The 5th Annual Global State of Customer Experience (CX) report confirms the power of customer experience as many industries enter a switching economy.

This year’s edition of the Global State of Customer Experience Report surveyed over 200 CX practitioners from around the globe within three main categories: Customer experience practitioners, Customer experience solution providers and CX industry analysts.

Total amount of CX experience from research practitioners:

Here we examine the highlights from the report and present insights from two brands highlighted as customer experience leaders in the research.

Industry trends

Digital experience and data analytics emerge on top again similar to last year’s results. A 360-degree view of the customer, through connecting diverse data sources, is integral to using artificial intelligence (AI) to boost personalization. AI is also crucial for strengthening self-service elements – a new category for this year’s research. After being knocked from its top spot last year the annual front runner ‘customer loyalty and retention’ sits outside of the top 3 ranking.

Industry Challenges

Last year’s main challenges continue to trouble CX practitioners: calculating ROI from CX investments, data silos and managing data. This year building a customer first culture muscles-past last year’s main challenge – competing priorities. It appears difficult for businesses to fully tear away from a business first, product focused end-to-end business mindset in order to fully live and breathe a customer-first culture. Customer-centric validation techniques are crucial for educating researchers on improving products and processes.

Investment Priorities

In comparison to previous years, this year’s base has more respondents with influence over CX investments. Data, customer analytics and digital customer experience all gained prestige with CX practitioners. Analysts think predictive analytics and personalization should be higher priorities for CX professionals, but neither of these categories featured in the top 10 for CX practitioners. Employee engagement also failed to make it into the top 10 spend priorities, despite it being flagged as an area of interest earlier in the research.

Digital Experience

One of the most promising statistics is that 54% of those surveyed said they are using their dedicated design/UX team to help shape their digital experience. Design thinking has frequently been overlooked in traditional CX practices. Firms plan to use digital experience data that illustrates customer behaviours to strengthen the success of their customer vision and thereby retain clients.

Indeed, brands appear to be enthusiastic about pushing their digital experience forward, however execution is proving to have some sticking points. 73% of respondents say that they cannot create seamless joined-up experiences across different digital touchpoints. Specifically, they cannot unite data across web and mobile (34%) or web and mobile apps (39%).

Channel Integration

Results show that businesses are struggling to make the omnichannel ecosystem a reality. Minor progression has been made year-on-year according to these stats. Businesses must press-on in this journey, as omnichannel customers are thought to have a higher lifetime value than single channel customers. Industry experts provide recommendations in this section of the report.

Voice Of The Customer

By understanding the customers’ perspective on the brand, the product or service and their overall satisfaction, organisations have the chance to make changes that can positively impact performance. In this section we look at how these respondents are actually capturing, actioning and prioritizing feedback from their clients.

Case study: Disney's Approach to Experience Management

Stephen Bender of the Disney Institute at a recent industry conference provided insight into the elements that fuse together to make Disney great:

Quality: Seeing the unseen

Disney enjoys consistent business results driven by strategically focusing on business functions and opportunities that most companies fail to see the value and potential. This is a key differentiation source. They have learned to be intentional where others are unintentional.

This feeds through to minor details in their business model. For instance:

• They serve guests not customers

• And they employ cast members not staff members

Back in 1955, Walt Disney built the world’s first theme park in a culture that had very negative stereotypes about carnivals being unhygienic, guests were often greeted with the sight and smell of rubbish. To protect the customer experience its theme park provided Disney was and still is passionate about cleanliness. So much so that Disney analyzed the design flaws of garbage cans of the time – Large uncovered cans with holes that emitted smell and allowed liquid and rubbish to spill out. He designed bins that were covered, self-contained and placed a protocol to empty the containers when they were 75% full not 100% to avoid spillage. Even going so far to conduct a study to determine how far apart bins should be in the park to prevent littering.

Disney’s chain of excellence

Stephen emphasized that customer focus will give brands sustained results.

The chain:

Leadership excellence> Employee excellence> customer satisfaction> business results

The design and delivery of quality experiences and quality service is best executed by highly engaged employees, this stems from leadership excellence. This set-up gives sustained results and loyalty from cast members and guests - intent to both return and recommend.

Leadership excellence

This links to a brand’s external communications and the internal communication that align employees to the brand vision.

Brand promise (external communications):

Disney is special entertainment with heart- they create happiness by providing finest entertainment for people of all ages everywhere

This brand promise is the essential foundation which service decisions can be developed. Brands should ensure business processes are in sync with their mission statement and values.

“Exceptional service is achievable for every organisation because exceptional service is architected from systems and processes that you control.”

Common purpose

Leaders at Disney should communicate these brand values to ensure their workforce is empowered and bought in to feed productivity. This ensures that staff are aligned on the brand mission and employees feel supported and cared for by their employer. This environment retains employees and boosts the customer experience they are likely to provide.

“The extent to which you care for your people is the extent to which they will care for your customers and for each other.” Stephen mentioned the power of wow moments and referred to an instance where a team leader gave a fellow cast member a lift to their hospital appointment.

Continuous improvement and continuous feedback are vital to ensure your business is performing in a way that will increase brand loyalty and your brand is the best it can be.

CASE STUDY: JOHN LEWIS

In customer experience collaboration is great, but validation is vital

Retail often finds itself in the struggle of having to do more with less.

At the Omnichannel Exec Forum, Steve Kato-Spyrou - UX Manager, John Lewis delivered a session on the power of using service design to integrate omnichannel by stitching together online and offline.

He highlighted the importance of validating concepts using design thinking approaches. The process of 6 up-sketching in workshops was discussed – coming up with as many ideas as humanly possible, as hearing ideas from peers can spark creativity. He noted that John Lewis puts ideas generated from workshops in front of its customers to see which ones are popular. In fact, customers visit the John Lewis Customer Hub in person four times a week to inform the validation cycle followed by researchers.

We spoke to Steve to find out more:

Where should businesses be, in your opinion, in 2019, looking at omnichannel and what is the baseline that customers expect?

Steve: “Well, we heard today that there are infinite touchpoints. So as far as omnichannel: you should be everywhere your customer is. If you’re saying: ‘we need to look into mobile or we need to look into in-store’, that’s correct, you need to go where the customer is.

“As far as the baseline, I would say look at your strongest competitor - that’s the expectation. It’s a case of: ‘Amazon do X, Y and Z – so, why don’t you do it?’.

Do you think CX practitioners should look to just competitors in their industry? Or these tech giants that are coming in and changing the game for everyone?

Steve: “I’m sure every industry is scared that Amazon will come into their vertical. They started in retail, but they’ve gone everywhere and have been disruptive with their model. That model is to test, learn and do alphas. CEOs and MDs at John Lewis are now focusing on the ‘test, learn and collaborate’ approach – It’s good to hear that sort of talk from the high up level.”

Looking at the next 12 months, where you think omnichannel is heading in retail?

Steve: “Customers are utilising the stores now as experiences. They visit to do fun things and spend the whole day out, not just to simply purchase something. So that’s where we’ve got to head in the next 12 months with in-store: the experience.” Image of Experience Desk Credit https://www.johnlewispresscentre.com/image/details/103985

At CX Network we are focusing on customer signals and feedback. In your company, does that customer feedback reach the relevant business units usually?

Steve: “Now, that’s fascinating. We have a UX designer that is very closely linked to a UX researcher. The UX researcher is in a constant validation loop as they’re building a product to validate and feed back to the product team on which the UX designer sits.

“Now, if you expand that out to the business level, we’ve recently just created an insight department which houses our UX researcher, our data scientists, analysts and our market researcher – and that’s fantastic, we’re still on the journey to fully implement that. This set-up will hopefully deliver the customer feedback straight away, or make the feedback loop quicker for when the business needs it. So that’s how John Lewis is tackling it, which I think is a great principle.”

Have there been any initiatives that get customers to have discussions with this team?

Steve: “The answer is basically yes, it needs to happen, and it happens a lot. We would like it to happen more but constraints like resource and time are often a limitation

“We have a new concept we’re looking into and the UX designer and researcher went away for three months and spoke to 70 people using the jobs-to-be-done framework. They utilised that and put it into Value Proposition Canvas, which they explained to the business. They then filter and interrogate all the new propositions through the canvas which is very helpful.”

It’s very key to have that hunger to grasp for more insights, because sometimes when companies build the richness of their customer knowledge, it can do the opposite and feed complacency, which is dangerous as things are always changing.

Steve: “I’d be a professional guesser if I wasn’t just validating constantly.”

Yes, exactly.

We are also looking at cultural differences with CX. Have you spotted any CX trends that are unique to a certain country or region?

Steve: “My wife is Japanese and in Japan at the moment they do not have UX designers. That’s because their whole culture is fundamentally orientated towards a servitude concept, so everyone constantly thinks about the customer. At the moment, they don’t have a need for UX, because it’s embedded into every employee in every company.”

“Although that does lead to other things: they need to collaborate more in their organisations and they’re very siloed in their thinking, but at least everyone is thinking from a customer standpoint.”

Yes – as a lot of companies struggle to even do that!

Steve: “They’re business first, not customer first.”

So to close what’s been the biggest challenge for you looking at providing a great service or customer experience? And how are you tackling this challenge?

Steve: “For us, it’s the business silos and breaking those down. We have the knowledge in the building; it’s getting every human into the right place at the right time to disseminate that knowledge and talk to each other to come up with the product or service or experience that works.”

To read the report in full please click here.

---

Chanice Henry
Chanice Henry graduated with a BA in Journalism, before diving into the world of B2B editorial focused on property finance. She spent three years as Editor of Pharma IQ and Pharma Logistics IQ leading the direction of the portals to inspire professionals working to treat the world’s patients. Now as Editor-in- Chief of the CX Network, she continues to produce a range of premium-level content, but now for senior customer experience, service, insight, digital and marketing leaders.