Customer Experience Trends 2020 – Intro

We’ve been pretty vocal about how we see the CX / CXM / VOC / Consumer Insights market during the past year.  When we look back at our top insights and extrapolate forward, we see some clear trends that don’t seem to go away, but just become stronger. These are our top bets on what will change in the CX market in 2020.

User Generated Content (UGC) will become top source of CX for brands

UGC is growing at a scary rate. We all love to share, review and comment on experiences, products and places.  UGC is part of the fast-growing volume of unstructured data around the world.

The challenge with UGC is that it comes in the form of unstructured data. In order to leverage it you need technology that can turn a “free form” opinion by any customer and language into a collection of organized feedbacks sorted by topics, sentiment, product and brand.

We covered both topics with an in depth research with these 2 blog posts:

• Why Unstructured Data is the new BFF of Product Marketing
• Why UGC is the new Benchmark data

We expect to see more and more of these technologies in 2020.

AI will empower more roles in brands to leverage CX data (DIY CX)

Between eCommerce and mobile internet boom, the war on customer’s pocket is on at full force. Major tech vendors CEO’s have recognized it and are vocal about the need for detailed customer understanding (Customer eXperience – CX) as a means to stay ahead of the competition. 

“We’re acquiring Qualtrics so you can combine your customer’s experience data with SAP’s operational data to transform how you run your business”, said SAP CEO, explaining their Qualtrics acquisition.

“Today’s consumers have the ability to review, compare prices, and purchase nearly any product at any time. This shift in the balance of power makes it more important than ever for companies to focus on customer experience” is a recent quote from Oracle’s CEO.

So, leaders and followers agree that deep understanding of customers is key. Still, there’s a huge gap between importance and actual achievements. According to strategic consulting company Bain & Company, while 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences” only 8% of customers agree.

It seems obtaining analytics for decision making is challenging. Most existing methods today take months to deliver and are either based on consultants and traditional market research methods, or they are based on heavy enterprise solutions. Either way that means solutions that are expensive, slow and even shallow in terms of insights. 

This explains why with huge $ spend on market research, CX, consultants etc. still only 8% of customers see great experiences. 

Realizing that one-size-fits-all solutions can’t satisfy the dynamic needs of thousands of operational roles in brands, the fundamentals of a personal, Do It Yourself (DIY) analytics solution should allow these individuals to be:

• Self sufficient
  1. Usable by any business user
  2. Can be purchased by one individual (No IT or Experts involved)
• Getting timely and actionable insights
  1. Delivering actionable insights at the product (SKU) level
  2. Short time to insights (Days vs months)
• Tweaking the insights at will, using a wide range of filters
• Priced for an individual or small department 

Social Media Monitoring will expand beyond Marketing in brands

Research report Social Media Analytics Market by MarketsandMarkets shows that the global social media analytics market size is $3.0B in 2019 and expected to grow to $9.4B billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.4% during that period. Major market growth drivers are the increasing user engagement of social media using smartphones and increased focus on competitive intelligence by brands. 

Social Media Listening at its core is about real time monitoring/response and influencer analysis for social media platforms. For this the key requirements from Social Media Listening are:

1. Access to all relevant social media platforms / networks
2. Real time listening and alerting 
3. Sentiment analysis 
4. Brand perception 
5. Influencer identification 

Social media data represents a huge opportunity as its massive amounts of data and the response cycle is very quick, unlike some other feedback channels. Because of this there is hunger to drive deeper insights from Social data. Once this is possible (and we’re already there in terms of technology) other departments, on top of Marketing, will start to leverage Social Media Monitoring / Listening solutions, too.

Conclusion

We’re at an exciting time in the life cycle of CX. After years of “first generation solutions” new technologies are making it possible to take a deeper dive into the minds of customers and harvest insights that were not possible before and from data sources that were not yielding results before. This will drive a new era of productivity for brands, with DIY CX and a wider range of roles leveraging fine CX data as part of their roles. On the customer end, customers will benefit from better services and products – which is good news as well!

Wishing you a very insightful 2020!

Boaz Grinvald