CX Summit
North America

In the world of analytics, it’s easy to get mired in technical details. But companies regularly face a bevy of people and process challenges that stymie efforts to translate insights into actions that improve CX. This session will provide real-world examples of:

• Collaboration across diverse stakeholders to drive action.
• Measuring and communicating the ROI of insights.
• Prioritizing insights and action.

Speakers:
Brandon Purcell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Dr. Brita Andercheck, Chief Data Officer and Director of the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, City of Dallas
Aniket Navalkar, Vice President, Survey & Insights, Advocate Health
Kerry Sette, Vice President of Consumer Research and Insights, Voya Financial
Julie Rickis, Head of CX Development, MassMutual

We (and others) have been saying for years that leaders need to get better at what they do, and that poor leadership leads to poor business outcomes. The sad truth is that most companies still don’t believe it, nor have they invested in a meaningful way in their leaders’ skills. So now we face a new question: If human leaders are mediocre enough, can they be replaced by generative AI? Good leaders can’t, but are you good enough? Attend this session so you can:

• Learn what differentiates human leaders from bots (and how smart leaders are leveraging AI to be even better).
• Understand (and avoid) the risks of poor leadership in an AI-infused world.
• Make a plan to develop the right skills that your leaders need to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

In the battle for market and wallet share, random acts of CX just don’t cut it. Marketing, digital, design, and CX leaders can systematically improve experiences by focusing on collaborative patterns, shared practices, and defined approaches to flexible processes that yield improvements in shared and discipline-centric metrics. You’ll learn:

• Why enterprise CX transformation can lose focus.
• How to get resources and funding back on track.
• How successful organizations deliver.

This session applies to B2C and B2B audiences.

Speakers:
AJ Joplin, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Digital business leaders can now deliver enhanced customer value by orienting around customer outcomes across brand ecosystems, rather than task-based experiences. With consumers accessing digital experiences across more digital touchpoints, proliferation of APIs to integrate data and systems across the modern enterprise, and the introduction of co-pilots built on large language models, businesses need to pivot their digital strategies now to take reap the benefits over the next 3-5 years. This session, baked in market proof points, will help leaders:

• Understand digital consumer’s psychology and what truly “removing friction” means
• Envision multi-brand intelligent customer journeys to create new value, while capturing additional data
• Leverage existing and emerging technology capabilities to engage, win and retain consumers

Speakers:
Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Invisible experiences are the ultimate loyalty play. They deliver unparalleled value to your customers while increasing their switching costs. Few organizations have the mindset, let alone the alignment, data, and AI competencies, to build a competitive advantage with an invisible experience (IX). Attend this session to:

• Understand and assess the benefits of IX to your company.
• Inventory the competencies that you must build to deliver IX.
• Learn IX best practices.

Speakers:
Joe Stanhope, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Jessica Liu, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Like with any new (and misunderstood) technology boasting “life-changing” promises, people are both excited for and skeptical of generative AI. As a result of public perception, consumer backlash against AI is on the rise, with awareness of the tech becoming more pervasive. But brands have a lot of control over how they deploy genAI responsibly in order to enhance the customer experience and preempt a trust disadvantage. During this session, you will:

• See the markers for what fuels consumer behavioral backlash over genAI.
• Understand the different means and impacts by which consumers react.
• Learn proactive ways to advance your genAI strategy without a PR crisis on hand.

Speakers:
Audrey Chee-Read, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Many companies continue to struggle to demonstrate the ROI of their CX initiatives. Success relies on making linkages between several types of metrics that each describe a unique aspect of customers’ experiences, including their perceptions. Falling survey response rates increasingly challenge organizations’ abilities to draw these linkages. Fortunately, AI brings the opportunity for firms to build these data connections more easily to demonstrate the ROI of strong CX. Attendees of this session will learn how AI:

• Captures customer perceptions while avoiding data collection landmines.
• Helps companies rely less on perception metrics in modeling customer outcomes.
• Will eventually replace the need for extensive survey programs.

Speakers:
Pete Jacques, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Marketing has spawned many of generative AI’s earliest use cases — from creative ideation and content development to personalization and search optimization. And we’re merely at the starting line of a marathon of possibilities. According to Forrester data, 40% of US-based B2C marketing executives indicated in Q4 2023 that they were exploring genAI use cases. But how do CMOs lead their teams toward integration of this tech into their marketing operations and strategy? And how is this all done in a human-centered way? During this panel, you will:

• Hear about marketing leaders’ wins and fails with generative AI.
• Learn how to advance genAI from exploration to integration.
• Explore what effect the fervor of genAI is having on the CMO’s remit.

Speakers:
Mike Proulx, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Norm Yustin, Yustin, Russell Reynolds Associates

Think about org structure not as an end state to accomplish but as a lever to pull to create alignment and your expression of customer obsession. Join this session to:

• Learn the common factors that make different org models successfully align CX, digital, and marketing functions.
• Determine what structure best suits your business using Forrester’s framework.
• Inform your strategy with real-world examples.”

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Emerging AI technologies let you design experiences that are more conversational, adaptive, and creative, which makes machines and their software feel more humanlike to users. Of these three new capabilities, creativity — enabled by generative AI — is the most powerful and surprising and requires a new mindset for effective human-machine collaboration. In this session, you’ll learn:

• How generative AI is making software creative.
• How to design experiences that tap into that creative power while also managing the risks.
• What it means for the future of human-machine interaction.

Speakers:
David Truog, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Empathy helps brands understand their customers and create meaningful experiences that meet customers’ needs. Human-to-human interactions have been at the core of building empathy, but that’s about to change. How can we maintain empathy in a world that’s increasingly becoming AI-driven? In this session:

• Rethink empathy’s role in an AI-driven world.
• Explore how automation can help create empathetic experiences.
• Learn about potential risks to avoid.

Speakers:
Senem Guler Biyikli, Analyst, Forrester

AI has a trust problem. Highly publicized blunders have eroded trust with consumers, while a lack of understanding among business stakeholders shakes confidence and stymies AI adoption. It’s time to bridge this trust gap and realize the full business potential of this transformational set of technologies. In this session, you will:

• Learn how to apply the seven levers of trust — accountability, competence, consistency, dependability, empathy, integrity, and transparency — to artificial intelligence.
• Discover which levers to pull to create trust with different types of stakeholders.
• See how other companies are developing trusted AI.

Speakers:
Brandon Purcell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis measures the future profitability of customers, providing companies with the ability to gauge the success of CX initiatives and to direct customer investment. Unfortunately, many companies that attempt to calculate CLV struggle to determine the right data and equation for doing so. This session will:

• Introduce different models for calculating CLV.
• Identify the data necessary for CLV calculation.
• Showcase best practices for using CLV to engage with customers.

Speakers:
Brandon Purcell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Matthew Blasco, Managing Director and Head of Customer Analytics, JP Morgan Chase
Barbara Lincoln, Director of Customer Satisfaction & Integration, Erie Insurance

Leading a team is challenging. Managing your projects and deadlines may distract you from the important process of assessing your team’s effectiveness. During this workshop session, executives and team leaders will learn an easy-to-apply model for organizational effectiveness and leave with their own team assessment and action items. In this session:

• Gain an actionable model for organizational effectiveness, applicable to any function.
• Learn how to assess your team and engage them in a collaborative assessment activity.
• Uncover action steps for you and your team to improve their effectiveness.

Speakers:
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Aligned customer-facing functions report higher growth and profitability. But integrating underlying tech stacks is a major hurdle. Forward-looking organizations that harmonize their tech ecosystems position themselves to better understand and respond to customer needs today — and adapt to new AI-driven experiences. In this session, you’ll learn:

• Core tenets of a customer-obsessed tech ecosystem.
• Techniques to audit your current disparate tech stacks.
• Tips for accelerating tech and business alignment.

Speakers:
Colleen Fazio, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Rusty Warner, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Generative AI enables conversations that are both smart and natural — exactly what’s been missing from customer self-service for years. But generative AI alone won’t orchestrate customer interactions across multiple AI solutions and back-end systems. This is where conversational AI comes in. It’s the glue that can turn natural conversations into self-service tools that answer questions, gather information from across the organization, and perform back-end transactions. Conversational AI will also be tasked with making sure that generative AI is targeted, safe, and truthful. In this presentation, you will learn:

• How the power of generative AI and large language models will impact customer self-service and the contact center.
• What guardrails are needed to protect your customers who interact directly with generative AI solutions.
• How organizations can map out a path to revolutionary self-service solutions.

Speakers:
Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Has there been a topic more discussed than generative AI over the past 18 months? Despite all the hype and talk, not many companies have widely deployed genAI to drive real customer experiences — especially not at scale. In this session, however, we’ll hear from a company that has done just that. In this session, you will learn:

• The process of deciding what problems to tackle with genAI.
• Lessons gleaned from real-world deployment, including common hurdles and how to overcome them.
• What results to expect and how to measure success in customer-facing genAI.

Speakers:
Ian Jacobs, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Chris Valleskey, Group Director, Creative Technology, Eversana

Generative AI entices marketers with promises of saved time and optimized outputs. But companies have overlooked critical questions about customer data and consent in their fervor to take advantage of this emerging tech. A “privacy by design” approach helps companies retain consumer trust and avoid the genAI extremes — either experimenting recklessly or blocking the emerging technology outright. Attend this session to:

• Understand the principles and benefits of a “privacy by design” approach.
• Learn how to pivot from a compliance-focused privacy discussion to a strategic one.
• Determine who to collaborate with to assess use cases, risks, and opportunities with the end consumer in mind.

Speakers:
Stephanie Liu, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Consumer personalization requires strategy, data, and technology. Companies are vocal about data challenges and immediately look to technology for solutions — but they require a sound strategy first. And a defined measurement plan must follow. In this session:

• Differentiate between consumer needs vs. company objectives.
• Adopt a strategy, data, and technology framework to approach consumer personalization.
• Measure personalization efforts across the organization.

Speakers:
Jessica Liu, Principal Analyst, Forrester

As a leader, you probably know where generative AI can help you improve customer experience or get more efficient, but your employees can also show you how. Learn how others are doing it through a handful of real-world client examples of successful employee-led projects, including what they learned along the way that you can use to guide your generative AI efforts. In this session, you will learn:

• Why the employee perspective is so critical for success.
• How organizations are governing their employee-led efforts.
• What they learned along the way that will help you avoid mistakes.

Speakers:
David Johnson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Leaders understand that aligning their team’s work to organizational goals is the path to success. Yet many still fail to be truly effective when driving performance. Where do they fall short? CX, digital, and marketing teams have different approaches to metrics that sometimes conflict with one another. This session will equip attendees to:

• Evaluate current measurement strategies to pinpoint incongruency.
• Identify common metrics across teams that drive alignment.
• Ensure that shared metrics drive business outcomes/ROI.

Speakers:
Pete Jacques, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Retail is one of the world’s most competitive industries — low barriers to entry, fickle shoppers, and heavy marketing costs are all factors. For decades, retailers have deployed machine learning to improve their inventory levels, set prices, and personalize promotions to effectively compete. In this session, attendees will learn about:

• The new applications of AI that retailers have found effective.
• Generative AI deployments that retailers have already launched and their effectiveness.
• What all consumer-facing businesses can learn from live retail deployments of AI.

Speakers:
Sucharita Kodali, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Tom Hutchins, Vice President - Technology Governance, Strategy & Business Operations, Tractor Supply

Many companies have self-service chatbots or interactive virtual assistants for customers and prospects, but most of them offer bad experiences that frustrate customers so much that they walk away from the brand. In this session, we’ll examine real-world chatbots, highlighting some best practices and identifying some mistakes that can be avoided by applying effective design principles. In this session, you will learn:

• Best practices for conversation design to help increase the value of your self-service offerings.
• Some common design mistakes that get in the way of good customer experiences.
• Ideas on how generative AI and other new technologies will help you take customer self-service to the next level.

Speakers:
David Truog, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester

To improve advertising’s performance, marketers must first improve the quality of their inputs into AI-powered ad platforms. High-quality inputs improve consumers’ experiences with advertising and, thus, trust — ultimately lifting return on ad spend. During this session, you will:

• Learn how to develop content that appears on AI-integrated search engine results pages.
• Understand when to use AI to develop persuasive ad creative that garners consumers’ attention.
• Discover where to plan and buy AI-powered media.

Speakers:
Nikhil Lai, Senior Analyst, Forrester

How do you turn data into action? Leverage the power of data storytelling to transform how you communicate insights and usher in a new era of boundless experiences. Storytelling is essential to help CX, marketing, digital, and data professionals make decisions, connect metrics and business goals, and obtain buy-in. You will learn how to:

• Assess your audience’s roles, goals, and values.
• Define and structure impactful narratives.
• Motivate your audience to drive transformative change.

Speakers:
Kim Herrington, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work has been at the forefront of many organizations’ people strategies for years. The introduction of generative AI raises many questions and concerns about the ways that AI can propel forward, or hold back, ongoing DEI and belonging efforts. Join Senior Analyst Jonathan Roberts and a panel of esteemed guests from the world of DEI and AI in a discussion that will help shape your thinking and gear up for the future ahead. During this panel, you will:

• Hear from industry thought leaders about the marriage of AI and belonging.
• Understand the truth of AI and who often gets lost in the shuffle.
• Learn how to move forward with AI while honoring your commitment to belonging.

Speakers:
Jonathan Roberts, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Kamilah Sanders, Founder/CEO, Greater Than Equal®
Missy Dunagan, Director, AI Strategy and Solutions, tekcity.ai

Forrester’s 2024 Customer-Obsessed Leadership Award recognizes senior leaders who exemplify customer obsession. Join us in speaking with Forrester’s 2024 Leadership Award winners so you can:

• Gain insights into how these leaders put customers at the heart of their business.
• Apply a customer-obsessed mindset to your own initiatives and your organization.
• Align across your organization to put the customer at the center of everyone’s work.

Speakers:
Melissa Gill, VP, CX Executive Partner • Executive Program, Forrester
Eric Epstein, VP, Executive Partner, Forrester

We predict that half of large global firms will experiment with customer-facing generative AI this year. CX pros need to support these new AI-driven experiences while simultaneously ensuring that their organizations don’t forget about the humans having these experiences. Now more than ever, organizations need customer insights to inform, measure, and monitor new AI-driven experiences. Attendees of this session will learn:

• How AI and genAI are relevant to customer feedback management practices (LIAM).
• How customer feedback management practices need to adapt in the age of AI.
• Key CX fundamentals in the age of AI.

Speakers:
Colleen Fazio, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Sera Tanner, Customer Experience Director, Delta Dental of New Jersey and Connecticut

Industries with heavy regulatory burdens still want to deliver excellent customer experiences. But those regulations limit the data capture and use that brands can deploy to drive those experiences, as well as causing some unintentional experiential friction (think of lengthy required disclosures!). In this session, experts in financial services and healthcare will help you learn:

• What expectations consumers bring to their experiences with regulated industries.
• How brands in regulated industries design great experiences.
• How brands deal with data restrictions and controls in their experiences.

Speakers:
Ian Jacobs, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Peter Wannemacher, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Arielle Trzcinski, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Emerging AI promises exciting advances in martech for creative, analytics, operations, and interaction execution. Marketers have a once-in-a-generation opportunity with AI to modernize the martech backbone, but it won’t happen on its own. Marketers must proactively plan and manage AI adoption to drive marketing results, develop trust in AI-powered capabilities, and ultimately drive effective customer experiences. Attend this session to:

• See a framework for defining new AI functionality and use cases in martech.
• Learn a planning approach for developing an AI adoption roadmap in martech.
• Understand key considerations for technology and organizational readiness to deliver and build confidence in AI use cases.

Speakers:
Joe Stanhope, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Most companies have no shortage of data, yet many remain “data-rich but insights-poor.” How can organizations become “data-rich and insights-rich”? In this session, learn how leaders in healthcare, retail, and financial services are:

• Discovering the signal within the noise of terabytes of data.
• Organizing data teams to produce and distribute insights.
• Delivering tangible and intangible business benefits from data and analytics.

Speakers:
Sucharita Kodali, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Peter Wannemacher, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Arielle Trzcinski, Principal Analyst, Forrester

What does it take to translate AI hype into customer value? In this panel-style session, industry experts will share how they are embracing emerging tech on the path to customer obsession. Learn how these real-world CX leaders have:

• Integrated generative AI into their 2024 CX initiatives.
• Overcome common obstacles of genAI adoption.
• Adapted their leadership styles for sustained culture change.

Speakers:
Katy Cobian, VP, Executive Partner, Forrester
Abhii Parakh, Vice President, Head of Enterprise Experience, Prudential Financial
Vishal Bhalla, SVP, Chief Experience Officer, Advocate Health

Effective collaboration isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s mission-critical. But it’s a rarity. We’re much more likely to surround ourselves with people who think exactly like we do, creating an echo chamber of diminishing returns. Join this interactive session to challenge your understanding of effective collaboration and open doors to effective cross-functional partnership. You’ll learn:

• What FIRE collaboration looks like.
• The key ingredients to effective collaboration and stakeholder engagement.
• Your own collaboration strengths and challenges.

Speakers:
Jonathan Roberts, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Forrester’s CX Index data reveals that customer experiences that are effective, easy, and that generate positive emotions lead to the outcomes of loyalty – retention, enrichment, and advocacy. In today’s world of ubiquitous loyalty initiatives, brands need to find technologies to help their efforts stand out. AI is increasingly being used to understand customers and their propensities, improving experiences, and engendering deeper loyalty. Join this session to explore:

• How AI is being used in loyalty analytics to better understand customers.
• Examples of AI use in loyalty initiatives today.
• Where AI can take loyalty in the next five years.

Speakers:
Mary Pilecki, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Phil Rubin, Founder & Principal, Grey Space Matters

Welcome to the age of contact-center agent augmentation! What can leaders do to ensure that they deploy solutions that enhance their agents’ human intelligence and capabilities without pulling everyone down to an automatable average? In this session, we will discuss:

• How companies are using AI to support contact center agents today.
• Ways that AI and automation can make customer service more human (yes, really!).
• Human-led customer service as a lever for differentiation.

Speakers:
Christina McAllister, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Marketers have long struggled to know which publishers are authentic, what content is safe, and which users are … actually human. AI-generated synthetic media and deepfakes make knowing these things nearly impossible. AI deception moves so quickly that the tools brands have long relied on to stay ahead of bad actors can’t keep up. Authenticity vertigo is setting in; it’s getting harder and harder to trust that any content is real. Attend this session to:

• Hear the latest on what the industry is doing to safeguard authenticity in media.
• Learn how to avoid AI-generated publisher content made with little to no human editorial input.
• Build defense against deepfake ads that seek to appropriate your brand to defraud consumers.

Speakers:
Mo Allibhai, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Using customer data can come with challenges — data sensitivity, gaps, scarcity, timeliness, and regulations, to name a few. Synthetic data offers a promising way to bypass these problems, enabling safe and effective usage without relying solely on authentic customer data. In this session:

• Learn what synthetic data is and what makes it so useful.
• Understand how it can help you move outside of the bounds of customer data.
• Prepare to make room for synthetic data in your data environment.

Speakers:
Zeid Khater, Analyst, Forrester

First, we wanted a culture of innovation, then it was a culture of creativity. Now, AI is at your doorstep, but culture will stand in adoption’s way without the right conditioning. What needs to fundamentally change in your culture, and what characteristics will you double down on? In this session, you will learn how to:

• Identify the elements of AI-ready culture.
• Use your organization’s cultural identity to steer through inevitable change.
• Unite colleagues around cultural objectives and benchmark progress.

Speakers:
Angelina Gennis, Senior Analyst, Forrester

The traditional customer lifecycle no longer holds true — and neither do organizational boundaries. Alignment is essential to create and sustain customer focus, competitive advantage, and business results.

Join this session to learn:

• How senior leaders align CX, digital, and marketing strategies.
• How customer focus drives profitable growth.
• How you can apply a customer-obsessed mindset to your own business.

Speakers:
Katerina Gryparis, VP, Executive Partner, Forrester
Reed Smith, Ardent Health, Chief Consumer Officer

AI-based analytics enable organizations to predict customer behavior and automate their experiences. CX leaders can leverage predictive strategies to enhance experiences and maximize business performance. In this session:

• Learn how CX leaders can take the lead in driving initiatives to leverage predictive techniques in their organizations.
• Understand how generative and predictive AI can work together to automate experience management.
• Find out how technology vendors and service providers are creating new opportunities for deploying CX-focused predictive strategies.

Speakers:
Rich Saunders, Senior Analyst, Forrester

With AI becoming increasingly critical as a medium for design, organizations need to reimagine how design is done so that customers embrace these experiences rather than fear them. But few organizations are prepared to take this leap into the future of design. In this session, attendees will:

• Learn what it means to design with AI responsibly.
• See examples of AI design patterns and methods from leading organizations.
• Leave prepared to design experiences using AI that customers can trust.

Speakers:
Gina Bhawalkar, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Just as they have with past emerging media, brands such as Coca-Cola were quick to launch generative AI stunts to achieve “first mover” credit in the industry trades. But when it comes to consumer-facing experiences, genAI’s real utility trounces superficially veiled marketing campaigns. During this session, we’ll showcase and evaluate recent brand activations to give inspiration from the best (and worst) of brands’ use of generative AI. Attend this session to:

• See a range of brand-led consumer-facing generative AI use cases.
• Learn what consumers want and expect from brands’ use of generative AI for marketing/CX.
• Distill genAI best practices (so far) as you advance your 2H 2024 marketing strategy.

Speakers:
Emily Collins, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Mike Proulx, VP, Research Director, Forrester