Customer Experience Experts Reveal CX Trends for 2020

Customer Experience is undergoing big changes as more and more brands work toward the ultimate customer engagements. Industry experts have their vision for what the ideal Customer Experience initiative looks like and what is trending now in the CX world. Meet our group of Customer Experience experts:

• • • Jeanne Bliss
    • Martin Hill-Wilson
    • Sue Duris
    • Nate Brown
    • Shep Hyken
    • Jeannie Walters
  

  Jeanne Bliss - @JeanneBliss

    Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association. Bliss feels that “CX falls short today by focusing on the mechanics: journey mapping, touchpoints, survey work, and other tactics. Companies are doing the busy work but they’ve lost the real meaning of what CX should be.” Her book, Would You Do That to Your Mother is available now.  

  Martin Hill-Wilson - @martinhw

    Martin Hill-Wilson is a customer engagement strategy and implementation consultant and founder of Brainfood. According to Hill-Wilson, “CX is about emotion management, especially in the context of the call center. And, unfortunately, the typical top-down structure of most organizations doesn’t really support true CX.”  

  Sue Duris - @SueDuris

    Sue Duris is Director of Marketing and Customer Experience of M4 Communications. According to Duris, “CX is still in a place where it needs to justify its existence. Too few company leaders understand the value. There’s still the dynamic of a big CX program going on while it’s business as usual in the rest of the company and they don’t necessarily connect. It’s really important that CX professionals translate what they’re doing in furthering the goals of the business.”

  Nate Brown - @CustomerIsFirst

  Nate Brown is a Customer Experience industry expert, author and co-founder of CX Accelerator. Brown believes that “when an organization wants to invest in “customer experience,” they buy solutions and hire people, but what they often fail to do is to strategically integrate the investment they’re making into how it’s going to change the culture and behaviors across the entire organization. This is another reason why that employee experience needs to be an aspect that has at least part ownership by the customer experience leader.”

  Shep Hyken - @Hyken

    Shep Hyken, a customer experience expert, contends that “convenience is the key to the ultimate CX. Smart companies will learn that convenience enters the picture when there is less friction in customer touchpoints with your brand. Things like duplicate paperwork, bad technology, wait times and poorly trained employees are obvious examples of friction. There are many others and it's critical for businesses to ask how they can smooth out their engagements with customers because that's what will keep them coming back to do business with them again.”

  Jeannie Walters - @jeanniecw

    is the Chief Customer Experience Investigator™ and founder of 360Connext. Walters projects that “customers want personalization and have appreciated it when leading personalization brands have presented them with options that feel like they’re ready made for them. Technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that help make personalization possible have become much more accessible, creating even higher levels of personalization in many customer experiences.”

  Lightico - @lightico

    Lightico, a customer experience enterprise software platform, contends that most consumers still prefer to receive agent-assisted help when in need to complete a complex task or process. This last leg of the journey, aka the Last Mile, is often times long, painful and full of friction. A bad experience in the Last Mile can completely diminish the great experiences that have led to it, leaving the customer frustrated and dissatisfied. It’s only in the critical last mile of the journey that customers directly interact with the business at a point of sale or critical point of contact (sales forms, renewals, loan applications, insurance claims, debt collection, billing disputes, etc). As customers engage with brands, they formulate their opinions based on these limited direct business interactions. The future of CX will be based on customer convenience, personalization and stronger C-Level support at businesses that are serious about great customer relationships. It will be interesting to see to which, and to what extent, these new innovations will find their way into businesses next year.