The drivers which affect the needs of business, selling and service and of customers and consumers are already in place and in motion. And much more important they will gain scale and momentum - and ultimately change the way commerce and retail is led and governed and how experiences are designed and delivered.
I am working in UX and CX since two decades and in retail since as I stood as a small boy in my aunt’s store (interior decorations, textile, leather and sporting goods store). She already told us: "Listen to our customers, understand what they really want and need and only sell them what they really want – so that they are happy and come back – talking good about us … "
And this is still true today and will be in the future.
CX and UX design figure out how to model, interact with, and influence today’s and tomorrow’s customer ecosystems
The impact of automation, AI, ML and DL (AI Artificial Intelligence, ML Machine Learning, DL Deep Learning … in this article you can learn more about AI, ML and DL ) are just a few of the forces that will change the fabric of markets, what a company is and how it works, and for sure the way experiences are designed and delivered in the service of differentiation and growth. These forces represent new challenges and opportunities for businesses to identify how to become and stay within a customer’s preferences.
Business must improve in empathy and understanding of their current and future consumers and buyers.
It's the law of nature that beings and their behavior change, evolve and so will customers - customers continue to be a moving target: increasingly experimental, more values-based, and more willing (and able) to take control of their own data and ecosystems.
Surveys, research and user and customer insights were always important - but nowadays even more - asking, listening, understanding customers - knowing about their experiences - and in addition data about customer interactions, behavior of communities, of trends, and influencing factors might it be weather, ecosystem or other real or forecast data or predictions - everything which can increase satisfaction
Customer Experience teams of commerce and retail - who are or stand on the frontline / at the cutting edge to end customers, consumers and buyers will be a primary beneficiary of these perspectives and they might become the company's role models in interpreting and anticipating future behaviors and preferences.
Leaders, boards and CEOs must tear down organizational and channel silos as I mentioned in the last two articles.
All these Customer Experience, user and usage centered, behavior and empathy efforts and mastery of automation will have a limited impact if the business is still organized in an old-business way or in other words to a 'suboptimize' CX performance.
The Path Forward
As much as commerce and retail will change in the future, some of their fundamentals will endure. Being a customer-obsessed business able to use technology to drive innovation and able to adapt to a constant wave of political, economic, and technological change continues to be a hard but essential strategy.
Having a consumer, customer and user centered approach and thinking - Customer Experience is a core and powerful mode and principle to assert brand, differentiate in noisy and diverse markets, and drive growth continues to be a vital part of any business strategy.
Stakeholders, decision makers and CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and whatever creative title these chiefs might have - they will need to rapidly get their heads around significant changes that surround and impact CX and they can prepare the groundwork and railway system for a powerful future of CX.
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