Hi, readers! You haven't heard from me recently, as I've been travelling and talking to Cisco customers. My colleague Jason Bettinger and I recently had a wonderful time at CDM's Customer Experience Summit in Chicago, IL. CDM Media Summits bring together leading C-level executives, analysts, and solution providers to network and attend interactive agenda sessions on the latest business topics and trends.

At the event, we gave the opening keynote presentation to address how enterprises can strive to meet the ever increasing demands of the customer.  The summit brought together some of the leading executives from a variety of industries to explore ways of confronting and overcoming current industry issues. This year's conference focused on topics that enterprises must deal with now, not in the future:

• Leveraging Big Data
• Social Media Marketing
• Predictive Analytics
• Digital Interactive Marketing
• Monetization of the Customer Experience
• Customer Engagement Management Platforms

Increasingly, institutions are focusing on customer experience as their primary competitive advantage. Those with the highest customer experience ratings typically enjoy some of the best financial performances when compared to their competitors and research has demonstrated a high correlation between experience to loyalty and loyalty to profitability. Companies are asking themselves: How do we design and deliver differentiated customer experiences that truly matter? What expectations do today's consumers have for customer care?

In our keynote, we showcased how new technologies that generate more positive outcomes in the customer experience era align with future business models across industries.  We discussed how consistency and personalization are critical to achieving new levels of customer experience and the factors that need to be considered when trying to achieve both.

Delivering a Next Generation Customer Experience Keynote

"Consistency may be one of the least inspirational topics for most managers. But it's exceptionally powerful, especially at a time when retail channels are proliferating and consumer choice and empowerment are increasing." -McKinsey & Company

Today, institutions are being challenged to meet the ever-increasing demands of the customer, something that is becoming more complex. Many have found that addressing those demands requires more coordination than ever -it's about moving to true customer collaboration throughout the customer journey and proactively engaging the customer by combining traditional tools with the power of the future.

Customers are driving how and when they interact and demanding an engaging experience. Therefore, organizations across all industries must evolve their customer care to align with new business models -addressing customer experience imperatives with new capabilities. The keynote can be viewed here.

We received some great feedback from those who attended our keynote. Below are a few key themes we heard from attendees:

• The importance of the customer is at the center of the ecosystem
• Consistency and personalization are not mutually exclusive
• Examples show that every industry is being impacted by the trends in the market today

As you can see, we had a great time at the Customer Experience Summit and we are already looking forward to next year's conference. Did you attend? Let us know your feedback from the event in the comments section below.