Every year, customer experience research, advisory and training firm Temkin Group highlights one theme that it sees as being particularly important for the customer experience community. In previous years, the focus has been on Empathy, Employees, Emotion, and Purpose.
Temkin Group, which recently announced the publication of its annual list of customer experience trends, has labeled 2018 as “The Year of Humanity.”
In 2018, Temkin Group is encouraging people to focus on Humanity in three areas:
Embrace diversity
Applaud our differences and find ways to treat people as individuals.
Extend compassion
Tune into the condition of the people around us and care about their well-being
Express appreciation
Proactively look for and acknowledge the positive aspects of the world around us.
“With all of the discord and tension throughout the world, it seems like a good time for all of us to refocus on what’s most important, our collective humanity,” said Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, in a news release.
Looking ahead to 2018, Temkin Group also identified 15 customer experience trends to watch:
1. Metrics reexamination
Companies will revamp and reconfigure their underperforming CX measurement programs.
2. Customer feedback pullback
Companies will cut back on the number of customer surveys and focus their data collection on areas where they are prepared to take action.
3. Voice recognition momentum
Companies will focus much more heavily on speech recognition for insights and interfaces.
4. Brand promise alignment
Companies will undergo projects to clarify or redefine the meaning of their brand and explicitly articulate their customer promises.
5. Experience design orientation
Design-oriented projects and efforts will increase as companies try to internalize experience design capabilities.
6. Customer journey expansion
Companies will realign their metrics, analytics, experience design, and innovation around customer journeys.
7. Digital integration
Companies will take the next step to digitation by building (and analyzing) experiences that tie together digital channels with contact centers and physical locations.
8. Chatbot rationalization
The short-term hysteria for chatbots will subside, but a longer-term wave of new AI-based applications will emerge.
9. Persona popularization
Design personas and behavioral segments will become an even more mainstream tool.
10. Analytics expertise shortage
Companies will aggressively recruit limited analytics experts and invest in retraining and retooling internal employees to fill this role.
11. Preemptive problem resolution
Service organizations will apply predictive analytics to find use cases where they can proactively resolve and avoid customer issues.
12. Newly energized executives
More senior leaders will jump on the customer experience bandwagon with an unrealistic sense of what it takes to drive success.
13. Customer experience dispersion
The term “customer experience” will continue to be misused and its meaning will become increasingly diluted.
14. Emergence of “people and culture.”
There will be a dramatic jump in the number of efforts that are explicitly focused on creating customer-centric culture.
15. Empathy and emotion dialogue
In “The Year of Humanity,” we expect to see executive agendas actually contain the words “emotion” and “empathy” on them.
Read more about these customer experience trends on Temkin’s Customer Experience Matters blog. For more information about The Year of Humanity, visit YearOfHumanity.com.
