Most organisations have more customer data now than they know what to do with.
They have dashboards, analytics, automation tools and customer feedback loops coming out of their ears. And yet, as Zoom’s CX Summit EMEA 2026 made clear this week – having insight isn’t the same as creating impact.
Across five sessions, speakers from Zoom, CULTIVATE CX, ArvatoConnect and Cavell unpacked what customer experience needs to become next: more connected, more intelligent, more human and much better at turning information into action.
The big question: How do businesses stop drowning in customer data and start using it to create better experiences? Luckily for our readers, we’ve got some key takeaways from the event for you! Let’s recap.
Why CX Needs to Stop Acting Like a Straight Line
The event opened with Ben Neo, Head of Zoom CX Sales EMEA, who set the scene for the day by challenging one of the biggest myths in customer experience: that customer journeys are neat, linear and predictable.
Too often, businesses design customer journeys in straight lines. They draw funnels on PowerPoint slides, map out tidy steps, and assume customers will move from one stage to the next exactly as planned.
But real customers do not behave like that.
They get stuck. They change their minds. They ask questions. They move between channels. They need reassurance, context and flexibility.
Neo captured this beautifully when he said:
“For far too long, customer journeys have been straight lines, drawn on PowerPoints, they’re rigid funnels, they’re four steps, they’re click here, then here, but actually, in the real world, people like me, they move along this road.”
That image of the road became a useful metaphor for the future of CX. A better customer journey is not one that bulldozes people through a fixed process. It bends, adapts and respects the terrain.
Neo continued: “The journey should be like this road. It curves, it adapts, it respects the terrain instead of bulldozing through it, and that’s exactly what the future of customer experience with AI should feel like.”
The promise of AI should be to make the journey more natural, not to make customer experience colder or more mechanical. As Neo put it, customers do not want to repeat themselves, get trapped in dead ends or “press 1 for frustration.”
The numbers shared also showed the scale of the gap.
71% of customers expect highly tailored engagement (McKinsey), but only 25% of organisations use embedded insights in their daily CX operations (Amplify AI).
Neo’s conclusion was straight-shooting: “We’re not lacking in customer data, we’re actually drowning in it. What we’re lacking is impact.”
Insight cannot just sit in reports, it needs to become a decision engine – a single billing issue should not only help to resolve just one case, for example.
In a connected CX organisation, that same interaction could alert sales to churn risk, help product spot pricing confusion, and help marketing refine messaging.
Same interaction, much bigger business impact.
Think of Customer Experience as a Movement, Not a Project
The guest keynote came from Katie Stabler, Global CX Influencer, Founder of CULTIVATE CX and author of CX-Ism. Her session, “CX-ISM: From Strategy to Soul: Building a Movement That Redefines Business Success,” brought the emotional, cultural and behavioural side of CX into sharp focus.
Stabler’s central argument was that customer experience is not just a collection of touchpoints, processes or tactics. It is much deeper than that. The success of a business sits in the emotions customers carry away from their interactions with it.
“The success of your business doesn’t lie in your product, your price, or your marketing. It lies in the emotions of every single customer.”
She also warned that there is often a dangerous gap between what businesses think they are delivering and what customers are actually experiencing.
“That gap is where billions of pounds of value disappear every single year. We are spending more on customer experience than ever before. Customers are feeling it less than ever before. That should stop us dead in our tracks.
Her point was not anti-technology – quite the opposite. Her argument was that technology needs philosophy behind it.
Without that, businesses risk automating interactions without understanding what those interactions mean to the person on the other side.
One of the most useful frameworks from the keynote was her four-link chain of customer experience: interaction, emotion, memory and perception.
Most organisations, she argued, only manage the first link. They focus on the interaction itself, but not enough on how it makes the customer feel, what they remember afterwards, or what perception it leaves behind.
To make that point, Stabler drew on behavioural psychology and neuroscience, including Daniel Kahneman’s peak-end rule and Professor Anil Seth’s work on the brain as a prediction machine.
Customers do not remember experiences evenly – they remember the most emotionally intense point and how the experience ended.
That means one negative peak, one bad ending, or one moment where a customer feels unseen can carry far more weight than a dashboard might suggest.
She also connected customer experience with employee experience. A Harvard Business Review study cited in the session found that moving employees from the bottom quartile to the top quartile on employee experience metrics produced a 50% revenue increase. That statistic reinforced one of the summit’s recurring themes: customers and employees cannot be treated as separate worlds.
Stabler’s closing point was one of the most memorable of the entire event: “Customer experience isn’t a strategy you implement. It is a movement you lead.”
Moving From AI Ambition to Customer Impact
The third session, “From AI Ambition to Customer Impact,” featured Michele Booth, CX AI Lead EMEA at Zoom, and James Towner, Chief Growth Officer at ArvatoConnect. This session shifted the conversation from big-picture CX philosophy to the practical reality of AI deployment.
The session tackled a pressure many contact centre leaders will recognise immediately: everyone feels they need to “do something with AI”, and most organisations already have.
They have run pilots, launched chatbots, tested proofs of concept and experimented with automation – but many still feel that the outcome has not matched the effort.
The discussion explored what is working right now, where leaders are getting stuck, and why AI must support strategy rather than replace it. It cannot be treated as a magic layer that fixes broken processes.
This key takeaway from this session was this: If the underlying customer journey is fragmented, AI may simply speed up the fragmentation.
Voice is Still Vital, and AI Has to Earn Trust
The fourth session came from Finbarr Begley, Senior Analyst at Cavell, who presented research from surveys of 2,000 British consumers, 500 customer service agents and 1,800 IT buyers. His session, “From Today’s CX to Tomorrow’s Reality,” added a valuable data-led view of where customer experience is now and where it is heading next.
One of the clearest insights from Begley’s presentation was that voice is not going away.
For routine engagements, only around 25% of customers prefer picking up the phone – but when urgency or empathy enters the picture, that number rises to 50%.
Begley explained:
“The second that you add an element of urgency or empathy required into that discussion, suddenly that number rises to 50%.”
Over half of consumers say speaking to another human being on the phone is the fastest way to resolve their customer service issue, and around 55% also see it as the best option.
These findings matter because many businesses have spent years trying to deflect customers away from voice, but customers still see human phone support as one of the fastest and best ways to resolve issues.
Rather than treating voice as a cost centre, Begley argued that businesses should see it as a premium channel and a rich source of data.
He also addressed AI’s current limitations. Customers are clear about what they want from AI: they want it to work faster and help them resolve issues quickly. But agent experiences have been more mixed.
Begley shared that significant numbers of agents in companies with AI deployed reported that it had made their jobs harder, including increasing the complexity and volume of their tasks.
“How you deploy AI, how you train and upskill your staff, how you get data from them to improve the quality of your service is just as important as deploying them to begin with.”
Begley predicted that humans will remain central to contact centres through to 2029, especially because customers still prefer human support for emotionally important issues.
At the same time, AI will become more embedded in the machinery of contact centres, helping to prioritise urgent cases, route customers to the right agents and reduce repetitive questioning.
He concluded with this simple point: organisations simply cannot afford to deploy automation in ways that worsen the customer experience.
Seeing connected CX in action
The final session was a live demo led by Tommy Hart, CX/AI Lead at Zoom. His session, “Zoom CX Demo: From Interaction to Resolution,” showed how the ideas discussed throughout the summit can work in practice inside Zoom’s connected CX platform.
The demo focused on three main capabilities:
- Virtual Agents
- AI Expert Assist
- CX Insights
First, Hart showed how a Virtual Agent can be analysed not just on whether it is working, but why it may not be resolving certain issues.
As he put it:
“Escalations to human agents are higher than expected. At this point, the question isn’t, ‘is the virtual agent working?’ It’s more, ‘why isn’t it resolving?’”
That shift is important.
Instead of simply measuring success or failure, the system helps identify knowledge gaps. In the example Hart walked through, AI analysed successful human-agent engagements and used those transcripts to draft a new knowledge article. That article could then help the virtual agent resolve similar queries in future.
Hart summed this up neatly:
“Conversation to resolution. We trace the issue, close the knowledge gap using real agent expertise, and the virtual agent uses that guidance to resolve the next interaction.”
The second part of the demo showed AI Expert Assist supporting a live agent in real time.
Before the agent even joined the chat, AI had already prepared a concise summary, captured the customer’s details and sentiment, identified what had already happened in the self-service journey, and highlighted which troubleshooting steps had been completed.
That meant the agent did not need to ask the customer to repeat themselves. Instead, they could join the conversation with context and respond in a more personalised way.
The final part of the demo focused on CX Insights, showing how businesses can move from resolving one issue to understanding whether that issue is happening at scale. As Hart noted:
“Resolving one customer issue is important, but understanding whether that issue is happening at scale, and what it means for your business, is where real operational intelligence begins.”
His closing line tied the whole summit together: “From one customer interaction, to operational visibility, to product improvement – that’s the power of connection in Zoom CX.”
Our Final Thoughts
Zoom’s CX Summit EMEA 2026 made one thing very clear. The next era of customer experience will not be won by the organisations with the most dashboards, the most AI pilots or the most ambitious automation roadmaps. It will be won by the organisations that can connect the dots.
Across every session, the same message kept coming through.
- Customers want experiences that feel fast, natural, empathetic and joined up.
- Employees need systems that make their work easier, not more complicated.
- Leaders need insight they can actually act on. And AI needs to be deployed with intention, context and care.
The summit also made a strong case for treating CX as more than something a business can implement once and forget about.
It has to become a movement inside the organisation, shaping decisions, culture, systems, workflows and customer interactions every day.
Author: Xander Freeman
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell
Published On: 12th May 2026
Read more about - Expert Insights, Ben Neo, Event Coverage, Katie Stabler, Zoom
