How customer experience is changing

The next wave of business change is customer science. Customer science is the fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concept of the behavioral sciences. 
 
As the new wave of customer science comes in, the old tide of customer experience (CX) is receding. I have seen this before with other influential business concepts. It was the CRM wave that receded in the early 2000s to make way for CX in the first place.  
 
It is essential to note that the old waves of change do not completely disappear when new waves appear. Instead, they have been absorbed into business as usual. I expect the same will be true for CX. 

So, what will customer science do for experiences? 

Customer science is the fusion of three parts. Another way to look at it is that customer science embraces machine learning (ML) AI, which automatically uses various data sources to predict what a customer will do. 
 
Perhaps most importantly, you can then provide customers with an experience that is proactive. Instead of waiting to respond, you are anticipating customers' needs. Over the next ten years, these proactive experiences will be essential in business. 

The cycle of change 

A recent guest on my podcast, The Intuitive Customer Podcast, David VanAmburg from the American Customer Satisfaction Institute (ACSI), shared some surprising statistics.

Firstly, that we are near to the lowest point for customer satisfaction since the ACSI was formed in 1994. Secondly, between 2010 and 2019, only 30 percent of organizations tracked by ACSI improved their customer satisfaction scores. Moreover, these dismal results were during the peak of the CX movement, when people were focused on enhancing experiences.
 
During this discussion, it occurred to me that the disappointment I felt about the CX movement sounded familiar. I thought I had felt this way before. 

I had. It was about CRM. In 2002, Fred Reichheld, inventor of Net Promoter Score®, wrote in the Harvard Business Review, "Avoid the Four Perils of CRM." I recently re-read this article with a sense of disappointment, with the ACSI’s CX movement results in mind, and was gobsmacked by the similarity. 
 
Reichheld wrote that 55 percent of all CRM projects do not produce results. The ACSI just reported that 70 percent of businesses that may or may not have focused on CX did not produce an increase in customer satisfaction scores.

What does this mean for the future? 

I do not think all CX professionals will lose their jobs this year. Instead, CX will still be there, just in a different way. Moreover, this change will happen over the next two or three years as the CX wave recedes and customer science crests.  
 
I hope that this information becomes a clarion call for people to focus on doing things to be part of the 30 percent that improve customer satisfaction rather than the 70 percent that do not. 
 
 So, what else should you do? A few things.  

Recognize the significance of producing results 

If you are part of the team that worked on what drives value and improved customer satisfaction, then your organization will carry on investing in you. If you are part of a department that does not improve, they will not. As a business owner myself, I am not going to invest in something that does not give me a return. 

Get into AI

This technology is the future for proactive experiences. These experience types will drive value moving forward in customer strategy. My company is already into behavioral science and data in a much bigger way as an organization than we have done before.  
 
Remember that you also should endlessly strive to understand customer behavior.
 
My company and other consultancies like mine pride themselves on understanding customers and their relationship with brand experiences. AI is run by IT, but what do they know about CX? There's always the need for that interpretation of why customers do what they do.  
 
Customer science will be the next wave of change over the next five years or so. It probably will not happen for two or three years because it will take time to take hold. Nevertheless, people's focus on the fusion between AI data and behavioral science today grows stronger. Organizations should examine it in a lot more detail for 2022. 
 
We are not abandoning CX, just making it part of business as usual in support of the next big thing in business. 

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