Experience ’25: Why Omnichannel Insights Are Essential for Customer Experience

Explore why omnichannel insights and conversational intelligence were key themes at Medallia Experience 2025.

At Medallia Experience ‘25, one of the biggest topics discussed was how much customer experience is changing. With customer expectations evolving and new technology available, it is now time for brands to move away from survey-centric programs and start not only capturing insights from all of their channels into one place, but taking nimble action on those insights — otherwise known as an omnichannel approach.

The foundation of omnichannel CX is combining direct and indirect feedback across the organization. Direct feedback, such as surveys and reviews, traditionally enable businesses to gather valuable data that can help pinpoint specific areas where improvements are needed. Indirect (or observed) feedback, meanwhile, offers a deeper, often more contextual understanding. Sources like website interactions or contact center conversations can reveal the underlying sentiments, behaviors, and pain points that customers may not directly express to a brand. 

It’s only when combining both structured and unstructured data across the enterprise that companies can harness the full power of AI to better understand customer friction points and make informed decisions to improve the overall experience and win customers in the new era of customer experience.

Progressing from Reactive to Proactive Customer Experience

A significant shift is underway in how brands approach customer experience. 

Today, many brands react to customer complaints or negative feedback days after they arise. This reactive model is no longer sufficient in a world where customers expect more timely and seamless experiences. Yet, acting on insight faster is still not enough. Today, the goal is to anticipate potential challenges and address them before they escalate. 

As Srikan Narasimhan,Vice President, Head of Enterprise Customer Experience & Insights at CVS Health, shared in his mainstage session: “In our space, we can get caught up in the insight, and not necessarily what you’re doing with that insight.” The most successful companies are moving toward a more proactive approach, where artificial intelligence can help anticipate pain points and resolve them before customers encounter them. “We don’t want to wait for experiences to go bad and then try to fix the issue,” he explained. 

By using tools like AI to track and predict customer needs, businesses can act faster and more efficiently, reducing the risk of customer frustration. For example, if a customer is showing signs of dissatisfaction based on prior interactions, AI can help identify those patterns and trigger actions that resolve issues before they reach a critical point. 

This shift not only enhances satisfaction but fosters deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers and ultimately significant business outcomes.

With the world of CX on the precipice of this significant change, experts believe it’s important to balance AI and human connection. In his session panel, Sasha Fard, Country Lead of Customer Experience Management at Capital One, further illustrated this point: “Everyone wants to do service recovery. Everyone wants to close a loop. Generally speaking, most people understand the value. When you get pushback, it’s about resource constraints. And I think this is the perfect use case where, especially if you’re taking in survey and operational data, AI can actually tailor a response that can be effective: ‘You know, I’m sorry. We will get better and here’s how we’re going to get better.’ But also you can fuse in the human component by offering a real person to call. It doesn’t have to stop at the AI. You can use the AI for the initial rapid response outreach, but ultimately still offer that human connection.”

Evolving from reactive to proactive customer experience, driven by AI and real-time insights, is essential for brands to anticipate and resolve issues before they escalate in the new age of CX. 

Recognizing the Contact Center as a Treasure Trove of Insights

One area that is often overlooked, but where feedback is incredibly valuable, is within the contact center. Often treated as a “cost center,” the contact center typically is the richest source of real-time customer insights for any brand. 

When a customer calls a contact center, they typically have a question, a problem that requires solving, or they have failed to get their question resolved in prior interactions or channels. By anticipating the issues customers will run into, agents can solve the problem faster and have a more seamless conversation with the agent. By tapping into what questions the customer is asking, a company can coach and train agents to be better responders, arming them with knowledge, and also coaching them on behaviors to ensure agent quality. Additionally, by mining questions to understand the root cause of a question — poor product usability, documentation, or capability — they can improve the product or experience across other channels.

Many organizations don’t fully leverage these conversational insights when shaping their customer experience programs. For example, agent notes from customer conversations could highlight recurring issues that need to be addressed — but this information often stays siloed. Without properly analyzing voice and virtual conversations and incorporating them into the broader customer experience strategy, businesses miss critical opportunities for improvement. 

The brands that are excelling in customer experience are the ones who understand the value of these conversational insights and use them to quickly refine their customer service strategies. For example, at Capital One, understanding this as a key piece of the customer journey is at the heart of their approach to customer experience. “One of our goals recently was to empower our frontline agents by giving them access to customer feedback so they can actually take action on it,” said Fard. “The more engaged folks are with their feedback, the higher the customer satisfaction actually is — and that makes sense, because when they’re reviewing their feedback, what they’re doing is they’re building empathy with the customer as well.”

Contact centers provide invaluable, real-time insights that can drive meaningful improvements in customer experience across the enterprise. Reduce agent effort, volume, and duration of calls and live chats, and you have happier, more loyal agents and customers — and a more efficient and profitable business.

Leveraging Omnichannel Feedback for Continuous Improvement

The need for comprehensive omnichannel feedback has never been more important for businesses looking to optimize their customer experience. By capturing insights from direct and indirect channels, brands can gain a holistic view of the customer journey, helping break organizational silos and quickly identify areas for improvement. As companies shift from a reactive to a proactive approach in their customer experience strategies, they are better equipped to anticipate challenges and address them before they negatively impact the customer journey.

With the help of AI and data-driven insights, businesses can stay ahead of customer needs and continuously improve their experiences. The key is to listen, learn, and act on feedback — both human and machine-driven — to create more meaningful connections and drive lasting customer loyalty. In his opening keynote, Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, emphasized: “We need to use AI to understand human interactions, to recommend human actions, to recommend machine actions and, ultimately, to be continuously listening and improving to make sure that we’re not creating more problems as we try to create solutions.”

Successfully navigating the future of customer experience requires a strategic approach that blends both direct and indirect feedback from a variety of channels, and machine and human action. Ultimately, companies that integrate this approach will not only improve customer satisfaction but also foster long-term loyalty and growth.

“The goal is to enable seamless execution and impact when it comes to customer experience, and experiences in general,” said Banerjee. “Our goal is to accelerate this cycle from action to more data to more insights so that ultimately this cycle is happening at the speed of thought.”

Watch Medallia Experience ‘25 Highlights

Looking to see some of our Experience ‘25 speakers in action? Check out Experience Now to watch keynotes, mainstage sessions, and more.