A place where CX leaders can come together to look at the different aspects of customer experience, learn from peers, review the vendor landscape and, most of all, get insights from different experts about the latest CX trends.

That, for me, is the value that delegates will get from attending the summit.

The number one thing for me really is trust. Trust is something that everybody is looking into as an important component of CX.

The second thing that we are seeing is lots of organisations need to find measurements or KPIs on CX as a priority.

The third is mostly to do with organisations starting out on their CX, asking ‘How do I bring the voice of the customer to the forefront of CX’ and ‘How do I know what I don’t know’.

The fourth is using data and analytics to personalize CX at each point throughout the customer journey.

Finally, the fifth, would be how to map the customer journey and automate specific stages of that journey.

The trust issue will continue to play an important role as we move forward, in terms of how CX leaders make investments in customer experience.

AI will continue to generate increasingly accurate customer insight, allowing the automation of not only the front line, with virtual assistants and chat bots to, but also the back-end with RPA.

CX leaders will be doing things in a more multi-experience way, using various engagement touchpoints that will have a big impact on CX projects in the short term.

The shift towards real time, events driven environments will continue, allowing CX leaders to react instantly on an individual basis to offer the best experience.

Delegates learn not only industry wide best practice, but also gain invaluable insights specific to the day to day jobs they are performing.

As we know, CX is not a one person show, it is really about the whole organization so we see groups made up of members of different business functions leaving with the insight they need to transform their organization for the future customer.

New attendees will benefit largely from the deep insights from presentations by Gartner experts and guest keynotes to sharpen their CX perspective. Additionally, we provide various tutorials to fast track CX initiatives for those new to the industry.

There are numerous networking opportunities, allowing attendees to connect with peers across all industries and functions and the workshops are ideal for those looking to build on specific areas like customer journey mapping.

The ask the expert sessions provide attendees with a free format, informal environment to ask questions on specific topics related to your current initiatives and challenges.

Our round tables offer a vendor free environment to discuss certain topics, exchange view points and experiences with your peers and Gartner experts.

For those attending in large teams, we can facilitate a private room with an expert of their choosing to dig deep into a topic.

Simply put, it is an action orientated, research-based summit, based on Gartner’s view on how to improve what you’re doing in CX.

I would say that there are three core things are:

Firstly, the “how to’s”. There is a lot of practical advice about doing things with technology that will improve CX.

Secondly, an accurate picture of what the last, and next 6 months look like in terms of predictions, forecasts, direction and trends.

Finally, the guest key note speakers we bring along to illustrate the latest trends and industry wide thinking with case studies and real-world examples.

We’re not selling anything other than information, so we have independence and a lack of bias. This is at the core of the value of all Gartner Summits.

Everything we discuss is research-based and independent, so we aren’t just giving opinions and it’s not research paid for by vendors wanting to get across their marketing messages. Yet technology has an increasingly important role to play in CX so it’s important to also hear technology vendor opinions and viewpoints too.

CX is maturing geographically, there are still numerous countries across Europe where there is nobody who’s head of CX, it isn’t a job title that exists in these areas.

It is also maturing by industry. Where previously it was consolidated in just a few industries, such as travel, hospitality, banking, insurance or telecoms, it is expanding into new industries like government, non-profits or utilities as they deregulate.

CX is moving from a predominantly B2C discipline, to be essential in B2B environments. We’ve gone from a situation where 80% of B2B organizations were doing almost nothing to where it's now 50%. So B2B is continuing to improve rapidly

Well the obvious insights from presentations for Gartner experts to sharpen their perspective. We also provide various tutorials to fast track CX initiatives for those new to the industry.

There are numerous networking opportunities, allowing attendees to connect with peers across all industries and functions.

The workshops are ideal for those looking to build on specific areas like customer journey mapping.

The ask the expert sessions provide attendees with a free format, informal environment to ask questions on specific topics related to your current initiatives and challenges.

Our round tables offer a vendor free environment to discuss certain topics, exchange view points and experiences with your peers and Gartner experts.

For those attending in large teams, we can facilitate a private room with an expert of their choosing to dig deep into a topic.

Actavo is an international service engineering provider operating across 100 locations worldwide including Ireland, the UK, the US, the Caribbean and Kazakstan. We have a global workforce of 4,000 people delivering Network and In-Home, Industrial, Hire & Sales, Modular Building and Event Solutions across multiple market sectors.

In my role, I’ve been focused on designing and executing our customer experience strategy in line with our brand promise of Going Beyond.  Each year in the In-Home division, we are trusted to visit over one and a half million customer homes. Because of this, we are both passionate and focused about delivering a re-markable Customer Experience every time.

Our ability to do this well is phenomenally important to us. We constantly strive to successfully deliver against a suite of customer experience key performance indicators such as Net Promotor Score, Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction and others. 

Early in the design of our customer experience strategy, we recognised 3 primary challenges impacting our ability to deliver improved customer experience outcomes.

One of the biggest challenges we were faced with overcoming was the dominance of departmental silos. We needed to ensure that customers had an effortless and consistent experience when interacting with us.

The second challenge was utilising the significant amount of CX Insight data at our disposal. We needed to use this insight together with information from partners like Gartner and leading universities to develop customer journeys that meet both the current and future needs of customers. We recognized that customers’ needs and behaviours are constantly changing.

Finally, we were challenged in identifying and selecting technology that aligns with our clients, their customers and our front line team’s needs. For us, CX digitalization is a key value differentiator in the pursuit of customer experience excellence.

Attending Gartner Customer Experience and Technologies Summit allowed us to drastically accelerate resolving these challenges.

What has really benefitted me over the years of attending the summit is the amount of actionable insight I received. The earlier years focused on the fundamentals of CX. There were a lot of tracks and sessions aligned to this level of maturity.

This really helped with building out our CX strategy and framework. In subsequent years the tracks have changed, so whilst the fundamentals are still covered in a number of different sessions, now there are increasing numbers of sessions focused on getting to the next CX maturity level.

It was very useful to plan progression through the Maturity Levels throughout the years attending the summit. The construct of the summit itself helped phenomenally in this regard. Building a CX culture and engaging employees with the CX agenda continues to be a key priority for me.

I had a one-to-one sessions with Ed Thompson, and another with Jim Davies, which were very useful as they validated what we had done so far and provided me with some advice on how to move forward.

Regardless of where you are in your CX journey, you will have conversations with peers, attend workshops and sit in on roundtables and sessions that are relative to you and your specific challenges.