Welcome to 2020. This is the year that many pundits and CX experts used as a milestone to predict the evolution of customer experience. You may have seen some of these stats circulating during past discussions predicting the future of CX:
In 2013 Walker Insights predicted that by 2020, “customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.”
Another well-cited stat is that by 2020, “Customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human,” according to Gartner.
Oracle lived up to its name by forecasting that “80% of businesses plan to deploy chatbots by 2020.”
Even TTEC got into the act. Back in 2013, we predicted that, “By 2020, metrics like average handle time [in the contact center] will be distant memories... Metrics like Net Promoter Score™, customer retention, share of wallet, and even time spent with customers will be commonplace.”
While brands are on the right track with many of these predictions, 2020 won’t be the year that brands solve all their customer experience challenges. But it will be a year where transformation around the customer accelerates. Companies are realizing that to compete for customers today and in the future, they must shed the old ways of doing business in favor of digital transformation, technology evolution, and in some cases, completely new ways of doing business.
The articles in this issue look at how disruption is shaping customer experiences today and what it will take to set a strong foundation for the future. The path is uncharted, but with a strong digital focus balanced with differentiated human intelligence, superior customer experiences will follow.
Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Glagowski
Editor-in-Chief
Elizabeth.Glagowski@1to1.com
