Influencers Share CX & NPS® Trends for 2020

Each year new data comes out stressing the importance of customer experience and the Net Promoter Score®. Research advisory firms like Forrester and Gartner regularly publish reports highlighting that some of world's most renowned brands have CX & NPS as their top business priority. 

However, the plethora of CX & NPS talk can sometimes be hard to know where to focus your business initiatives first for meaningful results. That is why CustomerGauge decided to invite some of world's most renowned business experts to share their predictions on the trends that will change the future of CX & NPS.

Here are our favourite 5 answers. 

1. Shep Hyken - Customer Service Expert, Keynote Speaker & New York Times Best Selling Author – Shepard Presentations, LLC 

Here are several “predictions” to consider as we move into 2020.

When it comes to customer service and CX, customers are smarter than ever before – and their expectations are higher. And, this will continue. More and more companies are promising a great CX. And, some of them deliver. They are the ones that set the bar high for everyone else. When the customer is told the experience will be great, and it is, they expect it to be great all the time—with everyone they do business with. Therefore, a company is no longer compared to another company in the same industry. They are compared to whoever gave the customer the best experience.

The end result of customer service or CX is the same. We want our customers to be happy enough that they will not only return, but hopefully share positive messages about us with their friends and colleagues. What has changed is how we get there. There are multiple ways for us to interact with our customers; phone, email, social channels, etc. The problem comes when there is an inconsistent experience between channels. Most businesses refer to multiple channels. To the customer, it’s just one channel: a connection to the business. We must understand the expectation and deliver on it.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a hot topic. It will improve to a point, but will not completely replace a human. We can expect chat bots to take care of the lower level needs, like a change of address, but the higher level will put the customer in the “safe hands” of a knowledgeable support rep. In the near future, we will see AI giving support to the rep who is helping a customer. That is when, as Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, says, “AI becomes IA, the Intelligent Assistant.”

P.S. Shep Hyken is also author of a number of customer service bestselling books like “The Amazement Revolution”, “The Cult of the Customer,” “The Loyal Customer,” and “Amaze Every Customer Every Time.”

Shep Hyken also hosted CustomerGauge’s CEO Adam Dorrell in his Amazing Business Radio, discussing how to monetize a Net Promoter System.

2. Adam Dorrell - CEO & Co-founder of CustomerGauge Group BV, NPS® practitioner and CX thought leader

After these last few charmed years, CX practitioners will come under pressure to justify the value of their CX programs. The CFOs of big corporations will begin to question if large investments in CX (which produced mediocre results) are worth continuing. As a result, those CX professionals that can’t prove that their efforts grew the overall business will struggle to justify their existence.

At the same time, major telecommunication, energy suppliers and finance companies won’t maximize their CX efforts if they continue to encourage “customer promiscuity”. They still spend the majority of marketing and sales spend on offers to encourage switching to win customer acquisition. So, until retention becomes as important as acquisition, CX will be an “also ran”. CFOs take note: growth can come from existing customers as well as new.

Looking ahead, I believe CX is destined to become just a mundane part of the basic fabric of companies. I remember the first CRM boom back in the 90’s. Companies used to have a “Department of CRM”.  Where are they now? Absorbed into sales! CX pros: meet your new boss – Chief Revenue Officer.

3. Matthew Dixon - Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group & Best-selling author

More companies will be digging into what actually drives NPS for their customers and will be surprised to learn that many of the things they’d long assumed to be critical to building customer loyalty actually have little to no bearing on it. In my experience, working with companies that have done this work, one of the big drivers that tends to emerge is that a company is easy to do business with across the entire life cycle of the customer relationship. These companies have realized that to truly distinguish themselves from their competitors, they need to offer a frictionless experience–from the purchase to how the product fits into the customer’s daily life to supporting the customer when the product doesn’t work as anticipated.

P.S. Matthew Dixon is a co-author of the bestselling book “The Effortless Experience”. Matt introduced the concept that companies need to focus on reducing the “effort” factor for customers before delighting them.

4. Jørgen Bo Christensen - VP Research & Product Management – CustomerGauge

We all agree—especially us CX people—that businesses must focus on improving customer experiences in the increasingly commoditized world. Still, many invest in CX but forget that the real purpose is to reduce churn, grow customer advocacy and eventually increase sales and revenues. For instance, an NPS study from 2016 revealed that 40% of companies with a Net Promoter program didn’t measure churn rates. And only 30% could prove that their program reduced churn or maintained an already low churn rate. For some reason, it seems that companies believe that CX success is simply measured with metrics like CSAT and NPS.

Bain & Co.’s reports on Management Tool and Trends from the previous 6 years show that the use of satisfaction and loyalty management as a strategic tool has decreased despite a continuous high interest. Since executives look for a return on their strategic investments, it is obvious to conclude that the CX industry has failed to (consistently) provide this. So, will it be a trend in the next couple of years to focus a lot more on the financial return of CX? In my opinion, it’s about time.

5. Annette Franz - Customer Experience Professional,CEO of CX Journey Inc

It’s hard to talk about trends when there are still so many companies who need to get the basics right. For example, while companies are listening to their customers, they aren’t necessarily acting on the feedback. Or they’re so focused on the metric that they overlook what customers are actually telling them.

In order to advance their improvement efforts, companies must:

(1) Map the customer journey to truly understand the customer experience and to identify where the experience is breaking down.

(2) Inventory and centralize customer data; I know this is no easy task, but without centralizing data, it’s going to be difficult to glean the robust insights necessary to make real change to the experience, e.g., personalizing it, reducing customer effort, etc.

Closely tied to that last point is the need to heed the evolution of analytics, shifting from the current descriptive and diagnostic analyses (and quad charts that simply paralyze users into inaction) to predictive, prescriptive, and eventually automated analyses. With these latter analyses, companies will get clear and relevant insights tied to business and customer outcomes in a manner that will help drive action much quicker than ever before.

Make sure you also download CustomerGauge's Next-Generation Net Promoter Score whitepaper below! 

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