation of customer interactions for multiple channels to improve efficacy 
• Categorizing data to be able to effectively prioritize issues and solve urgent problems more effectively 
• Leveraging post-service feedback to optimize processes and direct training 

Alan Scally

Associate Director Workforce Management
Spotify

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The AI optimism gap highlights that while we may be optimistic for AI’s potential, there is still a long way to go before we can be truly confident in its implementation; we know it exists, but we should be asking ourselves “what can it do for me now?” instead of wondering what it might be able to do for us in the future. AI shouldn’t have a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Whether you’re implementing it for automation, personalization or efficiency, you should be considering your organization’s core values, objectives and priorities. As we move from proof- of-concept through to production, it’s important to adopt a pragmatic approach to create a sustainable AI roadmap. This session will consider: 

• Assessing whether your data infrastructure is mature enough to handle AI implementation 
• A comparison of the value between implementing AI on an operational, customer-facing or enterprise level 
• Determining whether AI implementation is the right move for your organization 
• Demonstrating ROI of AI through Data & Analytics 

TS Balaji

VP Digital & Customer Experience
Cox Communications

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These interactive roundtables will give you an opportunity to explore your AI journey with your peers. Whether you’re at preadoption stage or an AI expert, share your strategies, challenges, and solutions with others in the industry. 

Getting a genuine idea of the success (or otherwise) of customer interactions has never been so important. Analysing these “moments of truth” can be critical in both improving your approach to customer experience overall, showing what’s working and what’s not and allowing you to adapt your plans where needed. Naturally, the most critical aspect of using data to drive future direction is the inputs used – in this case, ensuring the data captures the true nature of customer experiences and is representative of all interactions. 

Surveys have been the traditional medium to gather this information. However, whilst they are still a vital cog in the machine to deliver meaningful and actionable insight, in this keynote case-study, TS Balaji, VP of Digital and Customer Experience at Cox Communications will give invaluable insight into how Cox Communication go beyond this, measuring operational activity to create sentiment predictions, then using surveys to test these models against. Using this data, Cox Communications are able to get a greater level of certainty into their insights created and can drive a more customer-centric operating model – all of which will be explored during this critical presentation. 

TS Balaji

VP Digital & Customer Experience
Cox Communications

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