Customer Intelligence Summit 2023: Key Takeaways | Chattermill Blog

Customer Intelligence Summit 2023: Key Takeaways

By

Arron Westbrook

Last Updated:

June 25, 2025

Reading time:

7

minutes

Over 800 people attendees virtually and in person.

Critical CX insights from the leaders behind Amazon, Wise, and H&M.

Topics addressing the biggest talking points in CX right now.

Chattermill’s Customer Intelligence Summit was well and truly the CX event of 2023.

Luckily, I got to be there for the whole day. So, if you missed out on attending, you’re not at a loss. Below are some of the key takeaways from the day.

Let’s begin with the day’s first session.

The Way Most Companies Listen to their Customers is Broken

Topic: The Future of CX: Moving Towards a More Unified, Intelligent Approach

Speakers: Mikhail Dubov , CEO & Co-founder, Chattermill; Dmitry Isupov, Chief Strategy and Insights Officer & Co-founder, Chattermill

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: CX budgets and CX teams are under a lot of pressure.

Inflation, uncertainty about the future, a lot of us now have to deliver more with less.

There’s also now a sharp split in the market. Some companies are doubling down on CX, while others are being more careful with their investment.

At the same time, it’s getting harder to prove the value of CX. Customers are increasingly retreating from buying, putting a lot more pressure on CLTV, retention and revenue metrics. This makes it increasingly difficult to track the ROI of CX.

Why are we in this situation?

Most of us are approaching CX in the wrong way. While we may have a lot of ways to listen to and analyse our customers, it’s evident for a lot of us that customer feedback data is being siloed across different tools. There’s no centralised and unified view of the customer.

CX has also gotten much harder.

Over two-thirds of customers abandon or ignore traditional surveys.

Simultaneously, they’ve never been more eager to share their opinion. Customer feedback lives across 20 different channels, often more. Despite this wealth of customer interactions, most of us struggle to get access to real insights.

Indeed, only 13% of CX leaders say that they can take action on CX data in real-time.

The solution, according to Mikhail and Dmitry? Unified Customer Intelligence.

How Amazon Proves The Value of CX to the C-suite

Topic: Keynote Presentation: How to Prove the Value of CX

Speakers: Amanda Whiteside , Head of WW Customer Optimisation & Enablement, Amazon

Proving the value of CX to the C-suite is one of the most important, but also one of the most difficult topics that many of us need to address as CX professionals.

We’re all under pressure to tie our efforts back to business impact. But though we know what we need to do to gain more budget, influence, and the tools we need to build a truly customer-centric CX program, doing so can prove tricky.

That’s why it was incredible that one of the most influential CX leaders at Amazon, Amanda Whiteside, shared her secrets on what we could potentially do to solve that challenge.

However, I thought I’d pull out a few key quotes that I thought especially interesting on this topic, quotes that I’m sure will chime with you, too:

“We’re all intentionally trying to solve the same problem, and none of us has truly solved it yet. We’re all in the trenches really fighting for the customer, and that’s what brings us together as a community.”

“Analytics is key. You have to be able to pull the data using tools like Chattermill. Being able to do this is key to demonstrate your point, and bring value to the discussion.” ‍

‍ “In Amazon, one thing we’re really good at is mechanisms. Essentially what a mechanism is is bringing things forward. We’ll write a one-pager to senior stakeholders that outlines a problem statement. Every month we have a regular recurring meeting to check in on the performance and progress. Whatever that statement is, it enables us to hold each other accountable.”

Customer Feedback Has Helped Wise Become One of the Fastest-Growing Companies in the World

Topic: How Wise Uses Customer Feedback to Drive Product Success

Speakers: Nilan Peiris , Chief Product Officer, Wise

Though most of us work in CX, customer feedback can also prove to be massively impactful for product teams, and the wider business, too.

Wise, as we know, is one of the industry’s, and CX’s biggest success stories. Today, they’re moving £10bn every month, which is about 4% of the world’s money. And they’re still growing around 50% every year. For a brand that was only founded in 2010, that’s hugely impressive.

What’s more awe-inspiring is they’ve built much of this growth on being customer-centric from the get-go.

Here’s what Nilan had to say about their approach:

“Our north-star metric at Wise is NPS. It’s been this way for a very, very long time, since more or less the beginning. And there’s a reason for that. Last quarter we onboarded a million new customers to Wise. 700,000 of them found about Wise from a friend. That’s not by accident. We see a very strong correlation between improving NPS and improving word-of-mouth. And that gives us the confidence that investing in things that improve NPS, will positively impact growth.”

Pretty revolutionary, even for a brand known for its customer-centricity.

Not to blow our own horn. But there’s one tool they use to help power their approach: Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence platform. And it’s not just used by product teams. As Nilan said during the session:

“Chattermill helps us everywhere. It helps us with the feedback loop with customers. It helps us figure out what to build next. And it helps us operationally understand what our biggest challenges are.”

Etsy Is The Most Customer-Centric Retail Marketplace

Topic: CX Retail Trends: What Do Customers Care About Most?
Speakers: Teri Baines , Senior Product Manager, Chattermill; Tom Whitney , VP Solutions Consulting, Chattermill

How do two-sided marketplaces optimise the experience for both customers and sellers? It’s one of the most important challenges for CX leaders working for these brands to achieve.

Here are a few key points from the notes I took on the day:

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the day for me, however, was that Etsy is performing best among the five brands analysed.

Customers love the quality of products, and convenience in ordering, and actively say they prefer Etsy to its direct competitors.

My biggest takeaway of the day for CX professionals working in the retail marketplace space? Follow the path that Etsy has taken. According to this analysis, they’re the most customer-centric brand in their space.

Customer Retention Matters More Than Ever

Topic: CX Leaders Roundtable: How to Drive Customer Retention and Protect Your CX Budget

Speakers: Ross Macfarlane , Product Owner, Customer Feedback, H&M; Natasha Wear , Director Customer Experience, Zopa; Carli Glines , Head of Product - Customer Experience, Cazoo

What does customer retention mean to your organisation?

One thing’s for certain, in today’s economy, it really matters – especially for brands in the retail, eCommerce and finance industries.

As Natasha Wear stated towards the start of the CX Leaders Roundtable on retention:

“Our ambition is to be the UK’s best digital bank - supported by two pillars to be the most profitable bank and to have the happiest customers. Retention underpins both of those two pillars. Acquiring new customers is hard and expensive. So it’s important to keep customers in the ecosystem.”

H&M’s Ross Macfarlane added the fashion retailer perspective:

“It’s very easy for customers to switch between brands. We tried to model our growth targets for the next ten years and realised we wouldn't hit them. Our top 10% of loyal customers attributed 50% of our total revenue. That was a big wake-up call. We had to switch from a transaction-based mindset to a growth-based mindset.”

How about proving the value of CX?

“Move CX from nice to have, to a need to have. The benefit of CX is that it allows companies to form a 360-degree view of the customers.”

Needless to say, we couldn’t agree more with that statement.

Organisations Aren’t as Customer-Focused As They Should Be

Topic: Women of CX: Why We Need More CX in The C-Suite

Speakers: Paula Bobbett , Chief Digital Office, Boots; Rhea Fox , Digital Director, Paperchase; Jade Roberts , Head of CX, Monica Vinader

Former Digital Director of Paperchase, Rhea Fox, Chief Digital Officer at Boots, Paula Bobbett, and Head of CX at Monica Vinader, Jade Roberts, joined Chandni Trehan, VP  Marketing at Chattermill for a discussion on one of our industry’s million-dollar questions: why aren’t there more CX leaders in the C-suite?

So, what did they have to say?

Boot’s Paula Bobbett hits the nail on the head. In short, “Organisations are not as customer-focused as they should be.”

Rhea Fox added to this, saying that: “some of it is about scale and complexity \[of the organisation\]. There also needs to be a realisation at the highest level that CX is a big factor in why a business is or isn't succeeding. There needs to be a deep-seated recognition at the C-level that customer experience impacts the bottom line.”

How do we convince businesses to take CX more seriously?

Monica Vinader’s Jade Roberts:

“That’s the ultimate question. But to be great at CX, you need to be a fantastic storyteller, and you need to have buy-in. Don’t be afraid to advocate for it.”

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