8 Megatrends in Customer Experience

Longtime industry analyst Bruce Temkin recently released the first report under his own shingle. The report identifies eight customer experience megatrends, predicting how companies should interact with their customers in the next three to five years, on his blog, "Customer Experience Matters."

The megatrends are as follows:

• customer insight propagation,
• unstructured data appreciation,
• customer service rejuvenation,
• loyalty intensification,
• interaction iPod-ization,
• social media assimilation,
• digital/physical integration,
• cultural renovation.

In his detailed Temkin Report, Temkin stresses customer insights, text analytics, online interactions, and loyalty metrics using data and cultural changes from 25 to 30 companies that he "trusts in the industry." Temkin's report asserts that most company decisions are made with very little customer insight. He writes in his report, "People may have some pieces of information about something that has to do with customers. But often times it's spotty and outdated."

"The cultural changes have to do with a focus on the importance of customers to the overall organization," says Temkin. "The shift away from financial metrics to more customer central metrics. What it means to have people change their behaviors toreflect that .... I have seen a lot more companies come to me and talk to me about their desire to change their culture to focus on more on customers."

Other strategies outlined by Temkin encourage blending social media with agent interaction and to use tools like Facebook, wikis, and blogs to communicate with organizations. Although Tempkin's report places considerable weight on touchscreen Apple products, Tempkin sees the smartphone playing a very prominent role in designing digital integral experiences.

"Certainly people think about smartphones as an individual separate channel. When you use a smartphone, you're also doing something else and physically somewhere else," Temkin elaborates. "Maybe you're in a movie theatre, maybe you're in a GAP, or walking around New York city. All those things represent opportunities to design experiences for the smartphone that never existed before."

Temkin alludes to previous distinctions in design, concluding that lines are now blurring between who designs for which medium. "In the past, people in stores design for the store, web designs for web, but this type of separation is going away. How can you tie the digital experience of the phone into that moment? With the smartphone, there's more context to worry about."

Bruce Temkin, of the Temkin Group, has collaborated with hundreds of companies on business strategies, operational processes, and organizational structures to maintain strong customer relationships. His blog, "Customer Experience Matters," is considered one of the most insightful blogs on customer experience.

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine.

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