What does customer experience (CX) mean to you? Depending on the industry you work in it could be something different, but the essence of customer experience is really quite simple across the board.

It’s all about the interaction between a company and its customer over the course of their relationship. And it only takes one bad experience to ruin a good relationship.

This is why CX is so important to Amadeus. With this in mind, I was happy to participate in the 3rd Customer Experience Exchange for Travel & Hospitality in London, an exclusive event held in partnership with IATA and CXPA. More than 70 delegates shared their experience, expertise and advice on how they are transforming into customer centric organizations. They represented almost 50 companies including 15 airlines, 11 hotel groups, 8 airports, not to mention the 26 vendors sponsoring the event.

Embedding corporate CX excellence

So, what was the travel industry buzz about? One of the big topics was transforming company culture and brand to design a winning customer experience. I discussed this on a panel, with other panelists from AccorHotels, Finnair, and Booking.com. We shared our experiences around how an organization actually creates a culture of CX excellence and the different aspects that need to be taken into consideration. We first gave some examples of companies who are currently getting CX right through the delivery of a consistent experience.

People are power when it comes to CX

We then discussed the importance of employee empowerment in creating, developing and embedding CX excellence. It is really the number one common denominator – to process and deliver tasks. It is vital to have right people to be part of your brand to ensure they can deliver excellent customer experience. You need to get the basics right, deliver high standard of service across all brands, and embrace a customer-first mind set from the management level down.

Technology is key for empowerment

When it comes to embedding cultural CX excellence, real-time, open technology is instrumental in getting to know your customers to deliver a consistent personalized experience across the entire travel journey. In fact there are a set of capabilities airlines should master, starting with primary ones like data standardization, customer insights generation, and usage to name a few. As airlines get better at data collection and analysis, they can implement more advanced capabilities such as predictive metrics.

At the conclusion of the panel, we admitted that there’s work to be done to deliver CX excellence and no company has it perfect. But all of the professionals in the room had a shared vision of improving CX, brand recognition, and business performance for their enterprises.

Karin Dodson - Head of Marketing, Travel Experience Suite, Amadeus