Top 7 Customer Experience Quotes to Remember from Experience ‘24

The Medallia Experience ‘24 conference brought together the world’s leading voices in the experience industry, who shared advice for improving outcomes for customers and employees — here are some of the best customer experience quotes from this year’s event.

At this year’s Experience, which took place February 5–7 at the Wynn Las Vegas, more than 1,500 experience leaders and practitioners from around the country joined Medallia for a series of thoughtful, insights-packed discussions about how artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping customer experience (CX) and employe experience (EX) — and how innovations in CX, EX, and AI have the power to make personalization at scale a reality.

With featured speakers including celebrity entrepreneur Kristen Bell, football hall-of-famer Steve Young, NPS® creator Fred Reichheld, and HR analyst Josh Bersin, we learned about new innovations in CX, EX, AI, and personalization, and the strategies savvy leaders are using to defy the odds and change the game in their respective industries.

It was an event to remember, filled with ideas and learnings designed to inspire advances in CX and EX programs in 2024 and beyond. Here are some of the top customer experience quotes we heard across the event’s keynotes, sessions, and super sessions that got us thinking during Experience ’24 that we’re sharing for motivation as you do the work of elevating experiences in the year ahead. 

7 Customer Experience Quotes to Remember

1. “You’ve heard of quarterly earnings calls? We started quarterly customer calls, where business leaders come together and talk about what customers are saying and what action we’re taking.” — Abhii Parakh, Head of Customer Experience at Prudential

Parakh explained during a breakout session how democratizing insights on a regular basis is one of five key steps his company is taking to drive customer obsession across the organization.

2. “The best interaction with the contact center is no interaction at all.” — Ginny Couvillon, Head of Client Services, US Wealth Management, at UBS

Couvillon shared that she heard this sentiment repeated throughout many sessions at Experience ‘24, and that friction within operations is something she and her team are working to address using artificial intelligence. Three key areas of focus at UBS include harnessing the power of AI to improve employee training, guide the next-best experiences for customers, and prompt agents to provide better experiences to reduce friction in the contact center.

3. “You can’t show up as a company if you aren’t talking about your customers the same way.”— Srikant Narasimhan, Vice President, Enterprise Customer Experience, at CVS Health

In his Experience ‘24 super session, “CVS Health: Putting Consumers First with Personal, Seamless Interactions,” Narasimhan revealed how CVS Health has operationalized consumer data to unify the organization, drive action at the front line, create experience differentiation, and empower colleagues to drive a culture of consumer-centricity, fueling a massive culture shift across the company.

4. “Time is everything, and it’s more important than ever to ensure that valuable, human effort is spent in the right places at the right time to inspire loyalty and increase satisfaction.” — Hadley Spadaccini, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Medallia

During her portion of the opening Medallia keynote presentation, “Redefining the Possible in Generative AI and Personalization,” Spadaccini explored some of the ways new breakthroughs in AI are well-positioned to help contact center employees who are handling greater volumes of more complex customer inquiries with fewer resources as teams face the added challenge of rising turnover within the contact center.

5. “How many times have you been asked to reveal all this information about yourself, and then afterwards asked yourself, ‘Was my experience any different than anyone else’s?’ Customer disappointment — that’s the danger in not taking personalization seriously.” — Andrew Custage, Senior Director, Head of Research Insights at Medallia

In his Experience ‘24 session, “The Power of Personalization: Research and Methods to Unlock Customer Loyalty,” that he co-presented with Judy Bloch, Principal Customer Experience Advisor at Medallia, Custage shared new Medallia Market Research findings around personalization that reveal that personalizing customer experiences is the #1 top priority for CX professionals this year, 82% of consumers say personalized experiences drive brand choice in half of shopping situations (or more), and 61% say they’re willing to spend more with companies that customize the way they serve them to fit their unique needs.

6. “My message to you: I think AI is really powerful. But for heaven’s sake, use the right filter, focusing on the right thing, which is: Who are the people giving referrals? Why did they come to you? Who referred them? Learn about what they’re saying to their friends. This is the process, and ‘bring your friends’ is the goal.” — Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company Fellow, author/speaker on loyalty, and creator of the Net Promoter System℠

In his super session, “The Evolution of CX: Where It’s Been; Where It Must Go,” Reicheld discussed how NPS® has adapted in the 20+ years since its debut, and how the new challenge for CX leaders is identifying the link between CX efforts and financial outcomes. To do that, he explained that customer surveys and signals need to be augmented by earned growth: an accounting-based metric that tracks whether customers come back for more and if they refer their friends.

7. “There is one code base that’s more programmable than even any of the innovative new technologies that seem to grab the headlines — and that highly programmable code base is us. As humans, we are inherently programmable.” — Joe Tyrrell, CEO at Medallia

During the opening keynote that kicked off Experience ‘24, Tyrrell shared his thoughts on how while so much of customer data is very interesting, only select customer data is actually important in helping companies know how best to attract, retain, and grow relationships with customers. He also discussed how AI can be used to help brands sort through vast amounts of data to parse out what’s most important versus simply interesting. Alongside other members of Medallia’s leadership team, he introduced four new breakthroughs in AI designed to fundamentally change the way brands access, consume, understand, and take action on customer data to predict and offer up what customers want next, executing next-level personalized experiences.

Share Your Favorite Customer Experience Quotes with Us

Which presentations moved you the most at Experience ’24? Share your favorite moments and quotes with us on social media, using the hashtag #MedalliaEXP. 

Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s event! We can’t wait for what’s to come ahead at Experience 25. Stay tuned for updates about our event theme, speakers, and more.