Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Articles and insights about customer experience for CX and marketing professionals.
Forget chasing fleeting trends or scrambling to react to public sentiment. Today’s most disruptive companies are rewriting the playbook altogether. They are not followers of narrative; they are the authors. By strategically engineering narratives designed to shift perception, lead dialogue, and align with their audience’s deepest values, these organizations don’t just stay relevant; they dominate.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Simply
offering a high-quality product or service is no longer enough to set your business apart from the rest. In fact, according to Salesforce, almost 90% of customers value the experience of buying and using a product or service as much or more than the product or service itself.
Marketing leaders talk a big game about “customer-centricity,” but too often that phrase is code for “sell harder with friendlier emojis.” In Belgium’s hyper-competitive telco market, Telenet turned that trope on its head. Instead of nudging customers to upgrade, the company built a program that sometimes recommends downgrades—on purpose. The result? More loyalty, stronger brand affinity, and an unexpected boost to digital engagement.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. About 1,500
customer experience, digital-business and B2C marketing leaders converged here in Nashville June 23-26 to better understand the secret to “faster revenue, higher revenue, and a better overall experience.”
In a time when marketers are told to “move fast and personalize everything,” the pressure to build meaningful, measurable customer journeys—before the competition even drafts wireframes—has never been higher. At PegaWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, the buzz wasn’t about the latest buzzword. It was about something far more pragmatic and, frankly, overdue: designing customer experiences before writing a single line of code. Tara DeZao, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega, joined us to talk about how generative AI is helping marketers and developers prototype the entire experience upfront, using tools like Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint.
Loyalty isn’t dead. It’s just been grossly misunderstood. Traditional loyalty programs—built on points, perks, and promo codes—are fading into irrelevance as customers shift their expectations. They no longer reward brands just for consistency or price. Today’s consumers demand more: personalized experiences, seamless interactions across channels, and recognition beyond the checkout page.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Airlines, apps and investment firms see the biggest CX returns. Now it’s time to align your strategy with what customers really want.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. It’s a new year. Time to reconsider our priorities, set better goals and achieve more.
Perhaps your priorities are similar to last year, but you want to make more
progress toward your customer satisfaction strategies. Or perhaps it’s time to take a step back and take a look at all of the above.
There’s a new kind of customer out there. They’re not patiently moving through your sales funnel. They’re not marveling at your brand’s latest customer loyalty gimmick. They are the center of their own universe—and they expect your business to orbit around them.
If customer experience were a dinner guest, it would be the kind that arrives late, repeats itself, and then disappears before dessert. At least, that’s how most people feel when dealing with today’s contact centers—reactive systems that rely on outdated models of interaction and force customers to jump through hoops just to get basic help.
