Redefining CX: A Business Imperative, Not Just a Program

Dive into Medallia’s vision for the future of CX: one where true omnichannel insights, conversational intelligence, and powerful AI come together to make CX a strategic hub that drives seamless and personalized experiences at scale, improving business results across the enterprise.

The customer experience has changed dramatically over just the past five years. Consumers don’t shop or interact with brands like they used to. We could cite numerous studies and data points to validate the channel-hopping that now occurs across the customer journey, or how Covid-19 dramatically accelerated the rise of virtual and hybrid shopping and experiences, or how the even more dramatic introduction of generative AI is changing how companies converse and engage with customers and employees — but we’re all living it. 

Yet the way companies manage CX has changed very little. What started more than 20 years ago with innovative new technology making it easy for companies to survey customers at scale must advance now to listening to customers everywhere, not just asking for feedback, and using AI-powered insights to analyze, summarize, and activate insights to actions inside and outside of the company.

Customer-centricity is now the mantra for most organizations, and tapping into the voice of customer is the goal. CX is a corporate priority, and devoted teams focus on capturing and analyzing customer feedback and measuring whether customers would recommend the products and services they purchased. Companies see immediate dividends from these efforts. They use survey insights to improve frontline performance, keep customers happy by closing the loop after poor experiences, and increase return business.

But as this approach has become the standard, consumer behavior has evolved, and survey-centric CX programs have seen diminishing returns and have missed much of the insight and experiences that expose real opportunities to increase revenue, save money, and reduce risk.

Today, consumers are inundated with surveys. They receive surveys after every interaction, from every brand, across every channel. Response rates have been declining for years. The picture companies are painting of the customer experience is less detailed, less holistic, and far less actionable. Senior executives are asking harder questions about their CX programs and NPS and looking for more tangible business results from these investments.

At the same time, technological innovations have accelerated, and more customer data is available than ever. In the past year alone, we’ve seen the incredible potential of generative and agentic AI. What used to take an entire team and weeks to do is now possible in just hours, if not minutes. And that’s just the tip of the AI iceberg.  

These converging realities have put how companies manage experiences on the precipice of incredible change. CX can no longer be isolated in a silo, fueled primarily by surveys, manual analysis of lagging indicators, and actions only focused on resolving issues. The next generation of CX must be at the center of the organization, fueled by omnichannel insights and modern AI — a strategic imperative proactively driving competitive differentiation and enterprise-wide impact.

Surveys are not enough

Simply adding more sophisticated intelligence to limited data can only go so far. AI is only as powerful as the data feeding it. 

Instead of surveying customers after a contact center interaction and sampling a handful of calls to transcribe and review, today’s most innovative companies use technology to understand unstructured data at scale. Those same advances in AI seen elsewhere can provide near-real-time analysis and automate actions based on voice and chat conversations. Many organizations also capture digital behavior as consumers navigate websites and mobile apps, what consumers say on social media, and operational and employee data they know relates to the customer experience.

Bringing all these insights together remains the challenge. Disparate technology systems, organizational structures, and department silos only bias thinking to be about individual channels or business units. Contact center or digital channels are often analyzed and optimized in isolation instead of taking a more holistic approach. 

For a true omnichannel approach to CX, organizations must move beyond surveys and eliminate these silos and unite the teams, technology, and touchpoints across the entire customer journey.

Unlocking real value in the contact center

Contact centers provide the biggest opportunity to unlock immediate and significant value and build a holistic approach to CX. 

They are the epicenter of the customer experience for most enterprise organizations: a crucial channel available to assist and support customers, especially when immediate answers are needed. Contact centers are increasingly the hub for calls, chats, chatbot conversations, and even intelligent voice agent-led interactions. Yet for most organizations, contact centers are siloed and seen as a cost center, with every call and minute spent on those calls increasing expenses, and for both agents and customers, increasing frustrations. And when human interactions are augmented with chatbot and voice agent interactions, these new interaction modes offer the potential for efficiency, but can also introduce further fragmentation and inefficiency of the experience if not continuously analyzed and improved. 

Every contact center interaction is a treasure trove of insights that can improve agent performance to reduce call time and surface insights that enhance experiences and satisfaction across digital and in-person channels, ultimately reducing call volume. With conversational intelligence, companies don’t have to “ask” the customer for feedback — it happens with every voice or chat conversation nearly in real time. 

Machine learning and text analytics trained on billions of customer experience signals augmented with generative AI can help train virtual chatbots, offer coaching insights, generate interaction summaries, automate smart responses, and far more.

Bringing AI-powered CX to the contact center can help organizations save millions of dollars through reduced call time and volume, improve agent satisfaction and productivity, and increase customer and employee retention — driving significant ROI to organizations.

The AI-driven future of CX: From dashboards to automations

Today, most organizations react to customer needs — handling issues, responding to feedback, and making quick fixes. But in a world where businesses must grow, stay competitive, and be profitable, this approach isn’t enough.

Customer experience can’t be managed separately across channels, primarily driven by surveys, and accessed by traditional reports and dashboards. CX shouldn’t require humans to analyze data and spend time navigating through screens, all to make sense of lagging indicators. 

With AI fueled by omnichannel insights, CX can become like an enterprise brain, proactively coaching employees, initiating processes and actions with other customer- and employee-facing systems, and providing specific customer experience suggestions and recommendations, all in the moment. Humans — freed from tedious, manual processes and analyses — will focus on more complex areas requiring personal and consultative attention. 

Imagine a world where the feedback loop is happening at the speed of thought and CX is driving strategic decisions and enterprise-wide impact in real time. That is the next generation of CX, and what we’re building with our customers. 

The future of CX is one that listens everywhere, connects insights across the business, and turns intelligence into action. Those who embrace this opportunity won’t just improve experiences — they’ll predict opportunities, eliminate friction, and drive real, measurable business impact.

Medallia research shows that 86% of CX experts believe AI will transform what their teams can achieve. For a quick pulse on the state of AI in customer experience, download our infographic, AI + CX: A Dynamic Duo.