Feature
Research Report
Power Personalized CX with AI That Remembers What Customers Don’t Want to Repeat
The Gist
- AI maturity is about governance, not velocity. Practitioners aren’t racing to deploy tools — they’re sequencing them carefully.
- CX influence depends on business fluency. Conversion, order volume and lifetime value are the currencies that win executive alignment.
- Experience is cross-functional infrastructure. Hospitality, B2B rental and gig commerce all require structural coordination, not just better dashboards.
LAS VEGAS — Las Vegas loves a big demo. So does Medallia.
Conversational analytics that answer follow-up questions in seconds. Generative summaries that surface root causes instantly. Dashboards that look more like chat interfaces than reporting systems.
Essentially, the theme here at Medallia Experience '26 at the Wynn Las Vegas is "insights to action," and smart AI paves the way. Bring the LLM experience we know and love in the consumer world into enterprise customer experience.
Off the stage and away from the shiny, nicotine-stained casino halls, CX practitioners told a quieter — and more instructive — story. AI is accelerating insight. That much is clear. What matters more is how deliberately organizations are choosing to operationalize it.
Across hospitality, B2B industrial rental and subscription-based gig commerce, four CX leaders who caught up with CMSWire this week in the desert described different businesses with remarkably similar instincts: move forward, but don’t fracture the experience in the process.
No one's rolling the dice like they do in this city with customer experience. Their sure bets? A solid foundation of customer data management, customer listening and empowering teams around them to simply believe in customer experience as the bedrock discipline of a successful enterprise.
Table of Contents
- Holiday Inn Club: Protect the Expectation Layer in Customer Experience
- United Rentals: Compress Time, Protect Customer Trust
- Shipt: Remove the Barrier, Unlock the Lifetime Value
Holiday Inn Club: Protect the Expectation Layer in Customer Experience
For Camille Kremer, senior director of CX at Holiday Inn Club Vacations, everything begins with expectation management. Hospitality is uniquely vulnerable to inconsistency. A confusing pre-arrival email or a poorly handled check-in can set the emotional tone for an entire vacation.
As she put it, “An experience anywhere, sets expectations everywhere, right?” If the front end falters, recovery becomes exponentially harder. “If you have a bad experience up front, there's almost no way to recover from that. Because if we go off track there, the rest of your vacation is is downhill.”
That philosophy shapes how she and Mercedes Navarro, senior manager of CX, are thinking about generative AI. The technology is compelling. The demos are impressive. But deploying AI unevenly across a customer journey introduces new risk: expectation distortion.
Kremer worries about over-indexing on one touchpoint while others lag behind. “If we go without a strategy and without being thoughtful, and apply AI to one part of the experience and not strategically to the whole experience, we're going to create a really uneven experience for people,” she said. In that scenario, she says bluntly, “You can set up customers for discontent.”
Measured Philosophy With Customer Experience Rollouts
Navarro describes a similarly measured rollout philosophy. When Holiday Inn Club first implemented Medallia, the tool wasn’t handed to the entire organization overnight. Only after understanding workflows and use cases internally did they expand access in defined ways.
The same discipline now governs AI. Every decision runs through four internal tenets: know me, respect me, value my time, make me feel safe. If a new tool can’t support those principles, it doesn’t move forward.
That structural mindset recently shaped a surprising focus area: the “no sale” experience during timeshare tours. Rather than obsess solely over conversion, the customer experience team helped sales analyzed what happened when a guest declined to purchase. The emotional tone of departure mattered more than expected.
“A first impression is important, but a last impression is lasting,” Kremer said.
Coaching sales teams to protect that final interaction reduced negative behavioral incidents significantly. Financial linkage followed later, but the cultural shift came first. Senior leaders had something concrete to celebrate beyond revenue.
"We'll want to be in a good place to let our leaders both get to the root cause of an issue and develop a solution," Kremer said. "Again, I think the training and the guardrails and the framework needs to fit within our paradigm and pick a solution, run that experiment, that pilot, find your outcomes and determine if it was effective. Don't do this every week because we're just going to have spaghetti against the wall. ... It's not something I want someone to be looking at every day, or you are going to get lost."
Insight velocity without governance creates noise. In hospitality, noise becomes inconsistency. And inconsistency erodes customer trust.
Related Article: Medallia's AI Bet in Vegas: Can Cusotmers Move From Insight to Action?
United Rentals: Compress Time, Protect Customer Trust
At United Rentals, Alyse Fuller, customer experience program manager, operates as a one-person CX function inside a massive B2B organization. Her vantage point is different from hospitality, but her instinct for discipline is similar.
Fuller loves experimentation. When Medallia introduced generative AI capabilities, she volunteered immediately. “I love being an early adopter … Put me in, Coach.”
But before activation came alignment. Legal review. Data privacy conversations. Security validation. “Are there any legal implications we need to consider here?" she asked. Then, looping in the data specialists and the tech team to ensure they are rigorous on privacy.
In industrial rental, long-term contracts and enterprise accounts raise the stakes. Speed without governance isn’t innovation — it’s exposure.
Once deployed, however, the efficiency gains were tangible. During a routine report, Fuller spotted an 11-point shift in one sales channel. Historically, diagnosing that swing might have taken hours. Using Root Cause Assist, she narrowed it down in about 10 minutes. With conversational analytics layered in, she estimates the same task could take seconds.
The difference between hours and seconds changes decision rhythm. But Fuller frames even proactive CX moments in business math. Recounting an ISP provider that automatically credited her account after an outage, she reverse-engineered the logic. “They are able to calculate … the cost of action versus the cost of inaction," she said.
In other words, proactive service isn’t altruism. It’s ROI protection.
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Looking ahead, Fuller is shifting toward personalization at the internal level — breaking company-wide goals into regional and performance-tier variations. “We started … breaking it down to more of a regional level.” High performers aren’t managed the same way as struggling teams.
Bottom line: AI accelerates answers. Governance sustains trust. In B2B, both matter equally.
Key Drivers Behind These CX Leaders’ Operating Models
What Holiday Inn Club Vacations, United Rentals and Shipt revealed about how they structure, govern and monetize customer experience.
| Driver | Holiday Inn Club Vacations (Kremer & Navarro) | United Rentals (Fuller) | Shipt (Owumi) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expectation Management | Experience must be consistent across the entire journey. Uneven AI deployment risks creating “discontent” by raising expectations in one touchpoint that others can’t match. | Trust protection is central. Speed gains must not compromise governance or customer confidence in enterprise relationships. | Perception barriers (like price markups) directly affect trust and engagement. Removing friction strengthens loyalty and brand perception. |
| Governed AI Rollout | Selective deployment. Pilot internally before broad access. AI must align with defined customer tenets: know me, respect me, value my time, make me feel safe. | Legal, data security and privacy review precede activation. AI adoption flows through enterprise governance before workflow acceleration. | AI is embedded into lifecycle feedback systems and marketplace signals, but always tied back to business outcomes and growth strategy. |
| Behavioral Drivers Over Surface Metrics | Identified “knowledge” and “concern” as core behavioral drivers in contact centers. Improved coaching and real-time agent feedback drove 85% guest love scores. | Focuses on identifying which operational levers shift experience metrics — not just tracking scores but isolating causal factors. | Preferred Shopper program reveals emotional trust driver — continuity reduces cognitive load and doubles order frequency. |
| Financial Linkage & ROI Translation | Linked sales experience score increases to measurable conversion lift. Behavioral wins precede revenue, but financial linkage validates long-term impact. | Views CX through “cost of action vs cost of inaction.” Proactive service framed as ROI protection and lifetime value preservation. | Eliminated markups after data showed it was the industry’s largest perception barrier. Short-term margin tradeoff for long-term LTV growth. |
| Cadence & Insight Rhythm | Insight velocity must be controlled. Avoid daily reactive behavior. Structured review preferred over constant optimization noise. | AI compresses insight time from hours to seconds, but execution remains disciplined and measured. | Lifecycle-based feedback capture at defined moments (checkout, delivery, churn, shopper onboarding) to prevent over-surveying while identifying true patterns. |
| Cross-Functional Integration | Monthly leadership reviews bring CX into executive visibility. Sales, contact centers and resort teams coordinated under shared CX framework. | CX operates alongside operations excellence. Insight translation between NPS and operational metrics is continuous. | CX integrated with membership marketing, product marketing and consumer mindset research under one VP to align growth and experience strategy. |
| Empowerment Through Transparency | Agents receive real-time access to Medallia scores to drive ownership and coaching improvement. | Regional personalization of CX targets empowers teams differently based on performance maturity. | Gig workers incentivized through “Summit Seekers” loyalty model; feedback delivered in constructive, aspirational framework. |
| Friction Removal Strategy | Focused on improving the “no sale” departure experience to protect future revenue opportunity. | Reduces internal friction by building dashboards and AI workflows that shorten investigative cycles. | Removed price markups — the largest perceived industry friction — to unlock subscription engagement and order growth. |
| Operating Philosophy | AI must support a defined customer paradigm, not override it. | Insights are only valuable if teams trust them enough to act. | CX must align directly with enterprise growth priorities — not operate as a siloed advocacy function. |
Shipt: Remove the Barrier, Unlock the Lifetime Value
Courtney Owumi, vice president of consumer experience and membership engagement at Shipt, approaches CX through a growth lens. Her mandate spans consumer insights, membership marketing and product marketing — all reporting into the chief marketing officer.
For her, influence depends on alignment. “You need to put it in terms of what is important to the business and connect it to the priorities of the business.”
Shipt operates within a three-sided ecosystem: subscribers, gig shoppers and retail partners. “Our subscribers are just as important as our shoppers… and just important as our retail partners," she said.
One differentiator driving measurable lift is Preferred Shopper. Customers who request the same shopper repeatedly reduce cognitive load and increase customer loyalty. “If you liked your shopper and your order, you can say, 'Hey, I want them again.'”
The performance impact is significant. “The NPS increases double digits; the fulfillment OSAT increases like 300%," she said. "Those members shop twice as much as somebody who doesn't have preferred shoppers. So there's so much power as we think about the revenue and the satisfaction that that customer is getting, that ROI, that LTV, that we're building in that customer, and that's our partnership with ops to help make that happen."
Managing Customer Experience Across the Entire Lifecycle
But the most strategic unlock came from confronting an industry-wide friction point: price markups. “That is probably the biggest perception barrier in our industry," Owumi said.
Shipt tested eliminating markups for Target Circle 360 members and saw strong order volume lift. “We saw amazing results in lifts, in order volume.” Today, “All Target Circle 360 guests have access to the shipped marketplace with no price markups.”
Owumi’s team collects feedback across the entire lifecycle — app interaction, delivery experience, churn moments and even gig worker activation friction. “Collecting them at all those different places really helps us pick out what is really important.”
The ultimate lesson between the three brands? AI tools are evolving rapidly. Insight latency is shrinking. But maturity isn’t about deploying everything at once.
The operating system for customer experience excellence aligns technology, governance and business priorities — after the bright demo lights fade.