Today, customers expect personalized service, the ability to customize products to serve their unique needs, and immediate gratification. Essentially, customers expect the company to know them, recognize them, and anticipate their current and future needs.
These customer expectations are having a significant impact on customer experience practitioners. Here are a few paradigm shifts that customer experience professionals need to embrace:
- From VoC (Voice of Customer) to Customer Intelligence. Customer Experience professionals need to adopt a more holistic view of the customer by leveraging all of the information available.
- From customer sentiment to customer engagement. Customer experience professionals focus on metrics that measure sentiment (e.g., Net Promoter, Customer Satisfaction, etc.). While customer sentiment will always be important, other behavioral metrics, such as customer involvement (e.g., do customer attend your events, do they read your newsletters, have they shared a case study, etc.), product usage (e.g., how deep and broad are product purchases and usage), and competitive insight (e.g., share of wallet) will need to be combined with customer sentiment to create a customer engagement metric.
- From descriptive analytics to predictive analytics. Business leaders want a reliable indicator of future performance. Customer experience professionals can no longer rely on describing the past, they must predict future behaviors and leverage those insights to drive customer-focused behaviors.
- From data delivery to enterprise accessibility. It's no longer about delivering data, it's about embedding insights into the systems and processes that people use to make customer-focused decisions.
The world is changing rapidly and the customer is in the drivers seat. Customer experience professionals are in the ideal position to help the organization navigate the changes, but to be successful they must embrace these changes.