FROM THE INDUSTRY
Will the outcome of all of this learning be available internationally? Americans have always had the edge when it comes to consumer experience and customer service in general. Diane: Absolutely. In 2024 we published our third annual Intrapreneurship and innovation Report. We embedded an entire CX journal into that publication. All past I&I Reports are available on our website. https://syndeoinstitute.org/learn/ thought-leadership/intrapreneurship- innovation-report/ Diane: Domestically our industry has made a huge investment in the customer journey. We used to talk about it when I first joined the industry as the differentiator. It’s hard for some people to see the value of the emotional connection created by customer experience. Our members have known all along that you have to speak the language of the customer. AI is billed as this incredible panacea that’s either going to fix everything or ruin everything, but we aren’t anywhere near where we should be yet. Camilla: Large organisations like Charter Communications, Liberty Global and Comcast are ahead of the curve. They are investing enormous amounts of money. Smaller companies and independent operators, to your point, are much further behind. Everyone is trying to understand how to balance the investment with making the customer journey even better. Diane: We are proud to tell the story of the cable industry. We’re working on another archive and collection for the Barco Library
What else are you working on?
Camilla: It’s a think tank focused on using data-driven insights to collaboratively solve complex problems. Diane: The group came to The Cable
We are working on our Spring CXC Conference. The conference is being hosted by Cox Communications in Atlanta. Our global cohort includes members from Tier 1 and Tier 2 operators, and includes international partners such as Liberty Global, Telecom Argentina and Claro Brazil. We’re in conversation with partners from Canada and Mexico as well. What does this group do? Camilla: We recently rebranded. We were known as the Cable Center Customer Care Consortium, C5 for short. We’re now a customer experience collaborative or CXC. For 20 years we have operated under a more academic model and in 2024 we relaunched the programme with an experiential perspective. The new experiential style allows us to share our expertise in new ways, including industry panels and a CX Journal in our Intrapreneurship and Innovation Report annually. One of the objectives of our CX group is to have a tighter relationship with the technical and engineering community. The power of this group is that they see their role as helping connect the dots between the business and the technical sides of the industry. I hear this a lot; it sounds like C5 is creating a handbook for the industry about how to achieve excellence in customer service. Diane: Although there is not an actual handbook; together we work through challenges, do research and invite vendors and their researchers to come and partner with us. For the past year and a half, we’ve had a pretty heavy duty focus on AI, which has been interesting.
Center nearly 20 years ago. Prior to that, it was operated by Cable Telecommunications Association of
Marketers. In partnership with University of Denver, we created the curriculum for the MBA programme with an emphasis on customer experience; at the time it was the first of its kind in the country. This formed the cornerstone of our work in this area. We’ve seen growth and momentum and much of what we talked about in the beginning has been implemented. We were talking about emotion and the customer journey years ago, before people really knew what they were. We are developing a CX archive collection for the Barco library. Our goal is to have the largest collection possible that tells the full and sometimes messy story of our industry’s customer experience journey. We are proud of the great strides that the industry has made. It’s very gratifying to see what this cohort has accomplished and what they’ve done for the industry. Presumably back then you had a set direction in mind, but technology is unpredictable and so are consumer habits; has the direction you’ve taken has been a surprise? Camilla: Less of a surprise, it is more about a group whose time has come. What is clear, whether you’re in the US or abroad is that growth is slowing down, and the customer experience is more important than ever to retention and growth. The real importance for customer growth and customer retention falls to the CX group. Our partners have been saying all along that this is critically important. They’ve been ahead of the curve.
Cable Hall of Fame Honorees: Ed Breen, Joe Cohen, Zenita Henderson, Pat Kehoe, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bill Stemper Bresnan Ethics in Business Awardee: Richard Parsons Innovation and Intrapreneurship Award for Excellence Recipient: Jake Perlman
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May 2025 Volume 47 No.2
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