While we’ve seen an amazing adaptation of customer experience programs to the purely-virtual world, we do not believe in virtualizing everything. Most high-touch, strategic relationships are best supported with the power of IRL collaboration, intimate show and tell, and personalized storytelling.

However, we do believe in designing for inclusivity and equity – and the future of customer experience requires that we consider audiences who prefer to remain virtual. Leaning into these divergent preferences means designing ways to ask the same questions, get the same inputs, parse the same stories, and reflect back the same insights to customer teams that may exist within five feet, or five time zones. To do this, the design process must work to consider both audiences in parallel and the simultaneity of their physical-digital collaboration.