The Temkin Group recently released its annual list of customer experience trends and labeled 2017 “The Year of Purpose.” For reference, Temkin dubbed last year the Year of Emotion and 2015 the Year of Employees. They strongly feel that 2017 will require companies to focus heavily on purpose.
It’s clear CX leaders are those companies that consistently put the customer at the center of their thinking. The Temkin Group keeps a close eye on exactly how that plays out across industries in its annual trend report. We, too, see understanding and aligning the purpose of your people, processes and technologies around the customer experience as a major theme moving forward.
Here are the nine customer experience trends the Temkin Group says to watch in 2017, with links to articles we’ve written in the past about each topic:
- Elevating Purpose. Leaders will sharpen and share their organization's purpose.
- Operationalizing Emotion. Companies will increasingly measure and design for customer emotions.
- Orienting Around Customer Journeys. Companies will realign their metrics, design, and innovation around customer journeys.
- Continuing…. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile. Growth of remote digital connections will push companies to adopt a mobile first approach.
- Embracing Employee Engagement. A critical mass of leaders will begin prioritizing employee engagement.
- Federating Customer Experience. Initial change from centralized models to federated models will give way to CX capabilities being disbursed and cultivated.
- Predicting Through Behaviors. Companies will tap into rich behavioral data to anticipate customers' perceptions and actions.
- Tapping Into Speech Recognition. Insights will be extracted from contact center conversations and voice interfaces will blossom.
- Smartening Self-Service. Virtual agents and interactive guides will enable increased levels of self-service.
At Topdown, we’re particularly interested in #3 and #6 as they pertain to customer communications management (CCM). For a deeper dive on those, take a look at these past blog posts.
On orienting around customer journeys:
How to Identify Your Most Critical Customer Journeys
How to Map Your Most Critical Customer Journeys
Why Customer Journeys Need 360-Degree Integration
On federating customer experience:
Four Surprising Pitfalls in the Way of a Great Customer Experience
Secrets to CX Success, Part 3: Sharing the Investment
And if you like reading our take on these trends and more, please subscribe to our blog to be among the first to know when new posts are out.
