It has often been claimed that the field of CX is one of constant and ongoing transformation. Indeed change – ironically - is the one constant you can rely on in this field. Simultaneously customers’ expectations are shifting due to generational change and new technology also now allows you to adapt your operational activities and change your customer experience offering.

With this environment of constant change, standing still is not an option, and it's critical to maintain an innovation-focused mindset and maintain a flexible approach to CX across your team. Doing so will allow you to embrace the latest approaches, keep up to speed with technological developments and keep ahead of your competitors.

This keynote discussion will consider how you can maintain a constant state of innovation and find yourself comfortable “dancing on a moving carpet”. It will also consider how getting your training and staffing procedures right have a vital part to play in this, as well as giving you the tools to create overall awareness across the business of the vital importance of continued innovation in this field.

Creating a customer-centric culture is often thought of as central to CX. Ensuring employees – and the business as a whole – focuses on the exceeding the expectations of the customer makes absolute sense in today’s competitive market. 

Alongside improving CX techniques and investing in technology, empowering employees and having a focus on the employee journey can also have a significant impact on customer interactions in a retail environment. Given that retail staff are often the front-line in terms of customer interactions, treating them well can often have a significant impact.

The challenge is that CX leadership can have a limited impact on employee experience and their journey, and this conversation will consider:

• What impact can a strong employee journey have when it comes to delivering retail-based Customer Experience?
• How can CX leadership help influence the employee strategy, given this is often not their formal responsibility?
• How can you bridge the gap between head office and corporate strategy and front line-staff in retail locations, and ensure they feel part of the “bigger picture”?

Whilst the value of a strong focus on and investment into CX can be self-evident to those in the sector, defining this value to business leaders is often a challenge, and one which can inhibit the allocation of resources to this function. Likewise, whilst there are plenty of ways to measure the impact CX has (NPS, CSAT etc), often the impact of positive measurement on business growth is an area which can be difficult to define.

Translating the importance and impact of CX to a language understood by business leadership is a vital skillset for CX leaders to have if they want to continue developing their CX capabilities. Linking the existing metrics used in the CX space to areas such as ROI (and ROE) will inevitably lead to the critical senior-level support needed for projects, investment and the implementation of new technology, and this session will consider:

• How can you embed the role of CX within broader business decisions and demonstrate the importance of such an approach?
• Can the importance of CX always be boiled down to ROI, or is the value of CX’s impact more complex?
• How can you bring other groups (CDO / IT etc) onside when asking for their involvement in CX development projects?

While the concept of brand is still a critical focus for the retail sector, could the era of brand being the most important differentiator in customer purchases be coming to an end? Now there are a myriad of different ways to determine the value of a product or service, brand alone is not enough, and focus is shifting instead to product quality and development.

However, whilst the influence of brand may be changing due to a greater degree of choice and information, the power of storytelling shows no sign of waning – brand storytelling can still enhance an existing quality product and plays a very different role in the realm of CX. With this in mind the panel will consider:

• What role does brand play now, and how critical is it in today’s world of online reviews and shared information?
• How vital is it that your brand storytelling is aligned with the real-life customer experience and what is available to the customer in practice? How can you ensure this is the case?
• How can CX and brand work with product teams in the development phase, to ensure all aspects are aligned?

In recent years, expectations of customers of retail businesses have changed dramatically. Post-COVID, the in-store experience expected of many brands has been akin to that of a social event – whilst online retail demands have been for a much more practical, personalised and frictionless interaction. Likewise, in the digital space, whilst customers want a hyper-personalised omni-channel experience, data protection laws prohibit much of the use of data to make this possible.  

This is something of a perfect storm; balancing these challenging – and increasingly divergent - expectations is difficult enough, but this is against the backdrop of customers limiting their spending due to a more challenging economic environment. Andre Luis Rebelato Filomeno will give an insight into how Flying Tiger have tried to apply their learnings of recent past to enhance both online and in-store experiences across their business.