Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Articles and insights about customer experience for CX and marketing professionals.
AI is the Judgement-Free Customer Service Offering, If Done Right, a recent online survey, commissioned by Cyara and fielded by Dynata in March 2026, gathered insights from 1,000 adult panelists across the United States. This research illuminates consumer perceptions regarding AI judgment and trust, highlighting critical areas for CX leaders to address when designing and implementing AI-powered support strategies.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Experiences are not just a feature of the business. They are the business,” said Qualtrics CEO
Jason Maynard as he kicked off Qualtrics X4, which took place March 17 to 19 at the Seattle Convention Center.
Intuit Mailchimp’s recent report, The Ecommerce Playbook: A Practical Field Guide for Modern DTC Brands consolidates insights from 22 industry experts, offering a practical guide for senior marketing and CX leaders to build, scale, and sustain profitable e-commerce operations. This blueprint emphasizes a holistic approach, integrating brand strategy, financial discipline, optimized customer experiences, and diversified growth channels to foster resilient and measurable business outcomes.
This is the story of how CIBC, one of Canada’s largest financial institutions, undertook such a transformation. Over the course of a decade, they moved from a fragmented organization that was lagging its peers in client experience to a modern, relationship-oriented bank driving billions in revenue growth. They did it by moving customer experience (CX) from a siloed function to the core of their enterprise operating model, led from the very top.
For years, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been the North Star for customer experience programs. We’ve built dashboards, tied bonuses to it, and presented its steady upward climb in boardrooms as definitive proof of our success. And for good reason—it’s a simple, powerful metric. But as any seasoned leader knows, the comfort of a high, stable score can be deceptive. It can become a vanity metric, a signal so consistent that it lulls us into a state of operational complacency, masking the subtle friction points and emerging issues that lie just beneath the surface.
This article was written for CustomerThink by Greg Kihlström. The Medallia 2026 State of Customer Experience Report reveals a disconnect between how
brands perceive the quality of experiences they provide and the consumer
reality. While 66% of customer experience practitioners believe experience quality is on the rise, only 17% of consumers agree. This perception gap suggests that many enterprise teams operate in an echo chamber.
In a digital-first world where speed and efficiency often take center stage, the real opportunity for brand loyalty isn’t in making things faster. It’s in making them feel different. That’s where small, unexpected moments come in—the kind of gestures that aren’t scripted, but still say, “We see you.”
Personalization is what you infer. Customization is what customers choose. If you want durable engagement, treat preferences as a first-class product surface, not a settings page nobody trusts.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. If your
customer stays with you in a downturn, is it because they love your brand?
Or is it because they just don’t have the energy to try someone else again?
In the relentless pursuit of customer loyalty, we marketing leaders are often caught in a familiar cycle. We build intricate points-based programs, optimize our funnels for retention, and pour resources into personalized communications, all in an effort to keep customers from straying. We treat loyalty as an outcome to be engineered, a line item on a P&L to be maximized.
