Day THree: Brace Yourself, Even MORE Disruption is Coming: Meeting the Needs of Your Customer in 2025

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Known for its remarkable culture of service, the Ritz Carlton is constantly looked at as an example of best experience practices. Join Valori Borland during this session as she imparts to the audience some tips and tricks to reaching service excellence. Valori will be discussing:

• Differentiating your company from the competition by consistently offering service excellence
• Developing a customer-centric culture within your organization to drive brand loyalty
• Improving your employee engagement through service values and empowerment to reduce turnover

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It's not always easy for large and established companies to move quickly, despite the threats from newer and more agile startup brands. But, if legacy brands can't learn how to keep up with the times, they will be left behind. Join Chris Connors from Vistaprint as he walks the audience through the following points:

• How are companies applying lean start up best practices to their product ideation?
• Looking at the ways that legacy brands are by-passing one to two year product development cycles for shorter prototyping sprints
• How companies can be using innovation labs to bring customer insight into these agile product development cycles
• Potential drawbacks and challenges that present themselves when larger unwieldy companies try to operate this way

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Creating a customer centric culture begins with finding the right employees to represent your brand. How you find this talent and onboard them to provide the best possible experience is key to their success and in turn, your company’s success. Join this session to learn more about how T.S. Balaji and the Cox team are cultivating a customer centric culture both leading up to a new employee’s first day as well as the moment they walk through the door. He will be discussing

- How to engage the employee leading up to Day 1 ensuring they know what is required of them and building a relationship with their manager
- Providing a positive experience their first day and week by fully anticipating their needs and questions
- Creating a culture that helps the new employee establish relationships and find their place throughout their first year of employment

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There are those brands that just seem to attract raving fans, that immediately have advocates and seem a bit cult-ish. What can be learned from these companies who seem to have created their own culture and following?

• How do cult brands differentiate from the other brands that sell the same product?
• How do these brands use experiential marketing to promote a lifestyle
• How do these brands seem to be exactly where their customer needs them to be?
• How do they create such a sense of community? Is it surprise and delight or simply luck?

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As the discipline of CX matures and the c-suite continues to realize the importance of measuring and acting on customer experience strategies, the skillset needed by cx practitioners needs to mature along with it. Hard skills along with soft skills will be needed. Join this session led by Ann Marie Cilley to hear more about what cx teams should be looking for when hiring for their strategic functions, skills like:

·· Working with internal business partners to execute CX strategies
·· Working quickly and agilely to get new strategies to market
·· Understanding your customer at the deepest level
·· Working hard to effect change within the company that will bring the customer into the center of everything you do.

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Using the top challenges submitted by your peers during our day one morning ice breaker, these free flow discussions will be your chance to take a deep dive into the specific areas you came to discuss. You will have a chance to participate in two separate 30 minute discussions and tackle two challenges you face in your role head on.

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