15 Customer Experience Trends to Consider When Recruiting and Hiring

Customer experience drives or derails business success. Therefore, recruiting and hiring with attention to customer experience should be a priority for employers.

Temkin Group, a customer experience research, advisory, and training firm, has identified an overarching theme to interaction in 2018, and has dubbed this “The Year of Humanity.”

Focus on People

The firm encourages business to focus on humanity in three areas:

• Embrace diversity. Applaud our differences and find ways to treat people as individuals.
• Extend compassion. Tune in to the condition of the people around us and care about their well-being.
• Express appreciation. Proactively look for and acknowledge the positive aspects of the world around us.

“With all of the discord and tension throughout the world, it seems like a good time for all of us to refocus on what’s most important, our collective humanity,” says Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group.

Focus on Customer Experience

The 15 customer experience trends to watch in 2018, according to Temkin Group, are:

1. Metrics Reexamination. Companies will revamp and reconfigure their underperforming customer experience measurement programs.
2. Customer Feedback Pullback. Companies will cut back on the number of customer surveys and focus their data collection on areas where they are prepared to take action.
3. Voice Recognition Momentum. Companies will focus much more heavily on speech recognition for insights and interfaces.
4. Brand Promise Alignment. Companies will undergo projects to clarify or redefine the meaning of their brand and explicitly articulate their customer promises.
5. Experience Design Orientation. Design-oriented projects and efforts will increase as companies try to internalize experience design capabilities.
6. Customer Journey Expansion. Companies will realign their metrics, analytics, experience design, and innovation around customer journeys.
7. Digital Integration. Companies will take the next step to digitization by building (and analyzing) experiences that tie together digital channels with contact centers and physical locations.
8. Chatbot Rationalization. The short-term hysteria for chatbots will subside, but a longer-term wave of new AI-based applications will emerge.
9. Persona Popularization. Design personas and behavioral segments will become an even more mainstream tool.
10. Analytics Expertise Shortage. Companies will aggressively recruit limited analytics experts and invest in retraining and retooling internal employees to fill this role.
11. Preemptive Problem Resolution. Service organizations will apply predictive analytics to find use cases where they can proactively resolve and avoid customer issues.
12. Newly Energized Executives. More senior leaders will jump on the customer experience bandwagon with an unrealistic sense of what it takes to drive success.
13. Customer Experience Dispersion. The term “customer experience” will continue to be misused and its meaning will become increasingly diluted.
14. Emergence of “People and Culture.” There will be a dramatic jump in the number of efforts that are explicitly focused on creating customer-centric culture.
15. Empathy & Emotion Dialogue. In “The Year of Humanity,” Temkin Group expects to see executive agendas actually contain the words “emotion” and “empathy.”