That makes real estate an especially interesting lens for the broader customer experience (CX) conversation.

For companies serving consumers through complex, high-consideration journeys, support can’t exist on the sidelines. Every search, question, handoff, and moment of friction is part of the customer experience and can either build confidence or erode it.

That’s the conversation Phoebe Schultz, Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at Zillow Group, will bring to the main stage at CRS Scottsdale, September 30–October 2, 2026, at The Phoenician.

Turning Support into Strategy

In her keynote, Turning Support into Strategy: Zillow’s Approach to Smarter Self-Service, Schultz will share how Zillow approached a challenge that will sound familiar to many CX leaders: a support ecosystem that had become fragmented over time.

Zillow Group had numerous separate help sites, four technology platforms, and 12 support silos, an infrastructure shaped in part by years of acquisitions. The systems supported customers, but the experience reflected the company’s internal structure rather than how customers moved through their journeys.

That distinction matters.

For CX leaders, fragmentation isn’t simply a technology problem. It can show up as customers repeating themselves, searching across multiple places for answers, being routed to the wrong resource, reaching a human when a simple digital answer would have solved the problem, or being pushed into self-service when what they really need is human help.

Zillow’s experience offers a compelling look at what happens when an organization starts treating support differently.

Rather than viewing consolidation as an exercise in reducing complexity, Zillow used it as an opportunity to rethink the role of support altogether: not simply as a cost center, but as a product, a source of customer insight, and a way to connect customers with the right help at the right moment.

What CX Leaders Can Learn

The lessons extend well beyond real estate. As customer expectations continue to rise, organizations across industries are asking similar questions: How much should we automate? Where does self-service genuinely improve the experience? How do we make it easier for customers to find what they need? And how do we preserve the human moments that matter?

Schultz will explore how Zillow is approaching those questions through four key ideas:

1. The org chart trap: Why support experiences can become organized around internal structures rather than customer journeys, and the strategic cost of that disconnect.
2. Help as a product: What changes when support infrastructure is designed with the same discipline and intentionality as any other customer-facing product.
3. Friction as a signal: How customer questions and support interactions can reveal problems in products, processes, and communications.
4. Human where it matters: How intelligent triage and digital self-service can help organizations scale while still making room for the human interactions that build trust and loyalty.

For CX executives, the bigger takeaway is simple: support is telling you something.

The questions customers ask, where they get stuck, and when they seek human assistance can reveal where the broader experience is working and where it isn’t. The opportunity is to listen to those signals and turn support from a reactive function into a strategic advantage.

Join your CX leadership peers at CRS Scottsdale to see Zillow’s keynote. Learn more and register for CRS Scottsdale today.

The post From Help Desk to CX Strategy: What Zillow is Rethinking About Self-Service appeared first on Execs In The Know.

For AMC Global Media, that experience is especially important because its audiences aren’t simply customers; they’re passionate fans with emotional connections to the stories, characters, and worlds they love.

In this Brand Spotlight, Nicholas Solomon, Vice President of Customer Service at AMC Global Media, shares how his team is combining AI, Voice of the Customer insights, and empathetic service to remove friction, strengthen loyalty, and keep customer support from getting in the way of the entertainment experience.

Removing friction at every moment that matters

In a crowded streaming market, simplicity and reliability are no longer differentiators; they’re expectations. Solomon says AMC Global Media focuses on making the experience work seamlessly across devices, platforms, and brands, without requiring customers to navigate complicated logins, entitlements, or support processes.

But seamless service isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about empathy.

“When something goes wrong, a great customer experience is meeting customers where they are, resolving issues quickly, and making them feel heard,” Solomon explains.

That philosophy is particularly important when serving passionate fandoms. A billing question or technical issue may seem routine from an operational perspective, but for a viewer deeply invested in a show, even a small disruption can feel personal.

Using AI to remove friction, not the human touch

As AI continues to reshape customer service, AMC Global Media is taking an intentional approach. The goal isn’t to replace human agents, but to use technology where it can make the experience easier.

Automation and self-service can efficiently handle routine, high-volume needs, while agents remain available for situations that require judgment, empathy, or deeper problem-solving. Agent-assist technology also gives employees greater context, allowing them to focus on the interactions where human connection matters most.

That balance is already producing results. As AMC Global Media reduced friction across high-volume customer journeys, CSAT increased from 69% to 82%, while NPS doubled.

Turning customer service into a source of insight

For Solomon, the contact center has a role that extends far beyond issue resolution. It serves as both a safety net for customers and a feedback loop for the organization.

Customer interactions reveal where customers are struggling, where expectations aren’t being met, and which problems keep coming up. AMC Global Media uses those insights across product, engineering, marketing, and other teams to inform improvements and reduce repeat pain points.

The result is a more proactive approach to CX, one where customer service doesn’t simply respond to problems but helps prevent them.

Building loyalty by making customers feel heard

Ultimately, AMC Global Media’s approach comes down to a simple idea: great CX should protect the customer’s relationship with the content and the brand.

Technology can make service faster. Data can make it smarter. But empathy is what makes the experience meaningful.

As Solomon puts it, “Solving the immediate issue is expected. Building trust is the differentiator.”

For CX leaders, that’s a powerful reminder: operational excellence and memorable experiences don’t have to compete. When organizations invest in their people, use technology thoughtfully, and genuinely listen to customers, they can create experiences that do more than resolve issues; they build trust that keeps customers coming back.

Want to hear more from Nicholas on how AMC Global Media is turning customer service into a driver of trust and loyalty? Read the full Brand Spotlight in the latest issue of CX Insight magazine. 

The post How AMC Global Media is Building Loyalty Through Seamless Service appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The fastest way to separate AI hype from opportunity is to learn from organizations already putting it into practice. 

The session focused on measurable outcomes: how FOX, Everlane, Amazon Ring, and FuturHealth are deploying conversational AI agents, voice AI, proactive engagement strategies, and AI-powered workforce planning tools across use cases in streaming media, retail, telehealth, and consumer technology.  

Common threads ran throughout the discussions: the importance of grounding AI initiatives in real customer data, the need for continuous iteration after launch, the shift in how success is measured (moving beyond simple containment metrics to sentiment and implied satisfaction), and the reality that human oversight becomes more important, not less, as AI systems mature.  

Our partner presenters from Sierra, Kustomer, Vapi, and Assembled offered concrete frameworks, results, and lessons learned for CX and operations leaders looking to move from experimentation to measurable impact. 

Here’s a recap of the virtual event. 

Sierra + FOX: Building and launching an AI agent in 60 days 

FOX partnered with Sierra to build its AI customer service agent, timed to coincide with the launch of its Fox One subscription product. The AI wasn’t just answering FAQs; it was resetting passwords, updating billing information, and processing cancellations on customers’ behalf. That flexibility proved critical when contact volume spiked 430% in a single week during a major global sporting event.  

FOX’s philosophy: treat AI and human agents as one unified team, holding both to the same QA bar. The payoff has been a retention rate above 80%, driven by continuous iteration rather than a “set it and forget it” mindset. As FOX’s presenter put it, “It is never perfect, and the key to success is to ensure that we are constantly looking to improve.” 

Kustomer + Everlane: Getting ahead of the customer entirely 

Kustomer introduced a four-level maturity model for proactive AI (responsive, predictive, preventative, and orchestrated), arguing that each step up requires progressively richer customer context. To bring it to life, Kustomer walked through its work with Everlane, the sustainable apparel brand, which noticed that customers who returned their first purchase were far less likely to buy again. Everlane used that single signal (a customer’s first purchase) to trigger a simple automated outreach checking in on fit and sizing, reducing avoidable returns without a heavy data lift. The bigger lesson for CX leaders: you don’t need a perfect system to start. “Export the data, download it, drop it in an AI tool with a good prompt. That’s a perfectly valid way to explore a signal,” Kustomer’s presenter noted. 

Vapi + Amazon Ring: Solving the trust problem in voice AI 

Vapi’s team was candid about the uphill battle voice AI faces: “The last 20 years of CX have really broken trust for customers… it truly is until they experience it, they don’t believe it.” Their headline case study was Amazon Ring, which had evaluated roughly 40 voice AI vendors without success before finding Vapi’s platform flexible enough to meet its strict requirements around telephony integration and model choice. Ring went live in about two weeks and posted striking results: a 50% drop in average call time, a 70% cost reduction, and CSAT scores that matched or beat those of human agents. 

Assembled + FuturHealth: AI for what happens behind the scenes 

FuturHealth, a telehealth company that grew patient volume nearly 1,000% in its first year with a single operations leader and no dedicated data science team, partnered with Assembled for workforce planning. By connecting Assembled’s data platform to a general AI assistant, FutureHealth’s team could ask questions in plain language instead of writing code. Tasks that used to take days now happen in a single session, and FutureHealth proposed a simple adoption framework any operations leader could use: Ask, Act, Automate. Start by asking questions, then move to approval-based actions, and finally automate the repetitive work. 

In Summary 

Across all four use cases, a few themes kept surfacing. First, none of these companies started with a “cool AI idea,” they started with data on what customers actually needed. Second, launch is just the beginning; every case study described ongoing iteration, rather than a finished product. And maybe most importantly, the metrics are changing. Presenters repeatedly cautioned against leaning on old-school containment or deflection numbers alone, pointing instead to sentiment analysis and “implied CSAT” as better indicators of whether AI is actually helping, since, as FOX’s presenter noted, “folks who leave CSAT leave it when they’re negative. It’s just like an app review.” 

The overarching message: AI in CX is operational and measurable, and when grounded in real customer data and paired with human oversight, it delivers results companies can actually point to. For CX and operations leaders still in the experimentation phase, the advice from every presenter was the same: start small, start now, and let the data lead the way. 

Ready to see these AI use cases in action? 

The full session, including live demos, deeper dives into each case study, and audience Q&A, is available to watch on demand. Whether you’re just starting to explore AI in your CX operations or looking to benchmark against what these leaders have already built, this recording is worth the 90 minutes. 

Watch the full session on demand → 

The post How Four Companies Turned AI Into Measurable CX Results appeared first on Execs In The Know.

But there is a particular kind of conference experience that senior CX leaders tend to describe when you ask them what they are actually looking for. It’s not about the biggest audience or the longest speaker list. It’s about something harder to engineer: a conversation that changes how you think, a CX peer who has wrestled with the exact problem sitting on your desk right now, and relationships that are still paying dividends years later.

When is the last time you left a conference having learned something that actually changed how you work? When is the last time you met someone in a session who became a genuine thought partner, not just a LinkedIn connection? When is the last time a conference sent you home thinking differently about your job function?

That is what CRS is built around.

At CRS Scottsdale (September 30–October 2, 2026), the format is intentionally intimate, designed to foster real conversations, share knowledge, and build relationships that outlast the event itself.

Here’s what sets it apart from other CX conferences.

Leaders Learning from Leaders

At most conferences, you learn from a stage. At CRS, you learn from the person sitting across from you at dinner. The insights come from the CX executive who just cracked a problem you have been wrestling with for months, or the C-suite keynote speaker who is willing to share not just what is working, but what isn’t. There is a candor in the room that is rare because it is composed of people who have actually done the work.

“This is the only event where true CX leaders can learn from other leaders.”

— Ebrahim Hyder, Vice President of Customer Service, Michael Kors

That peer-to-peer dynamic changes everything about how knowledge moves through an event. You aren’t passively absorbing presentations. You are actively exchanging hard-won experience with the people who understand your challenges most deeply.

Intimate by Design

CRS is intentionally small. And that is the whole point. You are not navigating a convention center floor hoping to catch five minutes with someone meaningful. The smaller scale is a deliberate structural choice that shapes every aspect of the event, from the session format to the way the agenda is built, with dedicated connection time woven throughout.

Collaboration at scale is a contradiction in terms. Real collaboration, the kind that surfaces new ideas and shifts your thinking, requires enough space for a genuine conversation. CRS is built around that insight.

“One of the things I really love about these conferences is how intimate it is. The smaller environment allows for a lot more collaboration.” 

— Dima Cichi, Global Customer Success & Service Transformation Leader, Microsoft 

An Openness You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

Something happens when you put the right people in a room together. The attendees who come to CRS are not there to pitch or to perform. They are there because they genuinely care about the customer experience and want to get better at it, alongside others who share this. That shared purpose creates a culture of openness that is hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.

“What keeps me coming back year after year are the friendships you make and the people you trust.” 

— Lisa Oswald, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Member Services, Travelzoo

When the people in the room trust each other, conversations go deeper. Problems get examined honestly. Advice is given and received in good faith. That is the environment CRS creates and protects.

Relationships That Last Beyond the Event

A conference that leaves you with a stack of business cards is forgettable. A conference that leaves you with a network of genuine partners is something else entirely. Attendees describe the connections they have made at CRS as those that have made them better leaders, strategists, and people. Relationships that did not end when the event did.

“I have developed relationships from coming here over many, many years that transcend work. They’re my partners. And I think that’s very unique in the conference space.There’s no other community like that in the industry.”

— Dave Pitsch, Vice President of Guest Services, Arc’teryx

That word, community, is what separates CRS from everything else. An event happens once a year. A community is always there.

Come Experience CRS for Yourself

We are at a complex moment in customer experience, trying to figure out how to harness AI while doubling down on the human connection that still defines great brands. The tension between those two imperatives is real, and the organizations navigating it best are the ones learning together in rooms like the ones CRS creates.

There is no better place to work through that challenge than alongside the leaders doing it in real time. If you have not been to CRS before, this is the year to find out what everyone keeps coming back for.

Learn More  

Register Today 

The post What Makes CRS Different from Other CX Conferences appeared first on Execs In The Know.

That is the difference between having access to an audience and participating in a community like Execs In The Know, where we’ve spent 15 years building exactly that kind of community. A community exchanges ideas, builds relationships, and creates trust over time. In a community like this, visibility still matters, but it works differently than traditional marketing or sponsorship exposure. It is not about being seen once or being present in a single moment. It is about being consistently present in the spaces where CX leaders are already engaging, learning, and exchanging ideas. 

The partners who stand out are the ones who show up in ways that feel relevant, helpful, and connected to the ongoing conversations happening within the community. Real relationships with CX leaders form the way most relationships do: gradually, through consistent, valuable interactions that happen in the months between the times you’re together virtually or in person at an event. 

That’s worth taking seriously because much of the ROI from this kind of visibility never shows up on a dashboard. By some estimates, roughly 80% of B2B buying decisions are shaped by peer recommendations inside private communities before a buyer ever visits a company’s site. That influence happens quietly, in conversations and shared opinions no campaign report can capture, which is exactly why it’s so easy to underestimate. A CX leader has usually already formed a real opinion long before anyone reaches out to sell to them, shaped less by a pitch than by what they’ve seen, read, and heard from the peers they trust. That’s exactly why this community exists, and it’s exactly why showing up in more than one place, more than once, matters so much more than it might seem to in the moment. 

The event is where a relationship starts. What you do in the quiet stretch afterward determines whether it goes anywhere. Every business partner wants to be known, trusted, and remembered. 

Here’s what that tends to look like for the partners who do it well.

1. They Keep Showing Up

CX leaders are managing full calendars and a long list of people asking for their time. A great conversation from a few months back fades quickly unless something brings it back to the surface. The partners who stay genuinely memorable aren’t necessarily the ones who made the biggest splash in the room. They’re the ones who found low-pressure ways to stay present afterward, so the relationship never had to start completely over the next time they crossed paths.

2. They Lead with Something Valuable 

Between events, the strongest partners share things a CX leader can actually use: a perspective on a problem they’re already wrestling with, a lesson learned from working with someone in a similar seat. Sometimes that’s as simple as a short, well-timed thought leadership piece landing in their inbox. That kind of outreach reaches someone at their desk, on their own schedule, when they have the bandwidth to engage. Leaders can tell very quickly whether something was written to help them or to sell to them, and that distinction quietly shapes whether they keep paying attention to you.

3. They Bring Evidence

There’s a real difference between a partner who talks about a trend and one who has studied it. That evidence can take a few different shapes: a piece of CX research with real data behind it, a contributed article that walks through a point of view, or a concrete AI use case that shows rather than tells. Whatever form it takes, it doesn’t feel like a pitch when it reaches a CX leader. It feels like something worth citing in their own meeting or passing along to their team. That kind of evidence keeps a relationship alive between events far better than a check-in call, because it keeps proving its worth long after it first landed in their inbox.

4. They Show Up Across Moments That Matter

People trust the names they recognize, and recognition is built through consistent presence. A brand that CX leaders encounter across multiple touchpoints including in-person or virtual events, through research or CX Insight magazine, or through thought leadership content, becomes more familiar, more credible, and more top of mind. 

The strongest partnerships go beyond a single appearance. They create multiple opportunities to contribute value, share expertise, and stay connected with the leaders shaping the future of customer experience. By showing up across different channels and conversations, partners build the kind of sustained visibility that turns awareness into meaningful relationships.

5. They Stay Easy to Find When Timing Finally Lines Up

Timing rarely lines up perfectly the first time. A CX leader might meet a partner in the middle of a budget cycle or a reorg and still think of them fondly months later, once circumstances change. What matters at that point is whether the relationship is still easy to pick back up, whether via a quick search of the KIA Vendor Directory or a CX Insight magazine ad. 

The partners who stay visible and reachable in the gap between events are usually the ones who get the call when priorities finally shift, simply because they never let the connection go cold. 

The Common Thread 

None of this replaces the value of being in the room together. Events are still where relationships begin, whether that’s a flagship gathering like CRS or a smaller regional touchpoint like a leadership dinner, where a face gets attached to a name, ideas are exchanged, and meaningful conversations start. 

But strong relationships aren’t built in one interaction. They grow and are reinforced over time through repeated opportunities to connect, contribute, and stay engaged. The partners who get the most out of those moments understand that an event is not the finish line; it’s one part of a broader relationship. They continue showing up through additional events, thought leadership, research, community engagement, and other touchpoints throughout the year. 

That consistent presence means that when the next conversation happens, they won’t have to start from the beginning. They’re building on familiarity, trust, and shared experiences. They’re not reintroducing themselves; they’re continuing a relationship that has already been strengthened over time. 

That’s the difference between a partner CX leaders vaguely remember and one they actively think of first. It has less to do with any single event and everything to do with the cumulative impact of showing up consistently throughout the year. Because by the time a CX leader is ready for a deeper conversation, their perception has already been shaped by the brands, ideas, and partners they’ve encountered along the way. 

Community doesn’t replace great marketing; it makes great marketing more believable. Because when trust is already present, conversations become easier, relationships grow faster, and partnerships last longer.  

Ready to stay connected with a community of CX leaders beyond a single event? Connect with Scott Moberly, Vice President of Partner Advocacy, at Scott@execsintheknow.com to explore year-round opportunities to engage the Execs In The Know community through CX research, thought leadership promotions, digital content, and live or virtual events. Or explore our 2026 Media Kits to discover the partnership opportunities that best align with your goals. 

The post Beyond the Event: Building Meaningful Partnerships in a Powerful Community of CX Leaders appeared first on Execs In The Know.

PHOENIX, ARIZONA, US, July 14, 2026 — As organizations race to integrate AI into the customer journey, customer experience (CX) leaders are grappling with a new challenge: maintaining trust while accelerating innovation. New research from Execs In The Know’s 2026 CX Leaders Trends & Insights: Corporate Edition finds that two-thirds (67%) of contact centers now use some form of AI — yet leaders are shifting their focus from cost savings to outcomes, increasingly measuring success by resolution, customer trust, and abandonment rather than deflection alone.

To address that challenge, Execs In The Know today announced the speaker lineup for Customer Response Summit (CRS) Scottsdale under the theme, Customer Assurance: Leading the Next CX Advantage, a premier gathering of CX leaders from the world’s top corporate brands, taking place September 30–October 2, 2026, at The Phoenician in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The event will feature keynote presentations and executive-led discussions focused on responsible AI adoption, leadership resilience, customer trust, and the strategies brands are using to create assurance at every stage of the customer journey.

Featured Keynote Speakers

CRS Scottsdale will feature four main stage keynotes from executives who are redefining what CX leadership looks like.

• Julio Lopez, Vice President of Sales Enablement, Global Reservations at The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, will deliver a keynote highlighting leadership lessons and customer experience strategies from one of the world’s premier luxury hospitality brands.
• Todd Sale, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience at Corpay will explore why emotional regulation, self-awareness, and inner resilience have become critical leadership skills for guiding teams through uncertainty, change, and the rapid impact of AI on the workplace.
• Phoebe Schultz, Vice President, Customer Experience Operations at Zillow, will share how the company transformed a fragmented support ecosystem into a unified, AI-enabled self-service experience that reduces customer friction, strengthens trust, and delivers more personalized support at scale.
• Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, will address the growing gap between customer satisfaction metrics and customer reality, highlighting why trust has become the defining factor in long-term loyalty.

Featured Panel Speakers

In addition to the four keynote speakers, the conference will feature main stage panel discussions from CX leaders at some of the world’s most recognized brands, including: Travelzoo, Microsoft, Cox, Intuit, Priceline, YETI, and more.

These speakers will join a broader roster of CX executives sharing candid insights of building Customer Assurance on AI through the agent’s eyes, channel strategy, the contact center workforce, measuring what matters in CX, leadership wellness, and operationalizing customer feedback.

“Customer Assurance has become one of the most important strategic priorities facing CX leaders today,” said Susan McDaniel, COO and Co-Founder of Execs In The Know. “AI may change how we serve customers, but it can never replace the trust that earns their loyalty. CRS Scottsdale is designed to help leaders build the trust, confidence, and operational excellence required to thrive in this environment.”

About Customer Response Summit (CRS)

For more than 15 years, CRS has brought together senior customer experience leaders from many of the world’s most recognized brands to share ideas, tackle challenges, and explore what’s next in CX. Designed exclusively for corporate practitioners, CRS delivers real-world insights through practitioner-led keynotes, interactive discussions, peer-to-peer learning, and curated networking opportunities.

Attendees gain access to candid conversations with fellow leaders, discover innovative solutions shaping the future of customer experience, and build meaningful relationships that extend well beyond the event. Past attendees have represented organizations including Google, Grubhub, Microsoft, MLB, T-Mobile, American Airlines, Staples, Ulta Beauty, Uber, Michael Kors, YETI, Walmart, Target, Visa, Peloton, The Home Depot, and many others.

Learn more about the agenda details, speaker information, venue, and registration, visit: https://execsintheknow.com/events/customer-response-summit-scottsdale-2026/

About Execs In The Know  

Execs In The Know brings together customer experience (CX) leaders from across industries in an effort to advance the conversation and set a new agenda for delivering amazing experiences for consumers. As a global community of the brightest minds in CX, Execs In The Know provides opportunities to learn, share, network, and engage to innovate. Operating under the motto, “Leaders Learning from Leaders,” Execs In The Know facilitates many opportunities for community engagement, such as its bi-annual national Customer Response Summit and private, online community, Know It All “KIA.” There are also exclusive, laser-focused engagements like industry briefings and executive roundtables. Execs In The Know also guides and informs the industry with a rich tapestry of CX-related content that includes CX Insight magazine, industry research, webinars, blogs, and much more. For more information, visit Execs In The Know’s website.

The post Trust in the Age of AI: Customer Response Summit Scottsdale to Explore the Future of Customer Assurance appeared first on Execs In The Know.

But as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, the conversation is shifting. The question is no longer just how organizations can use data to personalize experiences; it is how they can use technology to better understand customers and support the people who deliver those experiences.

How can AI help organizations move from knowing customer preferences to understanding the motivations behind them? And how can companies use AI in a way that enhances the human connections at the center of exceptional service?

A Luxury Hospitality Perspective on AI-Powered Service

In luxury hospitality, where every detail and personal connection matters, this opportunity takes on even greater importance. The challenge is not simply applying technology to make interactions faster or more efficient. It is exploring how AI can help teams create experiences that feel thoughtful, personal, and considered.

That is the conversation Tracy Sedlak, Director, Contact Center Operations & Analytics at The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, will explore during her keynote at CRS Scottsdale.

In today’s AI discussions, much of the focus centers on automation, efficiency, and cost reduction. The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection is approaching AI through a customer-first lens, exploring how the technology can help uncover richer insights, recognize individual preferences, and support employees in delivering more personalized experiences.

During her keynote, Tracy will share how her team is using AI to better understand guest personas, identify motivations and expectations earlier in the customer journey, and equip advisors with the intelligence needed to deliver the anticipatory service that defines The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection.

As organizations across industries continue evaluating how AI fits into their CX strategies, the conversation around meaningful implementation becomes increasingly important. Technology alone does not create exceptional experiences. The value comes from how organizations apply intelligence to better understand the people they serve and empower employees with the information they need.

What opportunities could emerge if organizations had a deeper understanding of customer expectations before each interaction begins? How can CX leaders balance the possibilities of AI with the importance of thoughtful, human-centered service?

If your organization is exploring what’s next for AI in CX, this keynote will offer a compelling perspective on where the conversation is headed.

Join us at CRS Scottsdale, September 30–October 2, to hear Tracy share how The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection is reimagining CX through anticipatory service.

Learn more, explore the full agenda, and register today.

The post How Luxury Hospitality is Raising the Bar for Anticipatory Service appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Jyotsna Khandekar sits at the center of that work. As a Director of Product Management, she leads the customer-facing digital platforms and AI initiatives that serve millions of users, including Cisco Community and the systems that surface the right insights to the right customers at the right time. Over 17 years in technology, spanning go-to-market, partner commerce, and now customer experience, she’s built a rare, end-to-end view of how product, revenue, and customer relationships all connect.

We sat down with Jyotsna to talk about where AI is genuinely improving customer experience, what it actually takes to build trust in AI systems, and why she believes the next real competitive edge isn’t your product or your data; it’s how fast your organization can turn customer understanding into action.

Execs In The Know (EITK): AI is transforming customer experiences across industries. What opportunities excite you most, and where do you see organizations getting it wrong?

Jyotsna: What excites me most is the shift AI makes possible in customer experience — moving from reactive to proactive, predictive, and personalized. For most of our support history, we waited for a customer to hit a wall and come to us. AI lets us flip that: anticipate what a customer needs and meet them with the right help at the right moment, sometimes before they’ve even had to ask. That’s a fundamentally better experience, and we’re only at the beginning of it.

Where organizations get it wrong is in starting with technology rather than the customer. There’s a lot of pressure right now to “have an AI story,” which pushes teams to adopt AI first and then hunt for a problem to attach it to. The ones who get it right do the reverse; they start with a real customer problem and ask whether AI is genuinely the best way to solve it. The other trap is optimizing for internal efficiency at the customer’s expense, measuring success by what the company saves rather than the value the customer actually gains.

EITK: Trust has become a critical topic in the age of AI. What does “trustworthy AI” mean to you, and how should organizations build trust with customers while adopting new technologies?

Jyotsna: To me, trustworthy AI comes down to three things: visibility, governance, and safety.

Visibility means you can observe which model handled a request and what data and actions were involved, audit the decisions afterward, and explain the output with clear reasoning and sources. If you can’t see what the system did and why, you can’t trust it.

Governance means real human oversight, with clear conditions for when a person can step in and when they should.

And safety means guardrails: monitoring for abnormal behavior, setting stop conditions, and hardening against attacks. When you can account for all three, and put that visibility in the customer’s hands, the AI earns trust.

Working at Cisco shapes how I see this: trust in the AI era depends on the full stack working together — the network that carries it, the security that protects it, and the observability that lets you see what’s actually happening end-to-end. That’s how you build trust with customers, too: by showing them the system is observable, governed, and safe, not just telling them.

EITK: What’s one AI myth you’d like to debunk?

Jyotsna: One myth I’d debunk is that keeping a human in the loop is a weakness, a sign your AI isn’t good enough yet. I see it the opposite way: it’s a sign of maturity, because it means you understand the stakes. Autonomy without boundaries isn’t innovation, it’s risk.

The goal isn’t to remove people as fast as possible; it’s to know exactly where human judgment matters most and design for it.

EITK: What’s one CX metric you pay closest attention to?

Jyotsna: The one I watch closest is adoption depth — how much of what a customer already owns they’re actually using. I care about it because it’s a leading indicator, not a lagging one: a renewal tells you what has already happened, while adoption depth tells you, months ahead, whether a customer is getting value and is likely to stay. It’s also what my team directly works to move — sending customers the right insights through the right channels about what they’re using and what they’re not yet using, so we’re actively closing that gap. If someone’s using only a fraction of what they’ve invested in, that’s a signal to act now. And if they’re deeply adopted, satisfaction and renewal tend to take care of themselves.

EITK: What technology trend are people underestimating right now?

Jyotsna: This one isn’t about a specific model or chip; it’s about where competitive advantage actually comes from now.

For a long time, the moat was your product or your data. But AI has changed that: product ideas can be copied and rebuilt faster than ever, and data alone is everywhere. So in my view, the real moat now is context, and what I’d call contextual velocity. Context is how deeply you understand your users; contextual velocity is how fast that understanding flows through your organization so you can act on it and turn it into relevant experiences for customers. When anyone can copy the product, what differentiates you is the context you hold and how quickly you can put it to work. People are only starting to realize this, but it’s becoming the real differentiator.

This is the first installment of 5 Questions With, a new blog series in which we sit down with CX leaders from different brands to hear how they’re thinking about customer experience today. Keep an eye out for the next conversation.

The post 5 Questions with Cisco’s Director of Product Management appeared first on Execs In The Know.

That gap between what the data says and what customers actually feel is the defining challenge for customer experience (CX) leaders right now. And it is exactly what keynote speaker Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, is bringing to the mainstage at CRS Scottsdale.

There is a quiet crisis happening inside organizations that, by every measurable standard, appear to be doing everything right. Operational benchmarks are met, and satisfaction scores hold steady. And yet trust, the thing that actually drives repeat business and long-term loyalty, is eroding in ways the traditional dashboard was never built to detect.

Weingardt has a name for this problem: dashboard blindness. It is what happens when organizations confuse hitting their numbers with understanding their customers. When the metrics are green, but the friction is real, the disconnect does not stay invisible for long. It shows up in social feeds, in churn, and eventually, in revenue.

The Signal in the Silence

One of the most important insights Weingardt will unpack is what unrated interactions reveal. An interaction that goes unscored is not a neutral data point. It is a gap, and those gaps have consequences that quietly compound over time.

As automation becomes a larger part of the customer journey, the moments where customers disengage without providing feedback deserve far more attention than most organizations give them. The absence of a response is itself a response.

The Pressure Every CX Leader Feels Right Now

There is no avoiding the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI). The pressure to reduce costs through automation is real, it is coming from the top, and it is not going away. But Weingardt will challenge CX leaders to think carefully about what gets lost when the pendulum swings too far.

Human empathy, speed in the right context, and the ability to read nuance are not luxuries. They are operational assets with a measurable impact on customer trust. The question is not whether to adopt AI. The question is how to evaluate the trade-offs honestly, using frameworks that account for what a cost-savings analysis alone will never show you.

This is the cost-trust paradox, and navigating it well is quickly becoming one of the most important skills a CX leader can develop.

From Satisfaction to Advocacy

The session is ultimately a call to rethink the entire leadership model around customer loyalty. Satisfaction, as a goal, is reactive by nature. You wait for the interaction to happen, measure how it went, and adjust. Advocacy requires something different: a proactive, systematic approach to how organizations listen, what they measure, and how they scale the kind of experiences that build loyalty over time.

That shift is harder than it sounds, especially inside organizations that have spent years optimizing for the metrics they know how to measure. But it is the work that separates companies’ customers return to from companies customers tolerate.

Why This Conversation Matters Now

The timing could not be more relevant. As AI capabilities expand and budget pressures intensify, the temptation to optimize for efficiency at the expense of connection has never been stronger. Weingardt brings a practitioner’s perspective to a conversation the industry needs to have with honesty and urgency.

Whether you lead CX for retail, a financial institution, healthcare, or anywhere in between, the dynamics she is describing are not unique to Turo. They are the defining tensions of the moment.

Hear Weingardt’s full keynote at CRS Scottsdale. Learn more and register to attend.

The post Why Trust is a CX Metric That Matters appeared first on Execs In The Know.

A new research report from Execs In The Know, CX Agent Insights: Perspectives from the Front Line, changes that. Based on a 33-question survey of 107 contact center agents across internal and outsourced environments, it delivers something rare: an unfiltered, data-driven look at what agents actually experience, what motivates them, and what’s holding them back.

A Workforce That Genuinely Wants to Succeed

Here’s the good news: your agents care. A lot.

An overwhelming 88% of agents surveyed report being passionate about the brands they represent, and 82% say they’re satisfied in their roles. Nearly 9 in 10 believe their organization is committed to putting the customer first. This isn’t a disengaged workforce waiting for the clock to run out; it’s a motivated group of professionals who want to do meaningful work and do it well.

In fact, 67% of agents say they plan to stay and grow within the contact center industry in the long term. That’s a workforce with real tenure potential, and a real appetite for investment. So if agents are engaged and aligned, what’s the problem?

Tools, systems, and technology that simply aren’t keeping up with job demands.

Your Agents Want Faster, More Reliable Tools

When agents were asked what area of their contact center operation most needed improvement, technology ranked first, cited by 24% of respondents. Only 40% say they’re very satisfied with the technology they use day-to-day. Just 50% report that their systems integrate well and work seamlessly together. And when asked what single technology improvement would make the biggest difference in their work, the answer wasn’t AI or fancy new features; it was faster, more reliable tools, named by 54% of respondents.

The picture that emerges is of a capable, committed workforce operating with one hand tied behind its back. Agent performance isn’t capped by motivation; it’s capped by the operational environment around them.

The Hidden Risk: Career Clarity

There’s another gap that the research surfaces that deserves attention. While 67% of agents plan to grow in the field, only 47% feel their organization provides clear career paths and advancement opportunities. For a workforce that’s experienced (45% have five or more years in the role), that disconnect is a retention risk hiding in plain sight.

Agents are willing to commit. Organizations need to show they’re willing to invest in return.

What This Means for CX Leaders

The research is clear on one thing: improving CX outcomes starts with improving the agent experience. Not through perks or culture programs alone, but through faster systems, better integration, clearer career frameworks, and feedback loops that actually lead to visible change.

Ready to see the full picture? The complete CX Agent Insights: Perspectives from the Front Line report is packed with data, analysis, and actionable insights across hiring, satisfaction, technology, and operational strategy.

Read and Download the Full Report →

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