I was lucky enough to spend three days in the Hunter Valley recently at a very well organised CX Symposium; with some of the industry's most senior practitioners and thought leaders in attendance. As I spoke to many people over the course of the event and took the temperature on several subjects, some key themes became obvious:

• There's a real movement underway on the alignment of customer, product, brand and employee experience. Customer and employee experience are now widely accepted as intrinsically linked.
• The internal influence of CX professionals is on the rise with a view that these people should be one of the most important employees in the organisation.
• How customers are feeling - their sentiment - should be core to all progressive CX programs - not just what they are doing.
• CX teams need to be looking at much more than just CSAT or NPS. Insights on customer behaviour, intent and emotion are now crucial across all channels.

However, the biggest theme to emerge in my personal conversations with senior CX practitioners was vendors delivering on their promises of performance. Technology in CX is developing at a significant pace and there seems to be somewhat of an “over-hype"" developing. When it comes to the crunch, technology is simply a tool to support humans. Unfortunately, there was a broad feeling of discontent with some evident 'over-promising and under delivering’. Various CX platforms have been sold and deployed only to be under-supported post-deployment. Some people had a very real sense of having been left 'carrying the platform can'. As CX technology innovation continues at pace, it is incumbent on all of us CX tech vendors to obsess over the ultimate customer experience for our own clients. We need to equip them with platforms and then most importantly support them post-deployment in their own quest for world-class CX programs. I’m interested to hear what your biggest CX platform need is – cast your vote in my poll or leave a comment below.