Temkin Group, a leading customer experience firm, has published its annual list of customer experience trends. As a part of these publications, Temkin is calling 2016 “The Year of Emotion.”
Here are the 10 customer experience trends to watch in 2016:
1. Effort Metric Expanding. Companies will increasingly use “customer effort” as a key customer experience metric.
2. Customer Journey Designing. The rise of customer journey mapping as a tool will fuel firms to go beyond designing interactions, to designing experiences that help customers achieve what they really want to accomplish.
3. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile, Continuing. Mobile will continue to gain momentum and companies will design experience that go beyond apps and mobile websites.
4. Speech Analytics Piloting. The improvement in speech analytics will entice many companies to start pilots for extracting insights from their contact center conversations with customers.
5. Predictive Analytics Personalizing. Richer data hubs will enable companies to personalize experiences based on predictive models.
6. Metrics to Action Realigning. Voice of the customer programs will shift focus from collecting feedback to driving change across their organizations.
7. Value-as-a-Service Emerging. As consumers get comfortable with companies like Uber and AirBnB and use more iTunes and cloud-based apps, more will be pushed to break apart their offerings into bite-sized pieces.
8. Employee CX & Empathy Training. Companies will look for ways to train large groups of employees – to teach them basic CX concepts and to instill a sense of customer empathy.
9. CX Profession Maturing. The practice of customer experience has come a long way over the last several years. Nothing illustrates this better than the Customer Experience Professionals Association’s (CXPA.org). The growing number of CX professionals will become more focused on helping their organizations achieve business and brand objectives, changing their role from experts of tools to collaborators of change.
10. Emotion Arising. Our research shows that emotion is the component of customer experience that has the largest impact on loyalty, but it is also the area where companies are least adept and often ignore. Companies will recognize this opportunity and dramatically increase their focus on emotion in 2016.
“We continually scan leading-edge practices and new technologies to understand where the world of customer experience is heading,” states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group. “2016 will be an active and exciting year for customer experience, especially as companies begin to tap into the power of emotions.”
Further insights into these customer experience trends can be found on the Customer Experience Matters® blog, at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com
About the Author
Bruce Temkin is widely viewed as a leading expert in customer experience, leadership, and business transformation. Many of the world’s largest brands rely on the Temkin Group’s insights and advice to steer their transformational journeys. Temkin Group combines customer experience thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of organizations to help accelerate results.
