As the significance of the customer experience increasingly grows Forrester has revealed predicted trends that will help companies to avoid mistakes and get ahead.
In the report, Kerry Bodine predicts that customer experience professionals will seek to engage employees. At Proto Partners, we believe that the people in your organization can affect a customer’s view of your brand completely; this is especially true with service-based companies. Without strong service principles and training, your staff is left without any direction and the way they deliver your organisation’s service is based purely on interpretation. Therefore engaging employees in your customer experience is crucial and hopefully, more companies will catch on to this predicted trend this year.
It is also predicted that emotional insights will take centre stage and that marketers will mistake messaging for experience improvements. Without customer feedback or considering the emotional journey of the customer with your company, your customer experience will be lacking a human touch leading to a detachment from your brand. Attracting and keeping your customers is obviously important to any organization and putting them at the centre of your strategy will ultimately result in financial returns. However, improving the customer experience is not to be mistakenly achieved by short-term initiatives like “whitewashing campaigns created to cover up experience blunders” as Kerry puts it.