Editorial
The Gist
- Culture drives CX maturity. Leaders from CVS Health and others highlighted that a strong internal culture is foundational to delivering exceptional customer experience at scale.
- AI augments human empathy. Sessions at Medallia Experience stressed that AI should support—not replace—humans, freeing up time and focus for more meaningful customer interactions.
- Employee and customer experience are inseparable. Keynotes reinforced that internal operations and team empowerment are essential to delivering on external brand promises.
LAS VEGAS — It’s been a busy year for Medallia, releasing over 100 new features for their customer experience platform.
So, when Medallia Experience 2025 kicked off at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas last week, there were high expectations for the company to build on this momentum and introduce the new members of their executive team.
The next two days saw the introduction of several new AI-based features, as well as insights and ideas from brands that have been at the forefront of customer experience. Throughout keynotes and sessions over the two days of the event, several themes emerged. Let’s explore them, and look at how AI and human teams working together are shaping the future of CX.
Table of Contents
- Scaling CX Operations for the Enterprise
- Focusing AI on Solving Practical Customer Challenges
- The Power of Employee and Customer Experience Working Together
- What CX Leaders Should Take Away
Scaling CX Operations for the Enterprise
Most brands today understand the key role that great customer experience plays in both the short and long term success of their brands, though this understanding was probably best characterized by Sri Narasimhan, CVS Health vice president and head of enterprise consumer insights and customer experience, in his keynote session. He showed through real-world examples how a leading enterprise brand is able to deliver on the promise of great CX through building it in their culture and their brand.
Of course, with a solid approach to culture, an organization still needs a way to operationalize that great customer experience. This is where a recurring theme of building CX for scale become incredibly important, even for the smaller organizations in attendance.
Medallia CEO Mark Bishof opened the event talking about enterprise scale and management, and how an omnichannel architecture for a CX platform enables the ability to keep pace with the multitude of customers that are engaging with brands across multiple touchpoints and sometimes multiple reasons.
While many organizations may feel stuck at square one of building a good experience for employees and customers, it was consistently stressed that it is not enough to think about the current stage and potentially nascent stages of a CX program. Instead, building with future scalability in mind will help to differentiate the leaders from the laggards in the battle for loyal customers.
Related Article: Not Your Average CX: The Rise of Hyper-Personalized Experiences
Focusing AI on Solving Practical Customer Challenges
While the big picture is critical to drive a vision forward, leaders also need to make sure that their teams have the tools to create meaningful experiences with each interaction, every day. Medallia Chief Product Officer Fabrice Martin stressed that, while AI has broad applications throughout the enterprise, offering a blanket solution that can apply artificial intelligence to any problem can often be too open-ended and not gain the adoption that teams need when tasked with solving problems quickly, accurately and in a way that truly resolves them so customers can move on with their lives.
To provide practical solutions to some of the key challenges that CX professionals, customer service agents and others are impacted by on a daily basis, Medallia offered a few solutions. These include:
- Root Cause Assist that takes the time-consuming work of analyzing customer interactions to identify specific pain points or areas for improvement.
- Prescriptive Digital Experience Insights that analyze digital user interactions on websites and other channels to highlight room for enhancement.
- Intelligent Summaries that save customer service agents time and focus by providing details recaps of customer interactions so that agents can spend their time focused on the customer rather than note taking.
In addition to saving time and focus, these are examples of using AI where it is most needed: to save humans time, to crunch large amounts of data or hours of recorded interactions, and to enable employees to focus on building customer relationships, using empathy to build connections and tying strategic insights together.
Related Article: How Pfizer Is Building Customer Experience From the Inside Out
The Power of Employee and Customer Experience Working Together
Beyond the role of AI and software, the other theme that continued to emerge is the role of culture as the differentiator for CX success. The concept that every employee impacts the customer experience was prevalent throughout the sessions, and it was perhaps best articulated by keynote speaker Denise Lee Yohn, who said “you need to operate differently on the inside to operate differently on the outside.”
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As much as Medallia Experience was focused on how to use a CX platform to improve customer relationships, it kept circling back to what an organization needs to be successful in a holistic way. While this involves great software and data, it also involves the people, processes and culture that keep the organization focused on the customer while driving the business forward.
What CX Leaders Should Take Away
These is plenty more that could be mentioned here across a packed two days of content and announcements, but for leaders that are focused on growing customer acquisition, customer loyalty and customer retention in 2025, there is a key message here: great customer experience is the result of building a culture that focuses on building great employee experience, and leadership that ties these to tangible business results.
AI is a great augmentation to all of the above, and the brands that will be successful will understand how to strategically apply artificial intelligence, where to deploy their employees and, just as important, how to coordinate these two critical components of the future of customer experience.
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