Businesses in every industry are encountering a new set of challenges and opportunities as they seek to forge lasting relationships with a newly emerging generation of connected consumers who have varied interests, needs and expectations.

This is precisely why we recently invited several leading Customer Experience experts, technologists and industry thinkers to our CX Innovation Day roundtable event at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, where we had an engaging dialogue about new dimensions in CX innovation.

With eWeek’s editor-in-chief Chris Preimesberger serving as moderator, the attendees included Brian Solis, a globally recognized independent analyst and anthropologist covering CX and digital disruption; CX consultant and author Annette Franz; Rip Gerber, chief marketing and innovation officer at Vlocity, Annie Weckesser, chief marketing officer at Uniphore, and Ganesh Subramanian, senior director of product marketing at Gainsight. Our Comcast executives rounded out the group, including Preston Smalley, Comcast’s vice president of product development, Mike Fine, our software architect focusing on AI and content discovery, and Kristy Schaffler, who leads Comcast’s customer experience operations in California.

During the discussion, we explored the myriad challenges posed by connected consumers – sometimes referred to as Generation C – as attendees shared real-life examples and suggested best practices for the deployment of technology and other approaches that can help drive CX improvements. The discussion ranged from the importance of making sure that people are in the right positions and equipped with cutting edge tools to manage the most relevant metrics, to the role that technology and product innovation plays in fostering the experience companies want to create for their customers.

As Brian Solis highlighted, this is a generation that is not defined by age or traditional demographics. Rather, he noted that they share interests, behaviors and outcomes in pursuit of greater convenience, personalization and more ways to save time. “Their standards are much different than the personas that we’ve developed in the past,” he said.

So, when it comes to customer experience, it follows that the emergence of this new class of customers will bring to light a different set of needs than what companies have traditionally focused on. The conversation included some lively debates about the best ways to delight today’s consumer.

You can read more about what Solis had to say here as well as listen to an one-on-one interview conducted by Jeff Frick, the host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, who also attended our CX Innovation Day event. Frick spent time with Comcast’s Mike Fine, discussing how companies can use voice and chat data to improve their products and services. You can find the full interview here, as well as an article on why voice features can make the best market-research tools.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will share several key highlights from the discussion on Twitter. We hope that these conversations showcase how companies can continually raise the bar to provide  customers with the experiences they seek. At Comcast, as we take seriously our commitment to make customer experience our best product through continuous investments in customer service, employee training, technology innovation and business process improvements.