Ilenia Vidili

It was an honour to take the stage at AutoRek in Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Speaking to a room full of passionate, curious people about customer centricity, what it really means, why it matters, and how to make it real, was one of those experiences that reminds me why I love this work.

A huge thank you to the AutoRek team, and in particular to Chris Livesey and Sarah Brattesani for their warmth and openness.

And a special thank you to Dominic (DE-E) Eldred-Earl and Paula Nieuwoudt at London Speaker Bureau for making this happen..

🙏🏼

Every time CX leaders tell me “We’ve deployed a new AI tool” I get goosebumps.

- Because it is rarely just one.
- Each one supposedly integrated.
- Each one from a different vendor.
- None of them actually talking to each other properly.

The main problem is not customer service agents but the dozens of tools they have to use to answer a single customer query. Sometimes 10, sometimes 20...

▶︎ This is detrimental to customer experience!

Here is what’s happening:

✘ Agents are managing technology instead of managing the conversation.

✘ Agents spend more time updating records than actually helping customers.

✘ Every handover means customers repeating because the context never made it across the tools.

✘ Two agents, same query, two completely different experiences depending on who knows the tools best.

✘ When information travels manually across ten tools, something always gets lost, delayed, or entered incorrectly.

Customers do not see your tech stack but feel every single gap in that chain and then we wonder why they are not happy.

Here is what should be happening:

✔︎ The agent picks up already knowing the customer's history, what was promised, and what is still unresolved.

✔︎ Every word is captured automatically as the conversation happens, so the agent listens fully instead of writing frantically.

✔︎ When a customer raises an issue, the right information surfaces instantly, so the agent never has to put anyone on hold.

✔︎ The moment the call ends, a full summary is generated, accurate and complete, without the agent reconstructing anything from memory.

✔︎ The summary goes straight into the record, so the next agent already knows exactly what happened.

We cannot keep calling ourselves customer-centric while our customer support agents need 20 tools to answer one call.

I have been paying attention to what Aircall is doing with AI Assist Pro: ONE tool doing the work that most teams currently split across FIVE..

How many tools is your team currently using?

▶︎ For more info visit https://bit.ly/4fjlJjU

Last week I was in London at David Avrin’s Speaking Business Retreat.
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A room full of professional speakers from across Europe, all working on the same thing: turning a skill into a sustainable, scalable business.
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Most speakers focus on getting better at speaking. Few focus on building a speaking business.
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The craft matters. But so does positioning, pricing, pipeline, and strategy.
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You can be the best speaker in the room and still leave money on the table, or worse, leave opportunities to people who are simply better at running their business.
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Wonderful to meet everyone in person 🤩
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Cambridge (UK) is my second home. I studied there. I started my career there. Some of the most formative chapters of my life were written on those streets.

Going back is always strange in the best way.

The city looks exactly the same, the river, the colleges. The light in the afternoon that hits the stone buildings in a way you don’t find anywhere else.

What is different is me.

I walked past places that used to feel enormous, institutions, offices, buildings that once carried a weight I hadn’t earned the right to carry lightly yet.

And they felt smaller this time, because I have grown into them.

That is what going back to a place that shaped you does.

This city gave me a lot. A degree, a corporate career, and some of my closest friends.

But I think what it gave me most was the beginning of a standard I have never been willing to lower.

Cambridge has a culture of rigour that gets into you quietly. You stop seeing excellence as exceptional and start seeing it as the only acceptable direction. Once you have been in rooms where people operate at that level, you cannot un-see it.

After 9 years in Cambridge, I left with that, and I haven’t put it down since.

Today my business turns 6. I started it from scratch with €100 in my pocket. That money paid for a domain and a hosting service for my website.

From there I wore every hat you can imagine: learning how to sell, figuring out the legal stuff, building the website, structuring the business model, reaching out to potential clients.

The road has been very bumpy. Some days are good. Some days aren’t. But regardless of the emotional rollercoaster, I never gave up.

Even when people told me I had set myself a very challenging objective and that another job might have been easier.

Maybe. But here I am.

Difficult is not the same as impossible. And the advice to take the easier path usually comes from people who never took the harder one.

Today I consult, train and professionally speak for some of the most successful organisations in the world. And I can’t be more proud and grateful for it.

Six years in and there is still so much to learn, to do, and new things on the horizon.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this.

❤️

I met Trine Grönlund two weeks ago in Sweden, and she’s stayed with me ever since.

We were presenting at the same event. She’s the kind of moderator who makes everyone around her better: thoughtful, present, genuinely interested.

She’s not only a great moderator but also a fantastic impromptu speaker..

But what really got me was her warmth, kindness, and positive energy..

🔸Trine launched this wonderful book recently.. FLEX is about learning to work with your brain’s natural design instead of fighting against it.

🔹In her book she shares practical wisdom for anyone who wants to be more effective without burning out.

Trine, thank you for the gift, for your time, your energy and your generous heart.

You made a real impact on me. I hope we meet again soon.

If you haven’t experienced her work yet, you should. She’s the real deal. Brilliant, warm, and genuinely wonderful.

🇸🇪🩷

Minutes before stepping up on stage. Always smiling 💪🏼🌙☺️

The Swatch x Audemars Piguet Royal Pop was a total failure. Everything around it reveals exactly how brands lose control over their own customer experience.
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➖ The promise: a playful collaboration for accessible luxury. A $400 wrist watch that celebrates the Royal Oak through a Swatch lens.

➖ The ex*****on: store closures, police callouts, safety warnings asking customers not to rush to stores, camping outside locations, fights over a pocket watch.

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Let’s break what actually went wrong:
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🔻 The gap between what people thought they were waiting for and what they actually got created immediate disappointment and confusion. (For weeks AI-generated images flooded social media showing a wrist watch but they launched a pocket watch)

🔻No staggered access system, no pre-order infrastructure, no digital queuing. Just first-come-first-served chaos designed to incentivise exactly the kind of frenzy that followed.

🔻Camping outside stores began five days before launch. This reveals no staggered access system, no pre-order infrastructure, no digital queuing—just a classic first-come-first-served nightmare that incentivizes chaos.

🔻They engineered scarcity and hype as marketing tools, then discovered they’d created a dynamic that completely escaped their operational ability to manage.
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Two brands that created massive awareness and demand while simultaneously destroying the actual customer experience for obtaining the product.

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I have two possible causes for this chaos:
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1. They genuinely didn’t anticipate this level of demand (a forecasting failure)

2. They did know but chose to proceed anyway without adequate infrastructure because the “queue culture” is a strong marketing tool (worse)
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This wasn’t a product launch. It was a cautionary tale about what happens when brands prioritise the story they want to tell over the experience they’re actually delivering.

There is a difference between mastering how to apologise to customers and mastering what earns forgiveness. Most companies only know one of them.

Forgiveness is not given because you said sorry. It is given because the customer concluded, from your actions, that the failure was as unacceptable to you as it was to them.

When something goes wrong, customers are asking two questions, usually without being able to name them:

1. Did you mean to treat me this way?

2. And do you actually care that it happened?

Your answer, in actions not words, is what determines whether they come back.

What earns forgiveness:

→ Owning it completely, without deflecting to policy or process 
→ Giving them a clear resolution and a timeline
→ Not making them fight for what is fair 
→ Fixing it faster than they expected

What never earns forgiveness:

✕ Compensation calibrated to be just enough to close the ticket 
✕ A scripted apology followed by the same broken experience 
✕ A recovery that requires the customer to do the work 
✕ Blaming the system, the team, or the volume 
✕ Failing them twice

That last point is the one companies most underestimate:

Research shows that 96% of cases of online retaliation follow a “double deviation”: the original failure, plus a failed recovery attempt. Customers will forgive a mistake but they rarely forgive being failed again..

That is the question worth asking internally, before the next thing goes wrong:

▶︎ If our customers were watching how we respond to failures, what would they conclude about how we value them?

What happens when your customers become your competitors?

SaaS executives are increasingly worried by the fact that their B2B customers believe they can build their own software in-house.

Executives getting anxious about AI is not wrong.

Their customers might not be able to successfully build everything in-house, but the belief itself is enough to rewire their buying behaviour completely.

And this matters more than we think:

➖ They interrogate ROI.

➖ They stop auto-renewing.

➖ They ask harder questions at renewal.

➖ They shorten contracts from 3 years to 1.

➖ The multi-year revenue predictability evaporates.

➖ The switching costs that powered SaaS valuations for two decades disappear.

This isn’t a product problem but a paradigm problem.

And most SaaS companies are still trying to solve it with better features.

But nope, it’s not going to work..

▶︎ ▶︎ This is what I am going to talk about in my next keynote

What’s your view on this?
How can they solve this issue?

Stay tuned 💪🏼