Temkin Group Releases Annual List of Customer Experience Trends and Labels 2018 "The Year of Humanity"

WABAN, Mass., Dec. 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Temkin Group, a leading customer experience research, advisory, and training firm, announces the publication of its annual list of customer experience trends, and labels 2018 as "The Year of Humanity."

Every year, Temkin Group highlights one theme that it sees as being particularly important for the customer experience community. In previous years, the focus has been on Empathy, Employees, Emotion, and Purpose.

In 2018, Temkin Group is encouraging people to focus on Humanity in three areas:

• Embrace diversity. Applaud our differences and find ways to treat people as individuals.
• Extend compassion. Tune into the condition of the people around us and care about their well-being
• Express appreciation. Proactively look for and acknowledge the positive aspects of the world around us.

"With all of the discord and tension throughout the world, it seems like a good time for all of us to refocus on what's most important, our collective humanity," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group.

Looking ahead to 2018, Temkin Group also identified 15 customer experience trends to watch:

1. Metrics Reexamination. Companies will revamp and reconfigure their underperforming CX measurement programs.
2. Customer Feedback Pullback. Companies will cut back on the number of customer surveys and focus their data collection on areas where they are prepared to take action.
3. Voice Recognition Momentum. Companies will focus much more heavily on speech recognition for insights and interfaces.
4. Brand Promise Alignment. Companies will undergo projects to clarify or redefine the meaning of their brand and explicitly articulate their customer promises.
5. Experience Design Orientation. Design-oriented projects and efforts will increase as companies try to internalize experience design capabilities.
6. Customer Journey Expansion. Companies will realign their metrics, analytics, experience design, and innovation around customer journeys.
7. Digital Integration. Companies will take the next step to digitation by building (and analyzing) experiences that tie together digital channels with contact centers and physical locations. 
8. Chatbot Rationalization. The short-term hysteria for chatbots will subside, but a longer-term wave of new AI-based applications will emerge.
9. Persona Popularization. Design personas and behavioral segments will become an even more mainstream tool.
10. Analytics Expertise Shortage. Companies will aggressively recruit limited analytics experts and invest in retraining and retooling internal employees to fill this role.
11. Preemptive Problem Resolution. Service organizations will apply predictive analytics to find use cases where they can proactively resolve and avoid customer issues. 
12. Newly Energized Executives. More senior leaders will jump on the customer experience bandwagon with an unrealistic sense of what it takes to drive success.
13. Customer Experience Dispersion. The term "customer experience" will continue to be misused and its meaning will become increasingly diluted.
14. Emergence of "People and Culture." There will be a dramatic jump in the number of efforts that are explicitly focused on creating customer-centric culture.
15. Empathy & Emotion Dialogue.  In "The Year of Humanity," we expect to see executive agendas actually contain the words "emotion" and "empathy" on them.

These customer experience trends can be found on the Customer Experience Matters^® blog, at ExperienceMatters.wordpress.com. For more information about The Year of Humanity, visit YearOfHumanity.com.

About Temkin Group: Temkin Group is widely recognized as a leading customer experience research, consulting, and training firm. Many of the world's largest brands rely on its insights and advice to steer their transformational journeys. Temkin Group combines customer experience thought leadership with a deep understanding of the dynamics of organizations to help accelerate results. Rather than layering on cosmetic changes, Temkin Group helps companies embed practices within their culture by building four critical competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Employee Engagement, Compelling Brand Values, and Customer Connectedness. The firm's ongoing research identifies leading and emerging best practices across a wide range of activities for engaging the hearts and minds of customers, employees, and partners. For more information, visit the Temkin Group website, www.TemkinGroup.com, or contact Bruce Temkin at 617-916-2075 or send an email to [email protected].

Customer Experience Matters is a registered trademark of Temkin Group.

SOURCE Temkin Group

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