Curtis on…Customer Experience Trends in 2012 and Beyond
Curtis Bingham, Executive Director and Founder of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's Customer Experience Change in Berlin, shares his thoughts on upcoming trends in customer experience.
Transcript for Curtis on…Customer Experience Trends in 2012 and Beyond
I think some of the major trends that we're going to see is obviously a much wider adoption of customer experience. Right now, there are a handful of companies that really get this notion of customer experience, and they have invested in it. Their executives are championing the cause. They have made huge strides in changing their cultures in their organization to become much more customer centric.
And yet, there are still a huge number of delegates here who are working in almost a skunkworks fashion. They're underfunded. They're understaffed. And they don't have the borrowed authority that they need in the organization. And so, they're trying to develop their own relationships and earn the authority to influence the organization.
I think that in the next couple of years, we're going to start seeing that change; where a lot more of the executives, the top management, are going to recognize that this customer experience – or customer centricity as it is, perhaps, more accurately described – is a sustainable competitive advantage.
I think what we're going to see beyond that is transparency, that the customer experience is kind of a proxy for where we really want to go, which is transparency and having a transparent collaborative customer relationship where we are partnering with our customers to develop products and services we know that they're actually going to use because they helped us design them. And we're going to be transparent in our interconnections between company and customer and vendors.