By Wendy McLaughlin, GM CX Growth NZ | Feedback ASAP | feedbackasap.com

Two days. Seventeen sessions. One closing challenge from Alex Murphy that has stayed with me long after the final session: do less, better.

The Future CX Summit ran on 21 and 22 October, and I went in curious about one question. What actually changes for the customer? I came out with a clearer answer than I expected. The speakers came from a wide mix of organisations, public and private, large and small. They did not agree on everything. But they kept landing on the same point from different directions.

Insight is easy. Acting on it is the hard part.

Nobody in the room was short of data. Nobody was short of AI tools, either. What separated the organisations getting results from the rest was simpler and harder at the same time. They had decided who owns the outcome, what to stop doing, and how they would know whether a change worked.

This article pulls together what I heard, what it means for the teams creating customer moments every day, and what I would do on Monday morning. If you were at the Future CX Summit, I would love to know what stayed with you. If you were not, consider this your fast-forward.

What I Heard at the Future CX Summit: Six Themes, One Thread

Six ideas came up again and again across the two days.

1. Customers do not experience your org chart. They see one business. The failures happen in the hand-offs between teams that each hit their own targets.
2. CX is everyone’s job, so build shared accountability. The strongest examples gave one owner the outcome from start to finish, used shared KPIs and put executives on the front line.
3. AI is augmentation, not replacement. One speaker called it “Iron Man, not Terminator”. The proven wins are agent assist, call summaries, routing, quality checks on every interaction and feedback analysis.
4. Capability beats technology. Everyone can buy the same tools. The gap is knowledge quality, clean data, process redesign and change management.
5. Measure behaviour and outcomes, not just sentiment. What customers say and what they do often differ.
6. Insight is easy. Acting on it is the hard part.

Read that list again and you will see it is really one idea. The first five are the reasons the sixth is so hard. Teams are split by function. Nobody owns the result. The tools are bought before the capability exists. The metrics reward the wrong thing. And so the insight sits there.

There was also a useful reality check for us on this side of the Tasman. The annual CX capability index showed New Zealand has closed its belief gap with Australia in a single year. We believe in CX just as strongly. But we still trail on maturity, which is the ability to deliver. In other words, the intent is there. The execution is the opportunity.

Belief is no longer the problem. Delivery is.

The Problem: We Feel Customer-Centric Without Changing Anything

One keynote gave this a name I have not stopped thinking about. The “empathy surplus”.

CX teams have never been better at looking like they care. We run workshops. We draw journey maps. We build personas and stick them on walls. Everyone leaves feeling closer to the customer. And then very little changes for the customer.

The speaker split empathy into three types: understanding, feeling, and caring enough to act. Only the last one is visible to the customer. A persona cannot be felt. A fixed process can.

The same pattern showed up in the way organisations measure. A few examples stayed with me.

Metrics that reward the wrong behaviour

Several speakers questioned average handle time and NPS as targets. A contact centre leader made the point well. A six-minute call about a family medical crisis might be exactly the right handle time. A target that punishes it teaches agents to rush the people who most need them.

Another speaker pointed out that NPS often measures context rather than advocacy. And silence is not always good news. It can mean a customer trusts you so much they never check the bill. It can also mean they are about to leave.

What customers say is not what they do

One presenter shared research showing that most people say a particular type of insurance cover is a priority for them. Yet over one in four did not have it when it counted. Many younger customers were relying on cover bundled into another product like their credit card without realising they had made a choice at all.

A loyalty leader added that when most customers shop around, survey sentiment is a poor guide to loyalty. Behaviour tells the truth.

Silos that customers pay for

Almost every speaker made the org chart point. A customer sees one business. Behind the scenes, a claim, a loan or a complaint moves through teams that each have their own targets. Each team does its job. The customer still waits. Many of the real fixes sat in back-office backlogs, procurement contracts and policy, not in the contact centre.

That is the heart of the problem. It is not a lack of caring or a lack of data. It is a lack of ownership for what happens next.

Of the three types of empathy, only the one that changes something is visible to the customer.

The Impact: The Middle Is the Most Expensive Place to Be

The capability index presented at the Future CX Summit put numbers on what many of us feel. In New Zealand, about 15% of organisations are leaders, 31% are laggards and 54% are followers.

The presenters called the middle the most expensive place to be. Followers carry the full cost of the technology, the people and the programs. They get little of the advantage. The index showed leaders ahead of laggards on revenue growth (91% versus 68%), profit (84% versus 59%) and employee engagement (51% versus 32%).

The reason is not the tools. Around 93% of organisations scaling AI hit barriers, and those barriers are organisational: cost, trust and skills. Not technical. One line summed it up. A poor knowledge base just gives wrong answers faster.

Customers wait where nobody is looking

One panellist described being able to track a pizza across three suburbs on a phone, but not an important application that sat on “received” for more than a month. That is the bar. Customers do not compare you with your industry. They compare you with the best experience on their phone.

Here is the telling detail. Only about 10% of AI use cases target back-office processing. That is exactly where customers do most of their waiting.

Complexity gets passed on

One public sector organisation told a story that made the cost very clear. As its digital experience became easier to use, customers rated it as more competent, and its overall reputation lifted with it. Easy experiences are visible proof that an organisation knows what it is doing. The opposite is also true. As the speaker put it, simplicity is not simple. Complexity you do not resolve internally gets passed to the customer.

Stress makes this worse. A keynote explained that stress hits the reasoning part of the brain first. So complicated journeys fail exactly the people who most need them to work. The person who has lost their bank card at 11pm is not in the mood for a menu of options.

A new risk for 2027

One session raised something I had not thought through. Personal AI agents that can call, chat and negotiate on a customer’s behalf are already arriving. They are endlessly patient. They read every policy. They treat a “no” as a puzzle to solve.

The same session warned that AI search tools now describe your products and policies using whatever they find online, including outdated posts. Customers then quote that back to you as fact. If your own house is not in order, a machine will happily show everyone the mess.

A customer does not compare you with your industry. They compare you with the best experience on their phone.

The Action: Five Moves That Turn Insight Into Change

The good news is that the Future CX Summit was full of examples of organisations doing this well. Most were not spending more. They were choosing better. Here are the five moves I would take back to any business.

1. Reduce the load before you add anything

One keynote offered a simple load equation: the customer’s state, plus uncertainty, plus choice, plus friction. You cannot control how tired or stressed a customer is. You can control the last three.

The same speaker shared a delight matrix. Playful delight suits low-stakes moments, like a coffee order. High-stakes moments, like a claim or a bereavement, need calm, clarity and competence. So audit each step of your customer journey. Where is a “wow” moment adding load for someone who just needs it done?

One organisation did exactly this. It redesigned a key piece of customer information around the task customers were actually trying to complete, rather than publishing everything it knew. The redesigned version earned outstanding satisfaction scores in its first few months. It also replaced a multi-choice “report a problem” form with a free-text box that AI reads and routes. Correct routing rose from about 65% to 95%. Notice how narrow the job for AI was. Categorise and route. Not decide.

2. Give every outcome one owner

The strongest example came from an organisation that made customer outcomes the responsibility of the whole executive team, not just operations. A weekly cross-functional review kept everyone honest. Phone waits fell from more than half an hour to under a minute. Core processing times dropped from weeks to days, and simple changes from weeks to a single day. All without major new technology.

Another organisation described a similar approach. A senior leader owns one major customer journey end to end, with CX, product and tech people embedded. One caution from the panel is worth repeating. A single CX champion can become a bottleneck. Shared KPIs spread the accountability.

3. Let the data travel backwards

The founder of a fast-growing online brand gave my favourite line of the Future CX Summit: data should travel backwards. Every review, from one to five stars, posts to a company-wide channel. Negative reviews are tagged to the responsible team, and anything under four stars becomes a ticket. About 90% of negative experiences are turned around.

The real prize comes next. One long, angry email from a customer led the team to dig deeper, rather than just refund. The result was a new product designed around that customer’s needs, which became a best seller. Returning customers now drive a large share of the business’s revenue. When insight reaches the team that can act on it, it stops being feedback and starts being product development.

This is the principle behind how we work at Feedback ASAP. Every store or team gets one clear thing to work on, explained in plain language, with a named owner. Insight travels to the people who can change it.

4. Use AI to understand, not to generate

This was the most practical rule I heard at the Future CX Summit. Use AI to understand customers. Do not use it to invent answers about your policies. An overseas airline was held to a refund policy its own chatbot made up. By contrast, a regulated organisation that served only approved, signed-off answers got sign-off in weeks. Repeat contacts fell as a by-product of getting answers right the first time.

The rollout advice was just as sensible. Start small, in steps that fund the next step, rather than a big bang. Another presenter showed an AI voice assistant that knew its limits. When it hit a question it could not answer, it handed over to a human with the full context, so the customer did not have to repeat themselves. Knowing when to stop is a feature.

5. Check that it worked

One presenter asked the question I wish more leaders asked. Before commissioning more research, how quickly could we act on it? And did the last piece of research change anything? Knowing what customers need is the easy part. Being an organisation that can act on it quickly is the hard part.

Look for contradictions, not averages. Check what customers say against what they buy, return and recommend. The plastic bag charge was a good example from the attention panel. It changed behaviour where awareness campaigns had not.

Do less, better. Reduce what you ask of customers before you add anything new.

Alex Murphy

Where Frontline Teams Fit: Empathy Becomes the Superpower

If there was one group of people the Future CX Summit kept coming back to, it was the frontline.

As AI takes the simpler queries, the calls and conversations that remain are harder. They are more emotional and more complex. One contact centre panel said empathy becomes the agent’s superpower. A simple payment call can turn out to be a family dealing with a death. One organisation trains its people to look beyond the transaction.

Two practices stood out.

• Permission to break the process. One panel encouraged agents to break a process when it clearly fails the customer, then feed the example back so the process gets redesigned. That is the data travelling backwards again.
• Leaders on the floor. One retailer sends senior leaders to work on site. Loyalty there is often about the staff member who remembers your usual order. In another example, executives had to phone real customers to test their assumptions about a transformation program. Another business mined its emails and calls to find what was driving contact, and cut call volumes dramatically as a result.

The loyalty panel summed it up. Customers do not expect perfection. They expect accountability. Good service recovery can build more loyalty than a flawless run ever does. And authenticity beats scripts.

This is where I see the biggest gap in most organisations. Insight reaches head office. The frontline gets a target, a script and a report. What they need is one clear thing to work on, in plain language, with the coaching to do it. A team member who knows exactly what to try on their next shift, and why it matters to the customer, will do something different. A team member handed a dashboard will not.

Customers do not expect perfection. They expect accountability.

The Outcome: What Good Looks Like

When insight reaches the people who can act on it, the results follow. Not because the technology is cleverer, but because behaviour changes.

The Future CX Summit examples told the same story. Phone waits down from half an hour to under a minute. Requests turned around in days, not weeks. A product range shaped by what customers wrote in angry emails. An organisation whose customers rated it as more competent because the digital experience was simply easier.

We see the same pattern in the programs we run. When teams know the one thing to do differently, and are backed to do it every week, things move:

• Upsell rates up 31% over 12 months, for a national telco.
• NPS up 43% over six months, for an optical group.
• New customers up 45%, with 78% coming from advocates, referrals and reviews.

The order matters. Behaviour changes first. Then sales, reviews and referrals follow. A program that only measures the score cannot show you that chain. A program built around action can.

That is the difference we care about. They measure. We improve.

Questions to Ask Before Monday Morning

• Where does each step of our customer journey sit on the delight matrix, and where are we adding load instead of removing it?
• Who owns each customer outcome from start to finish, and do the teams involved share a KPI?
• Does insight travel backwards to the team that can fix the cause, or does it stop at a report?
• Is AI helping us understand customers, or generating answers we have not signed off?
• Did the last piece of research change anything, and how quickly could we act on the next one?

Worth a Conversation?

The Future CX Summit left me with a short list. Do less, better, as Alex Murphy put it. Give every outcome an owner. Let the data travel backwards. And make sure the people creating customer moments know the one thing to work on.

If any of that sounds like your business, I would love to compare notes. Whether you lead a contact centre, shape CX strategy or grow a team that serves customers every day, let’s grab a coffee.

You can start closer to home with our CX Growth Checklist. It takes five minutes and you get a free report. Or book 30 minutes with me. It is not a demo and it is not a pitch. It is a conversation about your teams, your customer moments and the one thing that would make the biggest difference.

Wendy McLaughlin, GM CX Growth NZ, Feedback ASAP
wendy@feedbackasap.com | 021 906 094

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the main message from the Future CX Summit 2026?

Do less, better. Reduce what you ask of customers before you add anything new. Across 17 sessions at the Future CX Summit, the common thread was that insight is easy and acting on it is hard, so the winners focused on ownership, simplicity and checking that changes worked.

How should businesses use AI in customer experience?

Use it to understand customers and support your people, not to invent answers. The proven wins were agent assist, call summaries, routing, quality checks on every interaction and feedback analysis. Start small, in steps that fund the next step.

Why do CX programs struggle to change customer outcomes?

Most are built to measure, not to change behaviour. Teams are split by function, nobody owns the whole outcome, and metrics such as handle time or a single score can reward the wrong thing. CX is a team sport, and I highly recommend Melanie Disse’s new CXTS book, which highlights this point.

How do I turn customer insight into frontline action?

Give each store or team one clear thing to work on, explain the what, the why and the how in plain language, name an owner, and check within weeks whether behaviour and results moved.