Temkin Group Publishes Its Top Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2013

WABAN, Mass., Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Temkin Group, a leading market research and consulting firm that helps organizations improve their customer experience, released its forecast of 13 customer experience trends to watch in 2013.

In a previous research report, The Future of Customer Experience, Temkin Group identified that the practice of customer experience had entered into what it calls The Era of CX Professionalism. Temkin Group estimates that there are more than 100,000 customer experience professionals in North America, and that this critical mass of workers will propel customer experience practices more widely across their organizations in 2013.

"We expect 2013 to be a very active year for customer experience," states Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group. "Many companies are evolving past the early stages of customer experience maturity and are beginning to drive organizational transformation. That's great news for their customers and for the bottom lines on those companies."

In a blog post entitled 13 Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2013, Temkin Group outlined these customer experience trends:

1.       Decline of surveys. Companies will rely less on multiple-choice questions as a source of customer feedback.

2.       Rise of text analytics. More insights will come from unstructured content like comments on surveys, calls into the contact center, social media conversations, and chat sessions with agents.

3.       "Big data" predictive insights. Customer feedback will be combined with troves of other operational and customer data to predict customer attitudes and behaviors.

4.       Anticipatory service. Service issues will be resolved before customers complain.

5.       Experience-infused product development. Customer experience requirements will get embedded throughout entire product development processes.

6.       Design-based process improvement. Quality, customer experience, and design thinking will come together in powerful organizational change efforts.

7.       Loyalty-focused contact centers. The focus on long-term loyalty versus short-term costs will result in the on-shoring of previously off-shored contact center interactions.

8.       Appreciation of employee assets. Employee engagement will become a key corporate priority.

9.       Mobile, mobile, mobile. Interactions will be designed that combine smart phones with other channels.

10.   Software as an Experience. Cloud-based software will begin a customer-centric transformation.

11.   Resurgence of values. Organizations will articulate and recommit to a core set of values.

12.   Rethinking risk-experience trade-offs. There will be more push back on and elimination of conservative legal and compliance rules that create poor customer experience.

13.   Continuing CX education. MBA programs and corporate training departments will create and teach more customer experience content.

The post "13 Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2013?" can be read on the Customer Experience Matters blog, at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com.

About Temkin Group: Temkin Group is a leading customer experience research and consulting firm with one simple goal for its clients: increase customer loyalty by becoming more customer‐centric. The company combines customer experience thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of large organizations to help senior executives accelerate their results. For more information, contact Bruce Temkin at 617-916-2075 or send an email to [email protected].

About Bruce Temkin: Bruce Temkin is widely recognized as a customer experience thought leader and is Customer Experience Transformist and Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He is also the author of a very popular blog, Customer Experience Matters® (ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com). Prior to forming Temkin Group, he was a VP at Forrester Research for 12 years. Bruce is a highly demanded speaker who consistently receives high marks for his content-rich, entertaining keynote addresses. He is also the co-founder and Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org), a global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management.

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SOURCE Temkin Group