The Customer Experience: Watching the Trends

Each year, the Forrester organization analyzes and reports on trends in business development. The trends are useful to the not-for-profit “business” community as well. We have extracted a few for your consideration this week. These trends relate to the customer experience and staffing needs.

Essentially, the value of your organization depends on how customer-obsessed, resilient, creative, and adaptive you are -- hard to argue with that proposition.

Forrester outlines these trends for this year… and we have added a few questions at the end of each for your consideration, and perhaps discussion around the board table (on your meeting agenda “for exploration”?).

Customer Experience.

For your client base, CX (Customer Experience) leaders will renovate not just decorate. So, who handles your customer experience, whether physicality onsite or online? Who is accountable? What are the metrics? How are they measured and reported?

Customer Experience in Digital Environments.

And customers will also seek more “digital pathways” to your services and expect better websites and chatbots. With more remote and digital environments, newer and better tools will be needed. Who within your organization drives and supports this change and these improvements? Having no staff, or limited staff, is hardly an excuse – do you have volunteers? An advisory council?

Customer Retention.

From there, CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) will reinvent themselves and their teams. More will devote dollars to loyalty and retention. What percentage of your potential customers do you attract? And retain? How do you measure their loyalty? Repeat business? Donations?

The Implications of Remote Work.

For staff, COVID-19 changes leadership and hiring practices forever. Remote work will triple. The role of HR is changing in recruitment and training models as a result. And employee wellness is an important consideration. Do your criteria for performance and productivity change as a result of more remote work? Should they?

Cybersecurity.

Remote work is driving an uptick in “insider threats”. As the cloud takes centre stage in the pandemic recovery, expect data breaches caused by insider incidents. More social collaboration among employees, and thus greater transparency in information available, means a need for security that is less distracting. But again, with more employee data comes opportunity -- and legal risk. Regulatory and legal activity related to employee workplace privacy infringements are up. Do you have policies on employee privacy? Risk management?

These trends will affect all of us of course. The only issue is whether you will you make things happen, watch them happen or wonder -- what happened?

What are your main “pain points” dealing with the customer experience?

And cybersecurity?

What advice would be most helpful to you?

Pose your questions and comments in the Facebook group Governance as Leadership. And we always assume that you are asking for a friend!

Or get in touch. We’ll address your questions and concerns in an upcoming blog post.

Forrester helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth. That means empowering you to put the customer at the center of everything you do: your leadership, strategy, and operations. Becoming a customer-obsessed organization requires change — it requires being bold. They give business and technology leaders the confidence to put bold into action, shaping and guiding how to navigate today’s unprecedented change in order to succeed.

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