Chair Report

It’s rare I leave a conference humming The Prodigy’s ‘Fi restarter’ – in fact this may be the first time, but ‘Go be a Fi restarter’ was the rallying cry ringing in my ears (more on that later!), as I headed out from EB M’s super successful CX Marketing Summit.
I was delighted to have been invited to chair the Summit; new into my role as Global Chief Marketing Officer for lpsos Loyalty, Customer Experience, having just moved from my UK MD CX role, I was
clearly the perfect representation of the target audience; marketing and CX rolled into one! Apparently, 70% of CX leaders are female; yep, I nailed that one too. Many thanks to all of you at EBM for a great day. I truly enjoyed chairing, but, more to the point, I truly enjoyed being a member of the audience -what a fabulous bunch of straight-talking, storytelling, expert speakers you brought together for us.
At the start of the day, my co-chair, Martin Hill-Wilson of Brainfood Consulting, promised us the ‘real-life take’ on the challenges faced by CX and marketing leaders; CX Marketing Summit certainly delivered on that front. According to Julian Poulter, Gartner Research Director, we have, however, only a short time as CX leaders to get our act together and deliver on those challenges, with the average tenure of the CX leader being just 18 months. Next up was Jonathan Armstrong of law firm, Cordery. The night before the conference, I counted the number of emails I’d received that week (like you do … ) promising to de-mystify the wonders of GDPR; 29 and it was only Thursday! Thanks goodness for Jonathan who cut through the ‘fake news’ out there and got us to focus on the task at hand and the time we have left to do so. People, we have 72 days to sort our 72- hour plan – hang on, that was on 15th March; you have even less time now. Worth bearing in mind, as you prepare, is that the biggest breaches last year were paper related.