It’s been two weeks since we’ve returned from New Orleans where we connected with over 300 other customer experience professionals at the 2018 CXPA Insight Exchange. The overarching theme during this two day event was to create business value – something that we really relate to at Nepa.

A keynote delivered by Graham Tuttom from Comcast was a great start to the two day immersion into CX. He is no stranger to these events and his experience in CX is impressive. His philosophy is that organizations should think of CX as their best product. According to him, the holy grail of CX is having all business units behave as a team and employees that are empowered to empathize with customers. This makes CX part of the company culture and employees feel like owners. At Nepa we agree that our mission as CX professionals is to create tools that provide information and opportunities for empowerment. For the majority of the organization, CX is a strange and complex animal, it’s our job to make it more approachable with better tools and technology.

Another great talk by Bruce Temkin of Temkin Group, was a state of the union address for the CX Industry. Titled Past, Present, Future of CX(PA) he expounded where the CX profession is heading and stressed four principles for making CXPA grow within a well managed organization:

● Focus on people

● Connect CX to business and brand

● Stay positive and passionate

● Support our collective community

His main point was that we as CX professionals have a great opportunity to take our rightful place at the C-level discussions, but in order to achieve that goal we need to continue to push our industry forward by following the four principles.

If you were at CXPA to meet new partners, you were in the right spot. It was a who’s who of vendors providing a broad array of services from CX design to Customer Service solutions, to CX feedback platforms. It was great to see many complementary solutions that we use as inputs in our CX analytics applications. If you felt a little overwhelmed by the number of partners, drop us a line – we’ve worked with many and are happy to share our experiences.

The most valuable takeaways came from the opportunities we had to exchange ideas with other CX professionals during shorter round table discussions and one-to-ones. In smaller groups, we explored a diverse range of subjects from creating a CX cultural change to the growth trends in the industry to methods on how to calculate ROI on CX investments. In discussions with our fellow CX professionals, we sense a budding optimism that organizations are realizing how important CX is for future business success, but with attention comes expectations.

A CX professional needs a diverse set of skills: change management, business development, analytics, technology, story telling, financial, design etc…the list goes on. We need to understand how to improve the experience and drive business efficiently. Are CX professionals the birth grounds for future CEO’s?

We can talk CX all day. Have a question? Email us at sales.us@nepa.com.