We caught up with Nick Varney, CX Practice Lead at Sparks Grove in our London office, to discuss his insights into customer experience transformations and the future of the practice.
What role does innovation play in CX?
Innovation can be at the very heart of CX strategy. Particularly at the intersection of customer experience and data. The tools available to clients such as predictive analytics and data science techniques enable us to build truly innovative customer journeys and personalized experiences like never before.
What are clients looking for with CX?
Most organizations want to make their customer experiences easy, make them worth paying for and make them worth a customer’s time to engage with. Enabling these things with practical solutions that are grounded in the reality of a client’s business is a big part of the challenge.
What are some of the biggest challenges you see clients face when building their CX practice?
Proving return on investment in experience continues to be difficult for a lot of organizations. Proving to senior leadership that investment in a CX function or enhancing the customer journey has real bottom line impact is hard and many organizations continue to struggle with it.
What do you think is the biggest trend in CX for 2019?
I see organizations thinking more about how they use their customer data to drive enhancements to the experience. For example, businesses looking to personalize every touchpoint with customer data or building out predictive capabilities to make experiences seamless and improve engagement. I think we’re going to see more investment in data driven experiences.
Where do you see CX going in the next few years?
Right now CX can be a real differentiator – and investment reflects that, for example having a customer experience design team and a focus on customer related KPIs. Over time this is going to become commoditized - providing customer experiences that just work, and having an organization where everyone is aligned to the customer – is going to be table-stakes. The most mature organizations in this space are already thinking about the relationship between CX and the Employee Experience and embedding this in organization culture building truly customer centric businesses.