The Future of Customer Listening: dynamic, active, and AI-powered

CX Network’s first webinar series of the year was an in-depth analysis of the future of customer listening, exploring how metrics, artificial intelligence (AI) and, sometimes, simply looking inward, is helping CX teams to understand their customers better.  

You can watch all sessions on-demand here, and read our round-up below…

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Customer listening is about activating, not just collecting customer data

Andra Bond, director of CX discovery and experimentation and Olivia Lucas, senior service designer, joined the first session to talk about how – and why – Electronic Arts (EA) decided to move customer listening in-house to create a single source of truth, the ‘Experience Atlas’, providing a holistic view of customer journeys. 

We started with the “why”. Many organizations are not using their data to its full potential, leading to decision paralysis and disconnected customer journeys. Along these lines, when we asked why EA decided to move customer listening in-house, Bond explained “We work with teams that interact with millions of our customers each year. That’s a goldmine that is often overlooked”. 

Then we got to the “how”. Data was abundant across departments, but it wasn’t connected. Bond and Lucas helped changed that. Connecting data across disparate teams required a flexible approach to building credibility. Gaining trust among separate teams is not always easy, especially in large organizations, and the key is meeting colleagues where they are while gently educating stakeholders on why they should be prioritizing CX and journey improvements. 

“We’re making sure that people are understanding why we are suggesting these changes, and what that budget is going to get them. That education piece is important,” said Lucas.

Connecting all of this data into an ‘Experience Atlas’ has provided shared definitions and metrics for touchpoints, allowing for more – and more visible – CX experimentation across teams. 

One challenge was simply the sheer amount of data they had to work with, with Lucas mentioning “analysis paralysis” as teams get overwhelmed with the large datasets. To mitigate this, the EA team is using AI to streamline the data synthesizing process, which would previously take months of manual process, and now takes a few minutes. This democratize customer insights within the organization but human oversight remains essential to validate results and ensure transparency. 

Why NPS is no longer enough, and what to look at instead

Claire Cunningham, former senior manager of voice of the customer experience at Coles, founder and director of Customer Connexion and a CX Network Advisory Board member, joined the series to discuss the misuse and limitations of Net Promoter Score (NPS), a topic she has written about for CX Network. 

“It’s kind of reduced the voice of the customer and customer experience in general down to one singular number that people actually don’t really understand”. 

NPS is often jumping the gun with a flawed question. Cunningham noted “before we even ask about the experience, we’re asking, would you recommend this?”, jumping straight to questions of advocacy without properly understanding the experience. 

When asked about alternatives, Cunningham suggested Customer Effort Score (CES), which reveals friction, which leads to churn. “It’s actually getting closer to the reason why people stay with a brand,” she said. “you’re now asking, ‘was there anything that blocked you from being able to achieve what you wanted?’”. This is especially useful when catering to younger audiences, who are less tolerant of barriers and more used to seamless journeys.  

Another way to plug the gap left by NPS is to speak to frontline teams. They see customer journeys playing out in real time, having unique access to insights that surveys and traditional Voice of Customer programs often miss. 

How Walmart Canada built listening maturity with AI + human collaboration

Like many large organizations, Walmart Canada didn’t have a problem with how much data they had, but with lack of visibility and speed. Montserrat Padierna, customer intelligence and experience lead at Walmart Canada, and CX Network Advisory Board member, joined to share how her team transformed customer listening and insights with AI. 

AI implementation has facilitated dynamic listening where before it was based on static reports: “AI gave us a way to move from static reports to a much more continuous listening model,” Padierna said. “The biggest and most important result is speed to insight. We have significantly reduced the time spent on manual work. That time has been reinvested in much higher-value work.” 

AI brought consistency, bringing focus, “when the signals are structured consistently, leadership conversations become much more focused, much more action-oriented,” Padierna said. “It’s not just faster reporting, it’s more about confident decision-making.”

Trust is the foundation of successful AI implementations, but, as Padierna pointed out, “it’s not automatic, it’s something that you earn”. While earning trust during the implementation phase, Padierna said she and the team were “careful in terms of hallucinations and always keeping humans in the validation loop”. 

The team’s roles changed slightly with AI implementation. “We have become much more like signal interpreters, strategic advisors,” Padierna said. But this doesn’t mean that humans are going to be replaced. “It’s not about replacing analytical skills, it’s about expanding them.”

Quick links 

• 7 Takeaways on customer insights and data analytics
• What we learned at All Access: Future of CX
• How the big brands are revolutionizing CX design and journey management