Be In The Know: Customer Experience Headlines

This week I participated in the Customer Experience Professionals' Association (CXPA) Insight Exchange with over 300 fellow Customer Experience (CX) professionals.  

Here are the headlines of what's happening now in Customer Experience:

• Companies view customer experience as an opportunity to create competitive advantage and differentiation.  "89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016," according to Gartner.
• Customer Experience initiatives and Employee Engagement initiatives are linked in the C-suite.  It takes highly engaged employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences.  CX and Employee Engagement are no longer lead in silo's or executed in silo's, especially at high performing companies.
• Let customer stories speak for themselves.  There is nothing more powerful than your customer's voice.  Don't diminish the power of your customer's voice by reducing it to data sets and trend lines.
• Use video to amplify your customer's voice.  An increasing number of companies are using video to replace or to compliment traditional surveys and advisory boards.  Videos capture hearts and minds.  And let your customers tell their own story on their terms.  
• Survey rates continue to decline.  Live interviews, focus groups, and Customer Advisory Boards are used to supplement research gaps.  Also to add context to annual relationship surveys.  And create deeper, more sustained customer engagement.
• Online communities are an under utilized source of customer insights.  While many of the companies represented have online communities, they are often silo'ed from other feedback sources (surveys, focus groups, advisory boards).  There's power in connecting community feedback with traditional research to build a 360 degree view of customer experience and perception.
• Data integration challenges abound.  Whether it's tracking names of customers who receive surveys or matching quantitative data with qualitative data, building a 360 degree view of customer perception is largely manual.?
• Your customers' onboarding experience sets the tone for future expectations.  Great onboarding experiences include personalization, warmth, thanks, affirmation, and activation.
• Culture is key.  Discover what works in your organization.  And work with it.  Use it to your advantage. And, what works at another company might not work at yours.
• Customer Experience is a high growth profession.  CXPA now has 4,000 members across 70 countries.  Of those, 300 members representing 32 countries have passed the Certified Customer Experience Professionals (CCXP) certification exam.  And, there are currently over 1,100 CX positions listed just in the US and UK alone.

What trends are you observing?  And how do you plan to address them?  Tell me more.  I'm listening...

The opinions expressed in this blog are my own views.

Karen Mangia (@karenmangia) believes that exceeding customer expectations starts with understanding why your customers are doing business with you.  She leads a global team focused on effective customer, partner, and sales engagements, analysis and implementation of new ideas. She also has a passion for building and connecting people, teams and communities around the world.