5 Ways to Actually Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy

What does it take to improve your customer experience strategy? Going beyond surveys, leveraging omnichannel insights, using conversational intelligence, empowering the frontline, and taking action on insights to drive business outcomes.

Investing in efforts to improve your customer experience strategy is not only something all companies can benefit from, it’s something all businesses need to add to the top of their priorities list for 2026. 

Perché?

To put it bluntly, brands are confident (overly confident) that they’re delivering better-than-expected experiences, but ONLY 17% of consumers say their customer experience has improved over the past year. That’s according to our new study: The 2026 State of Customer Experience Report, which is based on insights from 552 CX practitioners, 1,522 consumers, and benchmarks from over 600 anonymized enterprise CX programs.

This matters because customer loyalty is more fragile than ever. Less than one in four consumers (22%) say they’re “very loyal” to a brand, a rate that dropped three points in just one year, according to the same study.

Companies that are managing to hold onto their loyal customers are doing things differently. They’ve ditched the old (ineffective) ways of doing CX, in favor of the modern CX playbook. They’re using the following five customer experience strategies that actually work.

What It Takes to Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy

Go Beyond Surveys

Our study found that customer feedback surveys are still the #1 source of CX insights, even as survey participation is declining, with response having dropped 11% since Q1 2024.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most CX teams (78%) plan to use a new customer experience metric or approach to measure CX in 2026.

This aligns with previous Medallia research published in our Conversational Intelligence Report that found that 59% of customer communications happen outside of feedback surveys and that most CX practitioners (75%) say surveys aren’t enough to get the complete picture of the customer experience. 

If you’re ready to improve your customer experience strategy by expanding to include new metrics and approaches, we’ve got a guide that will help you evolve when good survey response rates are getting harder to come by. 

Gather Omnichannel Insights

Tapping a variety of data sources from across the omnichannel customer experience, from digital experience and social media touchpoints to phone calls and in-person interactions, is a strategic move that’s giving high-growth teams a considerable advantage.

Companies on the earnings fast track are 2x as likely as those with flat or declining revenues to prioritize using more CX signals and data sources, according to our 2026 study.

The proof is in the ROI: Teams using five or fewer data sources are less likely to be able to show the return on investment of their CX strategies compared to teams using 10 or more sources.

Companies that are still sampling recorded customer service calls to see what’s working and what’s not—or aren’t even listening to these conversations at all—are paying a price. We’ve crunched the numbers in our guide: The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Your Customer Conversations, which breaks down all the ways brands can both save and uncover new revenue by adding customer conversations to their omnichannel insights mix. 

Use Conversational Intelligence to Accelerate Your CX Program’s Maturity Level and Success

Powered by AI, conversational intelligence (CI) helps companies turn unstructured data from conversations between customers and organizations across channels like voice, chat, email, and messaging into insights they can use to improve the customer experience. 

Conversational intelligence is a powerful engine that enables brands to take what they know about their customers to deliver more effective, personalized upselling and cross-selling in the moment. It can also instantly analyze the sentiment and intent of these customer interactions to coach agents in the moment, analyze conversations in the aggregate to instantly get to the root-cause of issues, and improve the overall quality of customer service interactions.

Our 2026 State of CX report finds that teams that use conversational intelligence data are 63% more likely to say they’re exceeding their goals than teams that do not, but despite this massive advantage, conversational data remains vastly underutilized, with only 30% of teams leveraging it frequently.

Similarly, our 2025 Conversational Intelligence Report found that CX leaders are 6x more likely to use CI in a meaningful way vs. laggards and that investing in CI helps brands improve first-call resolution (FCR), upsell rates, revenue per customer, NPS®, overall satisfaction (OSAT), cost savings, compliance risks, and churn, but only almost half of CX teams aren’t using it at all.

As part of our 2025 CI study, we found that most CX practitioners (64%) plan to increase their use of CI, with fast-growing brands being even more likely to say so (73%).

Curious about giving conversational intelligence a try? Use our Conversational Intelligence ROI Calculator to see how much revenue you could recover by acting on the conversations you already have. 

Empower the frontline with AI

While 36% of CX teams report their company’s use of AI-based data analytics is advanced, a smaller share (29%) say they’re using AI for internal employees, according to our 2026 State of CX report. 

Companies are aware this needs to change, with the majority (83%) saying empowering the frontlines is a key part of achieving their goals this year and a similar amount (85%) saying they feel confident that equipping their employees with AI will help them serve their customers better.

This investment appears to be a differentiator between companies with leading CX programs and those at the bottom of the CX maturity curve. Leaders are more likely to feel confident about their plans to integrate AI into workflows vs. laggards. 

Want to join the CX teams at the head of the pack? The world’s leading brands are already using our Frontline-Ready AI capabilities to give employees access to AI that’s specifically designed for their needs and skillsets (no prompting expertise required) to help their customer-facing teams act faster, solve problems smarter, and deliver results in the moment.

Don’t Chase Scores—Take Action on Insights to Drive Business Outcomes

The most successful CX teams aren’t stopping at measuring metrics like NPS®. They’re unlocking the full potential of customer experience to deliver meaningful business outcomes—whether that’s to empower their organizations to make more money, save more money, or lower their risk.

This was a central theme at Experience ‘26, where CX leaders shared the ways their teams are translating CX measurements and strategies into quantifiable financial impact and going from being perceived as cost centers to earning recognition for being revenue generators. 

The Real Cost of Not Doing the Work to Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy

Inaction comes at a steep price. It leads to stagnation, stalled progress, missed revenue opportunities, and customer turnover. 

And it’s not just theoretical. This is what’s currently happening. 

According to our 2026 State of CX report, 30% of consumers say they experienced an issue during their most recent interaction with a company. When that happens, the likelihood of customers considering switching brands more than doubles. That’s something no business can afford to ignore. 

For more insights into what CX leaders are doing to prove value and earn priority with their C-suite leaders, check out the complete 2026 State of Customer Experience Report.