18 November 2024
Reuters’ Service & Experience at Customer 2024 event was hot. I’m not just talking about the Miami weather; there were some sizzling insights around what customer experience will look like in 2025 and beyond.
Relative Insight’s team were at the event in force, with our CEO, Ben Hookway, CRO, James Cuthbertson and Senior Business Development Manager, Georgie Cameron, all joining me at the show.
We had some fascinating conversations with fellow attendees at our bright green booth, plus James took part in an engaging panel discussion on aligning CX strategies with business objectives. Here are the three trends from the event that I found most exciting.
The union of CX and operations
Picture the scene. Ops want the performance of customer-facing processes analyzed by its CX team. It delivers a brief to the CX team, which exists in its own slio. The analysis in done in this silo, possibly without the necessary context, then shifted back to operations.
Will it get the attention of the COO or anyone else who can influence organizational change? Perhaps. But in moving through layers of company bureaucracy, there’s an increasing possibility that these insights go to waste; eroded by organizational inertia.
It’s a frustrating scenario, and one that you’re probably familiar with. That’s why businesses are increasingly bringing CX teams into their operations function. While this has been an under-the-radar trend in CX, it was brought to the fore at Service & Experience at Customer 2024.
We spoke to a vast range of operations leaders who were integrating or had already absorbed customer experience teams. This shift is driven by the growing recognition that CX isn’t just about delighting customers, it’s about operational excellence.
Siloed CX teams are great at capturing customer sentiment, but in larger businesses they often struggle to directly influence end-to-end operations. By embedding CX into operations, businesses ensure that every touchpoint, such as logistics, supply chain or service delivery, is designed with the customer in mind.
“Fewer dashboards, less reporting”
James concluded his panel session at Service & Experience at Customer 2024 with four simple words: “Fewer dashboards, less reporting”.
This is his key prediction for CX in 2025. While dashboards were initially a great way for leaders to get vital business information in one place, they’re becoming less and less informative.
The problem with dashboards lies in their volume and granularity. Endless metrics and charts can overwhelm even seasoned leaders, creating noise instead of clarity. The constant monitoring of dashboards is becoming a distraction and taking up too much of leaders’ time. They want digestible insights delivered conveniently, rather than having to access and navigate multiple dashboards themselves.
The same can be said for reporting in general. Businesses are generating more data than ever before, creating the knock-on effect of more reporting than ever before. Again, this is overwhelming leaders who want enough information to take action, but not too much to create an analysis paralysis.
Leaders are therefore rethinking their approach to reporting. Increasingly they are asking their teams for fewer, more insightful reports that prioritize depth over breadth.
This shift also reflects a desire to align reporting with strategic goals rather than tactical fixes. Leaders want storytelling in their data: What’s changing? Why does it matter? How does it link to long-term priorities?
By emphasizing periodic reports, CX teams will provide simplified data, but better insights.
Primacy of the customer journey
Customer journey mapping is a massive focus in the industry right now, so it’s no surprise that the team and I spoke to a variety of attendees looking to incorporate analytics into their customer journey maps.
Why the emphasis on journeys? Just like the reasoning behind combining CX and operations, customers don’t experience businesses in silos. For example, a seamless online checkout experience means little if delivery fails.
This is the key takeaway I had from the event around journey mapping. CX teams are iteratively improving individual touchpoints along the journey to improve customer experience as a whole.
Rather than make sweeping changes to existing customer touchpoints, these changes can be as small as changing the wording and interactions with a chatbot. Increasingly CX teams are focusing on these marginal gains; improving touchpoints a little bit to create a big improvement over the full journey.
Given this trend, it’s going to be even more vital for CX teams to use analytics to granularly pinpoint areas of improvement for each key touchpoint.
Service & Experience at Customer 2024 highlights the importance of analytics
Whether it’s driving operational improvements, producing more insightful, less frequent reports or developing marginal gains within the customer journey, Service & Experience at Customer 2024 reinforced the importance of CX teams using the right analytics tools.
Without the ability to identify customer pain points efficiently and at scale, it’s impossible for CX or operations teams to make changes quickly enough to make a difference to customers.
If you want to find out how Relative Insight can help make fast, metric-backed decisions through qualitative customer data analysis, you can speak to me or another one of our experts using the link below.
