CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
LONDON, 17TH JUNE 2025
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The Future of Connection
Social, economic and technological forces shape every generation’s expectations, from how they want to live their lives, how they work, and what they buy. Old product-driven business models, channels, and marketing communication strategies are quickly fading in relevance.
Already, today’s customer and employee expect Instant and Convenient. Once value-adding propositions, these are now base expectations in our one-click, one-swipe world. It affects our expectations around product and service delivery as much as it does regarding expected employment progression and organizational structures.
Authenticity has also become key in XM interactions. We want to invite ‘real’ into their lives (further compounded by the ‘artificial’ element of AI) and brands and organizations that foster genuine strong connections, standing with purpose, are winning.
Connection has become a core modern value of our times, catalysed by both our ever-dehumanising digital reality and a post pandemic PTSD response. We all collectively crave deeper and more meaningful connections, the essence of what it is to be a happy human.
Three CX Questions/ Reflections for your Brand from the ‘Future of Connection’
- What does your customer journey and product proposition look like through the eyes of Gen Alpha or future Gen Beta consumer? What specifically do you need to change to be significantly more relevant to the next generation of consumers?
- Where in the brand delivery can you dial-up authenticity and step away from commoditisation? How can you instil a ‘realness’ to what you do beyond your competitive set? And how can you do this at scale?
- How can you extend the brand connection beyond the simple purchase, service or consumption moment? Connection is an emotive state. How can you instil a philosophy around connection in your business?
Three EX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘Future of Connection’
- From a talent attraction perspective, what does your organization or department look like through the eyes of Gen Z or future Gen Alpha resource? What specifically do you need to change to be significantly more relevant to the next generation of employees?
- As an organization, where can you dial-up authenticity and step away from function? Are your employees aware of your purpose, do they share and live it, and how can you encourage them to bring their own authentic selves to work?
- Do our employees feel a deep connection to their peers, to our customers, and to our brand purpose? Do they see themselves as ‘connection creators’?
The Blue Dot Consumer (Employee)
The unyielding paper maps of old had us doing all the work. We had to know where we were, exactly the location of where we were heading, and then choose the navigation route we felt most suited our needs. We grew up learning that we were a small part of a big world, and we had to do most of the work to navigate our way.
That Blue Dot in the middle of your Google Maps screen changed everything. Today’s Blue Dot Consumer or employee does not navigate their way through the world. They remain at the centre of everything, the frame of reference revolving around them.
The implications for brands are significant. Your customer is not an endpoint on a customer journey, they are its fulcrum. Your employee is not another ‘human resource’, words we need to stop using. Brands that are truly placing CX and EX at the centre of who they are and what they do are winning.
From direct-to-consumer culture (‘I want it now so bring it to me’) to personalisation (‘I want it my way’), Blue Dot thinking is fundamental to win the race for relevance in CX and EX.
It is not about you, your product/service, your distribution channel, or your ways of working. It is about them. It is about people first, not product. It is about connecting with your customer and employee personally and making them feel special.
Three CX Questions/ Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The Blue Dot Consumer’
- Pick a number of points along your customer journey / CX and examine them from the ‘Blue Dot’ perspective. How could you shift the focus from YOU to THEM? From making it about your product/process to more about the customer?
- Blue Dot is all about personalisation. How can you make your customers (B2B or B2C) feel that the product/service and CX is all about them personally? How can you leverage AI to do this at scale?
- If you search for ‘Thai Restaurants’ on Google Maps, you will be shown restaurants near where you are right now, not 20km away. It is contextual, that is the point. How can you make your CX contextual so that the customer feels they are truly ‘at the centre’?
Three EX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The Blue Dot Consumer’
- How can you make your workplace more about what employees want from their work than what you want from them?
- What can you do in terms of personalisation to make each employee feel special? How can you make their ways of working and their work environment more suited to their individual needs?
- How can you adapt your expectations and their ways of working to their individual context in the present moment? What specific elements of the workplace can be adapted to be more contextual around what the employee needs right now?
The Reality of Expectations
The brand ladder that leads us from dissatisfaction all the way to an empowered and engaged customer or employee is based around the relationship between Experience v Expectations.
Clearly, failing to meet expectations results in feelings of dissatisfaction. However, even when experiences match expectations (satisfaction), a space we measure with surveys and NPS, we still find ourselves in unsafe territory.
Today’s customer and employee expects you to go beyond their expectations, to excite & delight. This is how brand storytelling is fuelled, not by simply delivering on what was already expected.
Customer Intimacy goes beyond CX/EX. It is the space where you foster a sense of closeness with your customer or employee, an emotive space. It is the foundation for engaging and empowerment, the space where your brand logo gets inked on someone’s skin, the moment they become your strongest marketing asset as a true brand ambassador.
It is in surpassing expectations that you will delight your customers and employees, how you lay down the foundations for lifetime value and true emotive loyalty. You all need to appoint an ‘excite & delight’ director, whose role is to bring CX/EX alive is way that goes beyond expectation.
Three CX Questions/ Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The Reality of Expectations’
- How do you strengthen the customer relationship when you realise a customer is dissatisfied? How is the conflict resolved beyond the customers’ expectations and in a way that strengthens the customer: brand relationship beyond pre-dissatisfaction levels?
- Where are the moments of delight in your customer journey that have the most ROI? Where could you implement a change to make your customer smile and to give them a reason to tell your brand story?
- How do you curate and encourage peer-to-per sharing relating to your brand experience within customer networks? The ‘like & subscribe’ models of old are now less relevant. What can you do to shift to a ‘care & share’ model?
Three EX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The Reality of Expectations’
- Beyond basic employee satisfaction surveys, how satisfied are our workforce relating to their expectations they have of the organization and the impact they can have on a day-to-day basis?
- As a leader, what can you do to surpass the expectations of your team this week, month, and quarter? How can you make their workplace and project team a space they feel goes beyond their expectations?
- Tribal belonging reduces talent attrition. How are you building your tribe in the workplace? Would your employees ink your logo on their skin and if not, what do you have to do in terms of belonging and community to get to that place?
The Wizard of EX
Employee Empowerment is critical for CX delivery. Employees who are simply going through the motions are unlikely to surpass customer expectations. But what is the ‘yellow brick road’ to achieve such empowerment? It is about connecting at an emotional level (heart), a creative execution of technology and data (brain) and about doing what is right (with courage and vulnerability).
Connect with Heart
Employees who lead from the heart understand the difference between pity or sympathy (an acknowledgement of customer suffering) and compassion (doing something about it).
Empowered employees know that it is their job to diffuse a customer pain point, and not only that but to go beyond expectation in doing so. Recruit those with high EQ so their decisions are heart-led in customer facing roles.
Use Your Brain
Technology, software, data and AI are only useful to us if they are creatively applied to making employees more empowered. Where applied at the right moment along the customer journey, AI can increase both your CX and EX.
A hospital installing an AI auto ‘speech-to-chart’ system, allowing permanent eye contact during clinical consultations makes the patients feel seen, heard and valued and the clinicians feel they are truly present, without having to have one hand running administration. Both are happier and more connected.
Feel Your Courage
An empowered employee has access to their courage and vulnerability and makes CX decisions from a place of wise mind. They have the courage to follow their hearts and believe in their own decision making in moments that matter.
The United Airlines story perfectly illustrated this courage. Two pilots, colluding off the system together to delay a connecting flight so a passenger would make it to the bedside of his dying mother. Sometimes you need to have the courage to do what is right, not what is profitable, but only emotionally intelligent and empowered employees can tell the difference.
The Illusion of Power
In the Wizard of Oz, the characters all made the journey to Oz, asking for their respective problems to be solved, believing the Wizard had the power to grant their desires. When the curtain was pulled back, that illusion was shattered.
It is the same regarding our employees. If we fail to build a philosophy around employee empowerment, they will continue to believe in the illusion that it is the brand/product in control. They will hide behind process, systems, and ways of working. They will spend their life in the sweet factory, another munchkin in the machine.
Empowered employees believe in themselves. They recognise the sparkly, red glitter heels they are wearing and understand that the answers they seek lie within. They make a significant and immediate difference in CX delivery.
Organizations that take employee empowerment investment seriously end up with an army of heel-clicking heroes.
Three EX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The Wizard of EX’
- How is EQ part of your everyday? How is it used in talent attraction and how do you develop levels of EQ, everyday empathy and emotive engagement in your organisation? If you expect your employees to lead from the heart, what are you practically doing to embed this philosophy at the organisational level?
- As you invest in AI, new systems and data, are you sure that collectively it is making your customer feel good? Is it being implemented in a way that engages emotively with customers and employees, and not just for short-term productivity and efficiency gains?
- What have you done to hero employees who have had the courage to ‘do what was right’ in CX, as opposed to stick with the process? How can you foster this sense of courage/vulnerability across the customer interface, and at scale?
The AI Connection
Technology is only ever an enabler for CX delivery. It is in the creative application of that technology we can make a customer smile and feel special. Bits and bytes don’t build belonging.
An Octopus Energy customer contact centre initiative to make their customers feel good while waiting on hold was genius. Linking their inbound phone number, account and thus date of birth, they played the song popular during the summer when they were aged 14. Peak nostalgia makes people feel good, and less likely to notice any hold time. A simple if/then technology solution, deployed to make customers feel good.
We are heading into a world fuelled by autonomous vehicles, AI, quantum computing and humanoid robotics. The way we live our lives and the nature of work will never be the same again. Unlike the hardware step-jumps of the past (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone) or the connectivity step-jumps (dial-up, broadband, Wi-Fi, 5G), AI represents a spring jump.
AI is not a technology that needs to be PUSHED by brands or business, as it is already being PULLED through by users. For the first time, many customers are already ahead of you in their daily use of AI.
The science-fiction future of AI boyfriends, grief bots, AI therapists and avatars at the hotel checkout is already here. AI changes the very nature of society and certainly of the CX and EX reality. But as exciting as all this is, we must never lose sight of the importance that the function of technology is in making a customer feel good.
However, remember that all of the technological progress of the last 20 years has really been the uphill trundle of the rollercoaster. It has been exciting; we’ve all enjoyed the vibrations, the views and the journey. But with AI powered by quantum computing, the main event, the drop and acceleration, is coming.
Three CX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The AI Connection’
- Where could you implement an AI solution today, leveraging existing data you already have, to creatively dissolve a pain point in your customer journey?
- If you were to use AI to hyper-personalise an experience, where would that give you the most ROI in your customer journey today?
- Considering your customers are already using AI in their everyday lives, which CX touchpoint do you feel needs immediate AI investment to now surpass customer expectations?
Three EX Questions/Reflections for your Brand from the ‘The AI Connection’
- Where can you implement an AI solution in workflow that will free up your employees to focus more on customer problem solving and ideation?
- Where in the customer journey can AI provide employees with contextual data to delight and excite them beyond expectation (while also making the employee feel that their work is more impactful)?
- Which of the AI investments currently being considered by your organisation will have the most impact and ROI with employees regarding how they connect with customers? HINT: Do that one first.
Taylormaking: A Tribal Belonging & Connection Playbook
Taylor Swift is an entertainer, singer, songwriter, musician, producer, director, actress, entrepreneur, fashion icon and global brand. She is also the Queen of CX. The global brand success you are witnessing is the ROI on 20 years of continuous CX investment.
Connections take time and brands that invest over the long-term tend to win. Other musicians win awards and are talented artists, but they do not have the record for the biggest grossing tour of all time, the biggest grossing concert movie of all time, the most streamed movie of all time, the most streamed album of all time. So, what gives? What does a 36-year-old entertainer have to teach the XM industry?
The Swiftie Tribal Brand Army she has built is the ROI of implementing the 9 core values above, a playbook that can be copied by any XM professional to improve CX and EX in their organisation.
Authenticity, Vulnerability & Intimacy
From the birth of social media, Taylor has shared behind-the-scenes footage of her career, life, heartbreaks, and successes. She has continuously shown her customers her authentic self, both on stage and screen, but more importantly in her real life.
From showing how the product is created (footage of her songwriting process, video dance rehearsals) to run-of-the-mill ‘Taylor living her life’, fans were always allowed behind the curtain. She portrays her authentic self in every interaction and thrives on Customer Intimacy, fostering a sense of closeness with her customers.
Collaboration & Together
Famous for her ‘heart hands’, she believes that the customer relationship is made up of two parts, the brand and the customer. Both parties are needed for the magic of the Swiftie Army to come to life.
She has continuously torn away the line between us and them, between producer and consumer. She has invited fans into her life (literally into her home), into her product (her videos) and stepped into their lives (visiting their homes, weddings).
She is fiercely protective of her fans, calling out bad behaviour on social media, on screen or live from the stage. She believes in inclusion and collaboration. She knows she is nothing without her fans and places the fan experience at the centre of most of what she does.
Delight, Appreciation & Belonging
Even in a commodity product delivery (a live performance to 70,000 fans in an arena) she will take the time to sing down the lens of individual fan phones as she performs, giving each fan their unique personal experience. She understands how important it is to make any individual customer feel.
She also shows her appreciation to her employees, giving them the limelight on stage and never making her dancers feel like ‘back-up’ artists. It may be her name on the ticket but it is a collaborative show. She treats journalists with the same respect as her fellow artists, taking time to get to know them in advance of interviews. She famously tipped her 42 truck drivers $100,000 each on the first leg of her Eras Tour.
The power of the Swiftie Army was visualised in Taylorgating, where up to 40,000+ fans gathered outside the stadium. Empowered customers came together to co-celebrate the brand to whom they belong, often at religious levels. This is tribal belonging at its best and the ROI for significant CX.
Our last slide, and the last slide of all of my four performances at X4 sums it all up. While the software, AI and data all enable the magic to happen, it is the way we make our customers and employees feel that matters.
Thirteen Questions/Reflections for your Brand from ‘Taylormaking’
- How do you leverage social media channels to let the customer see behind the curtain of the brand?
- How could you invite the customer in? Where, further back along the production process, could you involve customers so that they feel ownership of the brand beyond the end consumption moment?
- How can you be more intimate and vulnerable with customers? What elements of the brand story or CX could foster a sense of closeness? Get specific.
- How can you tear away the line between producer and consumer and enter a collaborative space with customers?
- How can you personalise commodity/scaled experience to the point of making a customer feel special?
- Do your customers feel supported by your brand, or do you simply want their money? Where is the evidence of that support or do you hide behind process and terms? How can you curate stories relating to brand care and support and have them shared by customers in their peer networks?
- Where can you delight customers or employees by going beyond their expectations? Where can you invest beyond the norm to deepen the customer experience?
- How do you show your customers you truly appreciate them in a powerfully emotional way (and not with a glib loyalty points/scheme)?
- How do you show your appreciation for all your stakeholders (employees, partners, providers)? Do they feel they belong to a brand family or just another ‘resource’ you are utilising for your own gain?
- What have you done to build your own brand army? What specific actions have you taken to build a brand that attracts belonging? If your brand or business was a cult, why would people follow you?
- Do your employees and customers know your brand purpose and is it reinforced and lived throughout all of your touchpoints, both in the physical and digital worlds?
- What have you done in CX delivery that might become a shared ‘brand story’?
- Finally, write to Taylor Swift herself and tell her that Ken Hughes wants his glitter red hotpants back.
