Can you guess the future of customer experience ?

Had a great webinar conversation today with Olivia from Zoopla, Andy from Shell and Dan from Zendesk. It was facilitated by Chris from MyCustomer and the topic was the future of CX.

To tell the future of anything right now is a challenge, is it not? What with major disruptions occurring like lock downs and killer viruses. Not to mention a recession and a Brexit on the way.

We covered a lot of ground about what has just happened and what is about to happen. It also sparked a lot of thoughts further into the future. So I thought I'd share a few points on the longer term.

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The key points of this article are:

1) You can tell the future 

2) The future is much slower to arrive than you think 

3) The big global trends set the future for CX 

And you can watch today's MyCustomer webinar at https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2522607/70C5F5DB704694A6069E29BD0CCC0701

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So here goes.....

If you could only tell the future, you probably wouldn't be sat in front of this screen. You'd be betting on the right horses, starting up unicorn businesses and making a killing on the stock market. Wouldn't you?

But there is a problem. We can't tell the future - or can we?

I've tried it a few times in earnest. With the right guidance, focus, necessity and importance. When you start up a business you are taking a very large bet, so it's worth investing the time to get it to work. And it worked for me.

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In 1993 Gary Hamel and CJ Prahalad wrote a seminal book on the subject "Competing For The Future". I first came across it on an entrepreneurs' potted MBA at London Business School where Gary was a guest lecturer.

Although an essential topic for entrepreneurs making their big bet, a more in-depth course for a wider audience was aimed squarely at "you can't cost cut your way to the future".

It was fascinating to put a structure to innovation, experimentation and growth. So I actually used it.

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At the time we had a really smart team focused on a core business which was physical - technology fit outs, moving City clients, building dealing rooms. Via the latter experience we'd also started building contact centres.

My hunch was contact centres were where we should be. This would grow. We were early. Our core market was maturing and we were no longer one of a very few specialists, but it was our core revenue. So how to get there?

I came back off the course evangelising the "Future" method [There's an aside story on a first training session - it was followed by VATs wine bar, a disappearing colleague left in a hotel lobby with his room number on a note under his tie - I'll save that for another day !]

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The core idea is that you need to start and practice having a point of view about the future and then experiment, in many small and rapid ways, to see what is valid or what comes true. And you have to understand your own core competencies and decide how to apply them in that future you envisage.

Sounds easy or obvious. But you have to really focus and take the team with you on a discovery journey. And not stop.

I'll not try to precis the book - have a read yourself. Or here's the HBR introductory article.

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We developed a point of view that our competencies would be best employed as gurus and gatekeepers (experts and helping access the useful answers) in a world where all information was free and available.

Bear in mind Google or Amazon hadn't started yet and the internet only became into the business vocabulary in 1994. It's a bit like the stage we are at now with AI - it's going to change the world but it hasn't quite landed yet so it's not clear how it will be: dystopian or wonderful or anything in between.

And we developed some experiments to find out how it would work commercially. The rest as they say is history. You can read more about how I first used the method in this previous blog.

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I fell into my first and second businesses through someone else's post of view ( buildings being designed by the occupiers needs ) and morphed it to contact centres. My third business came from a view that a business's culture is at the heart of its ability to deliver radically differently as an outsourced partner. The fourth from the point of view that Amazon did something rather well for customers and that the best service really is no need for service.

All of these points of view are still true, well into the futures they forecast.

A couple of years ago I did a webinar on this topic of the telling the future. I found an article "Nostradamus 2001" looking at the future as I started my fourth and fifth businesses. Cloud based business apps as the future - who'd have thought it!

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Which brings me to my second point.

To recap, the first point is, you can tell the future if you really need to and then try to. But then don't stop doing it.

The second is a useful point of view of the future doesn't come true over night. It's much slower to materialise and go mainstream than the early experiments which show it to be valid.

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The other reason the future arrives slower than you think is that it involves people. And the basic psychology of humans doesn't change rapidly. It's just had an alright shock and jolt through 2020, but have we as humans really changed our fundamental behaviours?

The pandemic has held a light up to our strengths and failings - systemically, organisationally and individually. But I would say that it has amplified those strengths and weaknesses, it has accelerated those trends. It hasn't yet changed the fundamentals.

The upcoming recession will challenge things further. Maybe there will be cataclysmic breakthroughs in behaviour beyond switching channels or changing expectations. But if so, let's hope they amplify the better traits of a social human race and not the alternative reality some countries are being pasted with.

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Which brings me to my third point. The big trends outside CX will tell you where the trends will be in customer experience as we respond to them.

The Future Agenda (not to be confused with Marvel Comics' Future Foundation!) is a great source of wider trend information with which to inform your point of view.

Maslow's hierarchy will be challenged - thirst, famine, shelter/migration, temperature. Mid term: post western democracy, inequality, resource wars, health services, ageing population.

All of these things have to be plugged into a changing expectation of work and what it means, what is meaningful work and what talented people want to work on. And what they don't.

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So to conclude - what's my point of view of the future now? Devised from spending time thinking on it, experimenting with it, keeping eyes wide open.

The essence of my point of view is in AI and in human psychology. Develop the talents to understand and exploit those two things together and something big is going to take place. Recruit ( in the broadest sense) the most talented people in these fields and give them purposeful human challenges to solve.

I'd start by looking to learn from Asia where there are newer better economies, different forms of government, attitudes to tech are more open. Yet there is recent memory of shortages, respect for age and an exceptional importance put on education to benefit one's future.

And my question to you would be how to enjoyably apply your own competencies in that space......