Experience ’26 Day 1: Stop Chasing Scores, Start Being a Changemaker

Experience ‘26 kicked off by outlining the necessary shift from scorekeeping to changemaking, highlighting how experience leaders are trading soft metrics for AI-powered, behavior-driven results.

The first day of Experience ‘26 is complete! 

Medallia CEO Mark Bishof, CSO Sid Banerjee, and CPO Fabrice Martin opened our conference with a declaration: the “Next Era of Experience” is here. 

Their keynote laid out a new rally cry for experience leaders to step into a bigger, more impactful role — moving from scorekeepers to changemakers who bring the business together and turn insight into action. How? Unite the organization, democratize the data, and establish operating models that empower everyone.

No more vague measures of success. Just results the business can’t ignore.

In line with this vision, Medallia has been focusing on evolving Frontline-Ready AI toward Agentic AI. We’re blending proven analytics with generative AI to uncover insights you wouldn’t know to look for, while maintaining the governance and consistency that global enterprises require. 

It was a bold opening, amplified by inspiring stories from our special guest speakers from Bank of America and Accenture. Watch the Experience ‘26 opening keynote →

Our closing keynote shined a light on real changemakers from Hyatt, Shipt, Maersk, and Toyota Financial Services, who spoke candidly about how they’re turning insights into influence to move their organizations forward. Attendees left with a renewed belief in what’s possible inside their own organizations. Watch the Changemakers in Action panel →

Here are the other important themes from day one of Experience ‘26.

Some of the best growth stories worked with lean budgets and smarter strategies.

It may be unexpected, but some of the most impressive results shared on day one came from world-renowned companies with the tightest constraints.

Santander had walked into a perfect storm: core cloud migration, branch closures, cost containment mandates, and exactly zero dollars for CX improvements. So they stopped asking for tools and started demanding discipline. Instead, they focused on governance and specific behaviors — the inputs they could control.

Their internal global NPS benchmark ranking increased 15 points in three years. During branch closures, they realized only 21% of projected attrition. All because they executed a sound strategy of investing in behaviors, not systems.

Mazda took this even further. The team radically decoupled dealer incentives from survey scores. The pressure to score high was creating survey manipulation, not better service. Their internal analysis revealed that a customer who gave a 10 but left no comment spent the same as a passive customer. But a customer who gave a 10 and left a positive comment, indicating a genuine relationship, spent substantially more and returned for service more often.

So they shifted from outputs (the score) to inputs (behaviors). They emphasized Omotenashi, or Japanese hospitality, and removed the score pressure entirely. And customer service retention increased 15%.

This is what a changemaker strategy looks like: the willingness to kill the metric you’ve been optimizing for years because you found a better way to measure what actually matters.

Digital isn’t where brands listen. It’s where customers are.

The leaders who stood out today aren’t chasing customers with surveys. They’re listening where customers already are: online, in-app, and in the actual flow of their experience.

Mayo Clinic Laboratories walked through their pivot away from standard relationship surveys. Their digital-first approach captures real-time web interactions — the kind of signals that tell you what’s breaking before customers have to tell you it’s broken. This allows the teams to view actionable insights that flow across the organization, not just pile up in a dashboard.

BAC Credomatic showed what happens when you actually use those insights. BAC didn’t just track digital banking errors; they systematically eliminated friction in navigation and security verification. The logic is straightforward: reduce digital friction upstream, prevent contact center volume downstream.

This isn’t revolutionary. It’s just smart. But somehow, most companies are still treating digital as one channel among many instead of the connective tissue of the entire customer journey.

Watch Experience ‘26 Day 1 sessions →

GenAI joined the frontline, and it’s already pulling its weight.

If 2025 was the year everyone experimented with generative AI, 2026 is the year it has become a teammate that makes frontline staff faster and more confident.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas shared a number that made people sit up: 25% more work with 25% less investment, with no quality drop. How? AI summaries became the single source of truth, which killed what they called “operational bias” — the game where different departments blame each other for low scores instead of fixing the actual problem.

Case in point: Pool sentiment scores dropped. Pre-AI, that would’ve triggered weeks of finger-pointing. With AI analysis, they identified the root cause in days: there were not enough chairs. Not service failures, not staff issues — chairs. Sometimes the answer is that simple, but you need the data infrastructure to see it.

Sekisui House also demonstrated an interesting case: AI as a trust-builder in high-stakes industries. By using Smart Response to close the loop with customers, Sekisui House pushed response rates from the low 30s to nearly 90%. They emphasized that in homebuilding, responsiveness is a proxy for competence. When a builder responds quickly to feedback, customers assume they’ll be equally attentive to building the actual house.

Alyse Fuller from United Rentals also showed what AI means for small teams punching above their weight class. Operating as a team of one supporting 20 regions, Fuller used Themes with GenAI to cut regional analysis time from a full day to two hours. United Rentals managers are now closing alerts six hours faster on average using AI drafting tools. The result: more time solving problems, less time describing them.

Action over scores. Every time.

In high-stakes industries, a survey apology can’t fix a failed live event.

As Material and Encore highlighted, real impact stems from action, not just data collection. Encore moved beyond score-watching by treating CX as a managed, ongoing capability rather than a one-time project. In the events business, the experience is the product, and there are no second chances.

By anchoring insights to customer emotions and operational standards, Encore ensured that feedback fueled real-time strategy instead of sitting in a static report. This shift from passive monitoring to active enablement allowed their frontline teams to anticipate risks and pivot before issues escalated. They effectively redesigned how insights move through an organization, making data digestible and immediately useful for the whole team.

This disciplined approach led to a staggering 87% customer satisfaction rate and maintained venue retention above 90%. 

This serves as a meaningful reminder that while scores provide a pulse, it is the systemic change in behavior that actually moves the needle. True business value is won through agile execution and emotional resonance.

The real takeaway of day one? True changemakers sit on experience teams.

The leaders who stood out today aren’t keeping score. They’re changing the game, partnering across business lines to fix systemic root causes — not isolated issues. They’ve embedded themselves into the financial and operational engines of their companies. They’ve established operating models that democratize insight and drive decisive action at scale.

The proof is in the execution: operational excellence beats unlimited resources.

Day two of Experience ‘26 will prove this value to the C-suite. But day one already answered the fundamental question: can you transform CX without infinite resources?

Yes, if you’re willing to lead like a changemaker.

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