Experience ‘25 Recap: The New Era of Exceptional CX

Here are the biggest highlights from Medallia Experience ’25, including our keynote sessions and Medallia’s new vision for customer experience.

What a week! CX and EX professionals from the world’s most beloved brands gathered together at the Wynn Las Vegas to learn, swap stories, and mind-meld about all things customer experience. 

This year’s conference theme was Being Exceptional: a rallying call for brands to deliver exceptional customer experiences by rethinking their traditional strategies and tools.

During the opening keynote, the Medallia executive team unveiled our vision and roadmap to help CX professionals move beyond surveys and usher in the new era of customer experience.

Over three days (including a pre-conference day), Experience ‘25 was packed with hands-on workshops, creative and engaging networking opportunities (a jet lag lounge! 90s theme party!), and attendees and speakers from impressive brands — including Sandals Resorts, CVS Health, Pacific Life, SeatGeek, and many more — making this conference the place to be for all experience professionals.

Here are the biggest takeaways from Experience ‘25:

The Power of Unreasonable Hospitality

This year’s celebrity keynote guest speaker was the world-renowned restaurateur Will Guidara, whose entrepreneurial journey and memoir Unreasonable Hospitality helped inspire the Emmy-winning series The Bear, where he is also a co-producer. 

Will’s relentless pursuit of excellence came to life when he set an audacious goal: to make Eleven Madison Park the number one restaurant in the world. To achieve this, he developed a new philosophy that he dubbed “unreasonable hospitality.”

Will understood that to stand out, he and his team needed to offer something more than just top-tier food and service — they needed to make every guest feel seen and cared for in a way that no one else was doing in the restaurant industry. His vision wasn’t just about creating exceptional dishes; it was about creating an unforgettable experience. 

This approach required tapping into the collective creativity and emotional investment of everyone on staff, from the dishwashers to the front-of-house team. The key was making each person feel integral to the restaurant’s success and empowering them to go the extra mile in serving customers.

The results spoke for themselves when Eleven Madison Park was named the best restaurant in the world. But, as Will humbly acknowledged, it wasn’t just about the quality of the food. “It had nothing to do with the excellence of our product,” he said. “That’s just table stakes — fulfilling the base-level promise to customers.” What set them apart was their relentless commitment to creating personal, memorable experiences for guests. This was what Will called “a win-win-win”: it boosted their bottom line, energized the team, and, most importantly, made their customers feel valued. 

Will’s philosophy of unreasonable hospitality transformed not only his restaurant but also the way his team thought about service, proving that when you focus on people — both guests and staff — success naturally follows.

Why It’s Really, Truly Time to Evolve Beyond Survey-Centric Programs

One of the buzziest topics at Experience ‘25 was Medallia unveiling its vision for the future of experience, where omnichannel insights, conversational intelligence, and modern AI come together to evolve CX programs beyond silos and surveys. 

Although surveys remain useful, brands must start capturing more signals from every source and channel available — voice, chat, social, digital behavior, employees, operational data, and more — rather than relying on surveys as the heart of their CX programs. 

“We’re not abandoning surveys. It’s foundational to what we do — but we need to pivot from them,” said Medallia CEO Mark Bishof. “They create the baseline with customers, and it’s important that we keep that going. But at the end of the day, if NPS goes up or down, you don’t know why. You need unstructured data to get there.”

Medallia’s Chief Strategy Officer, Sid Banerjee, emphasized the importance of omnichannel CX. It’s only when teams are able to access the plethora of customer data from all brand channels, he said, that CX programs will realize the full potential of the new generation of AI tools now available, which rely on vast data sources to work its magic.

Rethinking the Contact Center as a Strategic Asset

One of the biggest themes of the conference was the importance of the contact center as a source of rich data insights, and how tapping into those conversational insights, helping them make sense to frontline staff, and making them actionable is how the contact center becomes one of the most valuable channels for the organization. 

With the right solution automatically surfacing the right insights from every conversation, organizations can solve problems quickly and better serve their customers. Businesses can not only enhance customer satisfaction but also identify trends, predict future issues, and improve overall operational efficiency. These insights can provide a deeper understanding of customer needs, enabling organizations to make more informed decisions and drive innovation. This data can help companies foster stronger customer relationships and stay ahead of the competition.

Interested in learning more? This was such a big topic at Experience that we will explore it in more depth in our next blog.

Fusing EX and CX to Accelerate Growth

Kicking off day two of the conference was keynote speaker EX expert Denise Lee Yohn, along with a panel discussion with Jessica Shannon, Chief Experience Officer at Sandals Resorts International, and Sasha Fard, Country Lead for Customer Experience Management at Capital One. 

In the early stages of her career, Denise witnessed a brand leader in the electronics space lose to a competitor due to an arrogant and complacent company culture. She now believes that company culture — employees’ everyday experience with the company — is a crucial element of customer experience. She likens this EX and CX relationship to an atomic nucleus: when they come together, it creates a powerful energy — much like how nuclear energy fuels the sun — accelerating growth and success.

“If you want to win at CX, you need to focus more on data, tech, and tools,” she said. “Employees can and will only deliver experiences to customers that they experience themselves.”

At Sandals Resorts, there is an 80% correlation between employee engagement and guest experience, Jessica noted. They invest in their employees, giving them access to higher education, letting them share their culture with guests — and as a result, their staff invests their time and energy in their guests. These efforts work so well that Jessica shared how a couple that she had met recently on a plane changed their favorite property location to another simply because their favorite staff members had moved to that new location. 

At Capital One, Sasha’s biggest lesson was learning how to get executive leadership to invest in CX and EX. “Some leaders have other priorities, like making sure they are compliant, especially in banking. To get their focus, CX leaders have to have a solid business case to get their attention. I find success in finding out what their objectives are for the year, or five years, and framing the partnership as a means to make it easier for them to meet their objectives,” he explained. “Rather than looking at CX and EX as a checkbox, we focus on the partnership and showing the connection between CX, EX, and the outcomes they are looking to achieve. In the past for instance, if a stakeholder is trying to reduce churn, there’s actually a really good correlation between NPS and churn. For every higher rating, the lower churn, at least in my experience. So if that exec is looking to reduce churn, here’s the focus area for us to reduce churn.”

The session highlighted the undeniable link between employee experience and customer experience, with these experts emphasizing that a strong company culture and engaged employees directly contribute to business success. 

Watch Medallia Experience ‘25 Highlights

Did you miss out on Experience ‘25, or are you looking to share some of the content with your colleagues? We’ve got you covered! Go to Experience Now to watch keynotes, sessions, recaps, and more.