Belated Happy CX Day! On Thursday, October 15, CXPA Canada brought industry professionals together for a day of case studies, practical workshops and conversations about what makes service meaningful. I’ve been lucky to cross paths with so many remarkable people across this fascinating, research-adjacent field. Across three recent events all week, one phrase kept returning: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” It thus struck me once again how closely connected business and social impact are, and how much more opportunity there is to bring them into sync.
Chris Preston explored how CX earns a lasting seat at the boardroom table by translating its work into language executives value. His candid account of building homes at Mattamy Homes highlighted the unusually long and deeply personal customer journey that comes with buying a home. Jessica Gale and Lawrence Williams discussed retail’s evolution from transactions to relationships, including Harry Rosen’s emphasis on high-touch human service across physical and digital experiences despite the intense competition of e-tail, where a decision to grow the superpower of relying on advisor relationships to serve the greater good and drive more satisfaction and value for customers in a niche luxury market. Crystal D’Cunha of the Inside View led a workshop grounded these ambitions in the realities of leaner teams, dwindling resources, rising expectations and caring for employees alongside customers in a landscape of insights where every customer pain point was first an employee pain point! The roundtable sessions were ice-breaking and conducive to collaborative brainstorming and “questionstorming,” giving us plenty to explore together in challenges faced across diverse teams and organizations whether it came to planning the succession of institutional wealth in low-paper trail times, or the art and science of talent development, discharging unnecessary work, imbibing the Effort-Impact grid, and building more ownership goals within organizations.
The closing panel led by Natasha Renaud former CXPA President, with Trevor Clarke of Ipsos, Ian Cummings of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), and Jessica Cryer’s colleague from the Experience Advisors, all brought a particularly resonant thread into focus: good research and connected evidence deepen customer understanding. Data quality matters more than sheer volume, as does understanding the silent customer through behaviour, conversations and multiple touchpoints. In technology, silence can sometimes mean a service is simply meeting baseline expectations. Understanding what it means takes context. Frameworks and checklists might be useful but the most important insight but the size and structure of an organization particularly the industries they are in whether regulated, self-regulated or unregulated is what will determine how the frameworks apply.
Why do we care about CX and NPS at Generation1.ca? Because these approaches open up important questions about citizen experience: how people navigate institutions, encounter barriers and decide whether services deserve their trust. These questions are especially timely as I prepare to present Generation1.ca’s Immigrant Discombobulation Index next week at the Metropolis Identities Summit in Niagara Falls. The framework examines the gap between expectations and lived realities, bringing belonging, trust, recognition, confidence, agency and future orientation into our understanding of integration alongside employment, income and other established measures.
For me and my Generation1.ca members this extends our philosophies on designing better citizen experiences, at a time when over 20,000 immigrants from Canada’s 2026 intake could leave in 5 years if immigrant integration fails. That makes better representation and earlier intervention essential. A completed transaction or an accessed program or service tells us something. Understanding whether someone leaves feeling heard, respected and better able to navigate their future tells us more. More about the index here.
We had the best time reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting new ones. One of my favourite updates came from Larry Leung and Derek Bilfelf announcing that CXPA Canada is now a single chapter, focused on building partnerships with local businesses and organizations to elevate service and value to the industry communities they bind. I look forward to exploring where our work and communities can connect in this next era of this association chapter for Generation1.ca. We have had CXPA’s CEO and President Greg Melia, CAE on our Leading by Association podcast about three years ago.
