Future of Customer Experience
Strengthen customer loyalty through empathy at scale
The Future of Customer Experience
In the Future of Customer Experience, organizations must provide an empathetic relationship between customers and brands built on what the customer wants and how they want to be treated through the lens of technology. Brands need to engage with customers in a contextual manner based on awareness, engagement, learning, and measurement.
We are in the "age of experiences" and leading organizations are using customer experience (CX) as the tip of the spear to retain and win new ground with the future digital-first customer. To deliver empathy at scale, organizations must develop capabilities beyond traditional aspects of surveys or feedback to be able to detect and measure the emotional dimensions of customer sentiment.
Elevating Contextualization for Hyper-Personalized Experiences
Organizations will increasingly use data and employ technologies to facilitate contextual awareness, frictionless engagement, active learning, and sentiment measurement.
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Inside the Future of Customer Experience graphic description
The inner circle contains an illustration of two faces with the text, "Customer." The next concentric layer includes the text, "DATA." Four circles are overlayed, with the following text -- "Journeys," "Experience," "Satisfaction," and "Conversations." On the outer layer, there are rounded elements with the following text -- "Frictionless Engagement," "Active Learning," "Sentiment Measurement," and "Contextual Awareness."
IDC’s Future of Customer Experience framework provides a model for understanding how relationships between customers and businesses will be built on cognitive empathy, requiring CX leaders to make strategic decisions that emphasize experiences, trust and satisfaction.
Conversations
Dialogs between customers and both human and digital agents should ensure there is a clear exchange of information, knowledge, and understanding.
Journeys
Customers want a clear pathway from interest to purchase - no matter the channel.
Experience
Brands must understand and apply context as a component of contextualized physical and digital interactions.
Satisfaction
Satisfaction is about how a customer feels about individual and cumulative experiences with the business, essentially the outcomes that result from journeys, experiences, and conversations.
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Using Technology in the Future of Customer Experience graphic description
The inner circle contains an illustration of two faces with the text, "Customer." The next concentric layer includes the text, "DATA." Four circles are overlayed, with the following text -- "Journeys," "Experience," "Satisfaction," and "Conversations." On the outer layer, there are rounded elements with the following text -- "Frictionless Engagement," "Active Learning," "Sentiment Measurement," and "Contextual Awareness."
Organizations will use data and employ technologies that facilitate contextual awareness, frictionless engagement, active learning, and sentiment measurement. Data and technology are the prisms through which engagement takes place:
Frictionless Engagement
Technologies that correspond to a meaningful journey and strive to provide a consistent and seamless engagement not only include different channels, such as websites and mobile apps, but also technologies that support an exchange of value, such as mobile commerce applications.
Active Learning
The technologies that support learning about the customer include both general and customer intelligence analytics, data aggregation, manipulation, and management, AI, location technologies, and more.
Sentiment Measurement
In response to a brand's desire to continuously measure customer satisfaction, organizations can derive a lifetime value score using technologies, such as VoC, surveys, and real-time sentiment sensing through video analysis of facial expressions.
Contextual Awareness
Technologies and data are used to deliver real-time contextual awareness about the customer at the moment of interaction. Listening to responses from every action in the customer journey is critical.