What an event this was! We had a fantastic half-day in Atlanta on the first stop of the 2024 8x8 CX Tour! We had a full agenda—8x8 leaders, customers, and partners gathered for an exclusive event focused on the latest trends and innovations in customer experience (CX).

There were inspiring success stories from Kemesa Colson at Complete Contract Consulting and Marc Anthony of Leica Biosystems as each shared how they’re scaling success with 8x8. A special shout-out has to go to our transformative keynote speaker: Joel "Thor" Neeb. The co-founder of The Insight Age, he wowed us with insights on preparing businesses for the AI era, setting the stage for the future of CX.

What was fascinating to me was that, even though people were gathered from multiple industries and sectors, there’s a lot of commonality in the challenges faced when it comes to customer experience and, by extension, the employee experience. From the conversations I had with a number of attendees over the course of the event, I was able to distill eight core points:

1. Most businesses aren’t living in the CX age

We live in an age when everyone is a customer and we all know that we like to be treated well—and fairly. We also know what a good customer experience feels like at the individual level.

But so many companies are struggling to deliver. This has multiple knock-ons, including negative employee sentiment, loss of customers, and managers not getting the exact information that they need.

2. Who’s in charge of CX initiatives?

No one, that’s who.

A considerable point that came out of the event was that many organizations are yet to have CX leaders.Those we were speaking to said that, yes, they know of the importance of CX—but very often, it’s something that falls under someone else’s scope of responsibility. Perhaps someone under the CIO or someone on the IT Team, or maybe even someone in sales—it all depends and it varies from place to place. Many organizations said that they know it’s important. But, for various reasons, it’s just something that has been added to someone’s existing workload.

3. Never mind who’s in charge—who’s actually going to do the CX?

This was seen as another common issue. People I was speaking to told me that they know CX is important but, just as they weren’t sure who should be in charge of it, very often they weren’t sure who should be delivering it because it could be in one of a dozen different departments.

While some people might find this idea confusing, it’s where modern customer engagement thinking is going: whose job is it to deliver outstanding customer experiences? It’s everyone’s.

Customer experience is not just for the contact center. In fact, recent findings by 8x8 (we’ll be releasing that soon!) show that anything from 20-60% of customer experience can be delivered outside of the contact center. Knowledge workers, Sales, Marketing, Shop Floor, HR, Talent Acquisition–these are your CX champions. It’s one of the reasons why 8x8 has launched 8x8 Engage, a customer experience solution for staff who don’t work in the contact center.

One thing we did highlight at the CX Tour was that everyone does need to get involved because, at the moment, only 6% of companies think they deliver a consistent positive customer experience throughout their whole organization.

4. How do we make the changes for great CX?

This was a fair question. While we’re able to highlight companies and individuals who have ensure great CX work, the challenges of lack of leadership and lack of understanding around who is delivering CX means there’s a lot of uncertainty over how to change organizations and processes to deliver new, modern, outstanding CX. It’s a bit of a vicious circle—but with leadership and direction, it can be solved.

5. CX is seen as a cost, not a benefit

This is a huge point and one that impacts every sector. People we’re engaging with are telling us that, even when showing the benefits and a golden future of great CX, very often the first thing they hear back is “What will this cost us?”

This is an outdated way of looking at it. The real questions are:

  • “What will this cost us in terms of reputation and revenue if we don’t do it?” and
  • “What’s the benefit to the business?”

It’s an evolution of mindset, but at the same time it’s an ongoing question—and, again, without a strong CX champion, the negativity can win over.

6. CX is not a one-and-done deal

Like it or not, all of us are in two businesses: the technology business and the people business.

How people want to engage as customers is constantly changing, as is the technology we can use as companies and as consumers. To that end, delivering a strong customer experience is an ongoing process, an eternal evolution. If you revamp your processes and systems once, then that’s fine, you’ll reap the benefits–for now. But then, as people, technology, and processes change, you’ll be left behind. That’s why you need to stay on top of it.

7. Data’s only a part of the journey

AI is important, but human intelligence is vital too. This was a huge point on the day. Yes, AI and data are incredibly important, AI helps deliver outstanding CX, but you need to know what you want and then understand the data as it applies to your organization. Some organizations were telling us they had too much data, others were telling us they didn’t have enough, while some said they didn’t know if they had all the right data. Ultimately, the human element still plays a huge part here.

8. Partnerships make the CX journey a lot easier

Now, we were spoiled at the event as our event sponsor, Verint, provided fascinating insight on what's possible with the 8x8 partner ecosystem. What was apparent though is that having the right partners makes delivering great CX a lot easier as you have someone there to keep you up to date with the best in class options and share with you the latest thinking.

A great beginning—but there’s more to come across the US.

We left Atlanta with a lot of insight and learnings, but also a lot of questions—as you would expect in this pioneering field.

If you’re sad you missed the event, don’t worry. The CX Tours are continuing across the US for the rest of the year, so look and see if there’s one near you. If there isn’t, drop me a note via LinkedIn because we’re always adding more dates and if there’s enough interest for CX visitors in your neck of the woods, then we’ll drop by.