In this episode of ExPEERience, it’s time to look at the realities of delivering great CX in a digital space. How can you make your customers feel connected to your brand through non-human interactions? How far can you go with personalization before it gets “creepy”? And how do you give customers the same experience across multiple platforms? To help answer these questions, I reached out to some great CX leaders from around the world:

• Marwan Dimas, Group Marketing and Communications Director for Power International Holding, says that designing digital and physical experiences with universal human principles in mind will lead to meaningful experiences.
• Jay Baer, of Convince and Convert, believes that brands who claim technology limits their ability to be interesting are just using technology as an excuse to actually be disinteresting.
• Shep Hyken, the Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations, talks about the need for the switch between human-powered and digital-powered, to be seamless and frictionless.
• Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist and author, tells me that in a world where B2B is changing to “B-to-me,” smart brands are using technology to make the lives of their customers easier and better.
• Tom Cheesewright, author and applied futurist, explains that today’s customers are not benchmarking you against your direct competitors. They are benchmarking your brand against the best of their digital interactions. 
• Bruce Temkin, head of the Qualtrics XM Institute, discusses the role experience management plays and suggests brands need to apply even more experience management into their digital activities next year than they’ve done this year.
• Anne Morriss, Executive Founder of The Leadership Consortium, says that brands that rely on empathy and transparency can strike the balance between personalization and privacy that customers appreciate.
• Frances Frei, professor at Harvard Business School, shares a simple litmus test to determine which brands actually have empathy with their customers and which are all about themselves.

And that’s just a start!

On the next episode of ExPEERience, the topic is the future of CX. How will advances in technology change what your customers expect from you? And what will those experiences look like tomorrow?

I would like to thank the team responsible for the creation and production of ExPEERience: SAP Executive Producer, Melissa Lange; our production partners at Simpler Media, Evo Terra and Sam Walker; and the SAP team Ana Amman, Tram Anh Nguyen, Tara Sorman, Molly Breene, and Amber Hatfield. 

I’m Paula Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Customer Experience and the host of ExPEERience. Thank you for listening.