Customer experience (CX) has moved far beyond a buzzword or a set of performance metrics. Today, it is one of the most powerful drivers of loyalty, advocacy, and long-term profitability. Brands that truly understand how customers feel, not just what they do, are the ones that succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Take Amazon and Starbucks as just two examples. Amazon consistently focuses on exceeding customer expectations. This dedication to optimising customer experiences has propelled Amazon to unparalleled success, with increased customer retention and substantial revenue growth.
One-Click Ordering is just one such example. This eliminates friction at checkout by letting customers complete purchases instantly with saved payment and delivery details, reducing cart abandonment and simplifying the buying process.
Starbucks, renowned for its customer-focused approach, exemplifies how fostering customer loyalty directly impacts ROI. Through their reward program and mobile app, Starbucks has nurtured a loyal customer base. This loyalty not only drives repeat business but also encourages customers to spend more per visit.
Brands that commit to being experience-driven consistently outperform those that don’t. Studies from Forrester and Harvard Business Review highlight that those prioritising CX benefit from stronger customer retention, higher lifetime value, and improved brand advocacy over time.
This is because experience-driven brands understand that loyalty isn’t built through transactions alone. It’s created through emotional connection, how customers feel during and after each interaction. When brands focus on these moments, they unlock sustainable growth rather than short-term wins.
When you bring into consideration that customer expectations have never been higher, it brings the focus even more onto CX. As discovered by PwC, a seamless experience is no longer a “nice to have”, it’s a core expectation from brands.
The financial consequences are significant if the customer experience isn’t right. Over half of customers report have cut spending or left a brand altogether following a poor experience. On the other hand, customers who receive excellent service spend substantially more than those who experience poor interactions, reinforcing the idea that CX is not just about satisfaction, it directly affects revenue and lifetime value.
Nearly 30% of consumers remain silent after a poor experience, choosing not to complain or provide feedback at all. This silence creates blind spots, leaving brands unaware of issues that may be quietly driving customers away. It is vital to then have a method to collect real customer feedback as part of your CX programme. These feedback programmes are critical role in the value brands achieve as part of their overall customer experience programme.
Many are familiar with the concept of CX feedback programmes, and if you’re not, I’m talking about CSAT and NPS for data collection, looped into a cross-functional cycle of feedback and action which is also rolled up into trend analysis.
At FlexMR, we recommend a conversational survey interface for CX feedback programmes. A conversational flow mimics natural dialogue - which customers engage with more organically than sterile research surveys. People are more willing to continue when it feels like a conversation instead of a task. The result is better response rates, fewer drop-outs, a more accurate representation of your customer experience, which critically leads to more action.
Of course, it not only matters how you collect the feedback, where and when also matters. Encouraging feedback requires more than sending surveys by email. It means creating easy, accessible, and meaningful opportunities for customers to share their experiences, both positive and negative. It needs an approach which captures views across multiple touchpoints, in real-time.
We use a regular cadence of pop-up surveys in our CX programmes, with digital intercepts implemented at key points of the customer journey to capture the in-the-moment feedback, rather than waiting 24-48 hours (or even longer) to send a CSAT survey out post-interaction.
Data from Forrester highlights that whilst many brands work hard to improve the customer experience, they focus on the functional elements of the experience, such as effectiveness and ease and not the emotional elements of how the customer feels.
While functional elements are valuable indicators, they only tell part of the story. Numbers alone can’t explain why a customer feels the way they do, or what needs to change to improve their experience.
Effective CX feedback programmes translate insight into action. They need to understand not just on what customers report, but on the emotions and motivations that sit beneath the surface, because at the end of the day, customers aren’t an item on a spreadsheet, they’re people. And people make decisions based on feelings first, logic second.
We have carried out a number of experiments to explore the impact of AI prompts in open-ended questions. PromptAI increased word count on average by 300% and made a dramatic difference when we looked at the outputs from AI text analytics; increasing the percentage of responses with explanation and sentiment from 56% to 84% and decreasing the volume of responses unable to be categorised in code frames from 18% to just 3%. By increasing the response rate and gaining more depth, brands are better positioned to drive more action, and importantly action which will have a meaningful impact on customers.
Use PromptAI to gather more detail on customer experiences in CX feedback programmes, by automatically following up on open-ended questions. The addition of this extra prompt, increases the level of understanding of the experience, and therefore is able to drive more action.
The focus on KPIs and CRM databases within CX feedback programmes can leave businesses at risk of viewing customers as numbers and transactions and not people. This can numb decision-makers from action because they don’t empathise with customers, nor feel their pain points; they don’t fully experience the customer experience.
Everyone understands emotions. Telling decision-makers “customers feel abandoned during onboarding” creates urgency and action in a way “drop-off at step three” never will. Emotion makes CX feedback insight actionable, not just analytical. This is why as part of the CX Feedback Programmes we manage at FlexMR, we look at ways to bring those feelings and emotions to the forefront and live alongside the data points.
Historically, CX surveys have combined core quant metrics with open-ended questions to understand the why. AI prompting on these open-ends has become standard practice in recent years, to get more richness from data. But this still only takes you so far. Yes, you know what’s driven their likelihood to recommend, their satisfaction or their effort score, but you don’t know how they have felt during the interaction.
Instead of just rating a service with a score, video allows customers to show and explain their experience in their own words, offering 6x more information than open-ended text responses. By humanising customers in this way, it stops decision-makers seeing them as numbers or transactions, it counter-acts the numbness that can all too easily happen, and makes those decision-makers more compelled to act.
Starting a CX survey with an optional Video Booth question about the interaction, instantly sets you off on the path of understanding the emotions and the feelings, not just the scores.
However, you also need to go one step further and identify which functional elements of the experience are triggering those emotions. This is when combining Video Booth responses with PromptAI really starts to open eyes to what, and why customers are feeling during their interactions with your brand.
Once you know how your customers are feeling, you’re then able to decide if they are the emotions, you want them to feel, and if not, target building the right emotions. Once you start getting the right emotions, you build the emotional connection and that is when you start seeing the financial benefits such as increased retention, increased customer lifetime value etc.
There’s another advantage to capturing video as part as your CX feedback programme, and it (once again) links back to emotional connections. However, this time it’s with decision-makers and colleagues around the business.
Hearing a customer describe frustration, confusion, delight, or relief in their own tone and body language makes their experience tangible. Decision-makers don’t just know an issue exists; they feel it, it humanises the experience for them and aids their decision-making processes. It drives action to a far greater extent than simply seeing a statistic on a chart.
For this reason, within the CX Feedback Programmes we manage, we don’t just collect video footage, we collate it into easily shareable video montages which are shared around, not just the CX team, but the wider business. Doing this fosters alignment. Montages create shared context - teams see the same customer and decisions are grounded in real-world experiences. Having this shared understanding of the customer reduces siloed interpretations.
Not only this, but because video is more memorable, it is an anchor for empathy and a driver for action. Studies in communications and psychology show that people remember stories better than statistics and they retain visual and emotional information longer.
If we don’t build empathy and action-orientation into our CX programmes, decision-makers may prioritise efficiency over experience, value internal constraints over customer needs, miss emotional drivers of loyalty and churn – or simply not act in customer interests. However, when we build this emotional layer in, improvements resolve real customer pains; solutions are built that resonate emotionally; and loyalty, retention, and advocacy are driven to a far higher extent.
Customer experience feedback is no longer a support function - it is a strategic growth lever. And humanising the data cranks that lever further. Brands that succeed in the future will be those that listen, act decisively, and design experiences around human needs rather than internal processes.
By focusing on emotions, encouraging honest feedback, and turning insight into meaningful action, organisations can move beyond metrics to create experiences that drive loyalty, advocacy, and measurable business impact. In a world where customers have endless choice, experience and empathy are the differences that truly matter.