commonFont’s clients and community gathered in Bozeman Sept 12-14 for confluence, our flagship Experience Management Summit. During the event, attendees built lasting connections, performed a hip-hop loop with award-winning artist Supaman, and left inspired to apply five critical takeaways to their work as Experience Management leaders: 

1. The next horizon of Experience Management is Human-Centric 

Abby Schlatter, CEO, and Co-founder of commonFont opened the conference with a call for attendees to come together and look to new horizons in XM. “As Experience Leaders, it is up to us to leverage technology in the best interests of the humans we serve,” Schlatter said.

Later in the day, Matt Fulton, Managing Director of Client Services and Co-Founder of commonFont introduced the characteristics of human-centricity. “Human-Centric XM is comprehensive, personalized at scale, and predictive with a purpose,” Fulton said. “Delivering personalized experiences guided by the human traits of empathy and emotion will lead to durable business outcomes like customer loyalty and trust.”

2. Empathy-driven personalization will be at the heart of XM 

According to Brad Anderson, President of Product & Engineering at Qualtrics, companies will seek to deeply understand individual human journeys in the near future. “Building these deep-rooted connections requires listening, understanding and caring,” Anderson said.

In his presentation on a Human-Centric approach to Experience Management, Matt Fulton underscored the importance of human-centricity: when companies ask their customers “how did we do” instead of “what do you prefer,” they lose sight of the human at the center of the experience equation.

3. Focus on managing vs. measuring experiences

Raj Sivasubramanian, VoC Manager at Airbnb, urged conference attendees not to fall into the metric-centric trap. Raj has driven a customer-centric culture by shifting his team’s reporting focus from trending to targeted insights. Sivasubramanian recommended creating insight-specific packets of information for other departments.

Nat Bishop, Director of Digital Research at Fidelity Investments shared a perspective that there is no single perfect measure for Customer Experience. Before instituting a measurement system, Bishop recommends that CX teams ask themselves, “what actionable changes can we draw from this metric to enhance CX?”

4. In your XM journey seek progress, not perfection 

Bill Schimikowski, CX Manager at Drizly, is no stranger to leveling up CX programs. After advancing CX maturity at Fidelity and Biogen, Bill joined the team at Drizly to establish a best-in-class Customer Experience program.

“Understand challenges across the organization, create a CX Vision informed by those challenges, and look for quick wins,” Schimikowski said. “Find opportunities to add value through actionable insights.”

5. Drive Customer Experience through Employee Experience

Better customer experiences start with employees. “Exceptional experiences create higher levels of engagement,” said Angela McClure, Chief Global Experience Officer at Fresenius.

“You should be asking yourselves, how can we serve our customers through our people?”

Angela McClure, Chief Global Experience Officer, Fresenius Medical Care

Nilofer Merchant, the award-winning Author, and Co-founder of the Intangible Labs delivered the closing keynote at confluence. Her presentation explored onlyness: the concept that you (and only you) stand in a spot that is informed by your history, experiences, visions, and hopes. “From this spot,” Merchant said, “you can offer your unique perspective and ideas.”