JC Quintana

I hate pointing fingers, but I tend to blame vendors, especially technology vendors.

Because if you remember back in the days where CRM came out, the idea was exactly that, customer relationship management.

What are the nuances of the relationship expectation for each customer segment?

All the way to today, you can't say the word CRM without saying technology blank.

And I think that over time that has happened with the idea of experience.

It started out with a very simple idea that whether I'm doing something one-on-one with an individual or with a company or with a brand, by experience, I mean experience.

the things that I do to get from point A to point B in a way that is functional, accessible, effective, and connected for me as an individual, right?

Yep.

But now, unfortunately, you say experience, people think methodologies, rating systems, technology for managing the customer experience or CX, and we've lost a lot of that human component and what it means to real people.

Great to see you, Lacey.

It's fantastic.

I'm looking forward to it and to the year as well.

I think 2026 is going to be great.

We don't like calling it that.

We don't like calling it assumptions, but that's really what they are.

The idea of what experience is itself, our definition of experience, I think, is broken.

And what I mean by that is that we've spent so much time, and you have to give Forrester a lot of credit for going back to this very idea of what experience means.

And if you ask any company what experience means, they'll go through, talk about touch points and customer interactions and how to make them better.

But if you ask them, how are you doing that in a way that provides feedback

real functionality, reduces effort, increases accessibility, connects emotionally, a lot of people don't realize that that really is at the very core what an engineer experience is.