CX professionals today face mounting pressure: meet rising customer expectations, scale AI responsibly, manage organizational change, and prove impact to leadership, all at once.
We sat down with three CX leaders from top organizations to hear how they’re meeting these challenges:
Woody Berner, AVP of CX and Product Insights at AT&T
Ralf Nickel, Director, Customer Experience at General Motors
Tori Tschopp Signorelli, Director of Guest Journey and Insights at Alaska Airlines.
The common thread: the companies strengthening loyalty are using customer insights and competitive benchmarking to make faster, smarter decisions, and connect CX directly to business outcomes.
Internal NPS tells you where you stand. External benchmarks show how you compare to competitors, and that’s what gets budgets approved. All three experts agreed that competitive benchmarking is one of the most effective tools for aligning leadership.
When a leadership team can see that a competitor is gaining ground on a specific journey touchpoint, the conversation shifts from “should we invest?” to “how fast can we move?”
However, different leaders may require different arguments. Some respond to competitive pressure, others want customer stories, while others need the financial case of retention rates, support costs, and lifetime value. When all three converge on the same priority, investments get funded.
Benchmarking data can also unify employees across ranks and functions. When CX is measured with one central metric like NPS, performance becomes easy to share across the organization. Employees can see the direct impact of their work on a number the CEO is also watching, creating an important cultural shift.
All three leaders see AI as a powerful tool, but agree it can’t replace direct customer contact, which is essential for forming the hypotheses that data validates.
In their experience, AI’s biggest potential is offering a shift from reactive to proactive measurement. They’re using AI to detect patterns as they emerge rather than after the fact, conduct proactive investment analyses, and surface more insights from everyday customer interactions.
However, they agreed that it’s still vital to stay close to the customer. Berner’s challenge to every CX professional: whatever efficiency you gain from AI, reinvest some of it in direct customer contact.
“Take 10% of the time you get out of AI and put it back into getting right in front of the customer where you can see how their lives intersect with our products, because that’s who we’re doing it for,” Berner said.
All three leaders practice this. Berner’s team builds product insights through firsthand experience with the product itself. Nickel regularly visits GM dealers. Signorelli goes to the airport and listens to guests.
Field observations gave them the hypotheses; benchmarking gave them the proof. That combination is what turns a CX leader’s conviction into a funded investment.
A crucial takeaway from the discussion: Seeing where you rank in the industry on different touchpoints in the guest journey is crucial to identifying where to invest.
Alaska Airlines, GM, and AT&T all leveraged NPS Prism to break down the customer experience into episodes (discrete moments across the journey) and benchmark each one competitively.
The episode model has proved useful for a variety of initiatives: during product launches, teams can pair hands-on product testing with episode-level data to quickly identify the highest-impact improvements. It also enables CX pros to zero in on the behaviors that correlate with stronger loyalty, and then find ways to make it easier for customers to engage with those episodes.
All three panelists agreed: in-industry benchmarking shows you where to catch up; cross-industry benchmarking shows you where to leap ahead.
Companies in other industries may face similar CX challenges, like delivering strong returns experiences and maintaining brand standards across independent distribution points. By looking at how leaders in those spaces created best-in-class experiences, inspiration can be found proactively. NPS Prism enables these cross-industry comparisons at the channel level.
The panel put it simply: “By the time you close the gap, the competition has already moved on. Where do you get inspired to move the needle beyond?”
The CX leaders gaining ground aren’t waiting to see what’s ahead. They’re building the habits, frameworks, and cultures to act on insight faster than competition.
Whether it’s embedding a unifying CX metric across their org, using benchmarking to unlock leadership buy-in, or ensuring every AI efficiency gain gets reinvested into direct customer contact, the common thread is intentionality.
In a landscape of rising expectations and rapid change, the winners will be those who use data not just to measure the customer experience, but to shape it proactively, cross-functionally, and with the customer at the center.
NPS Prism shows which journey moments carry disproportionate weight with customers, where your most significant competitive gaps are, and what's driving them—so you can prioritize CX investment based on evidence, not incomplete data alone. See what the data looks like—request a sample competitive view for your industry.