Last night was our first CX Folk meetup. The meeting was a great success; we raised $400 for the Australian Red Cross Bush Fire Appeal, and came together to connect and listen to three CX experts share their thoughts and experiences leading into 2020 and the next decade.
A big thank you to our panel of CX experts: Darryn De Kock, Suncop, Belinda Dimovski, Australian Red Cross and Peter Nann, Cognigy. CX Folk’s co-founder Sophie Imbert, Ideal CX, opened the meet up and Alex Allwood, All Work Together, facilitated the discussion.
We kicked off the discussion by exploring the macro-trends influencing our work cultures, life/workstyles and technologies. In the next decade organisational culture will shift as we accommodate greater age diversity and technology; Generation Z will enter the workforce, Gen Y an X will take the helm and remnant Baby Boomers may very well still want to work.
More of us will use technology to connect, communicate and collaborate. Our CX experts all agreed that technology, customer and contextual data and agile methods for working; where customer is at the center, is how our CX teams will function in the next decade.
Panelist, Belinda Dimovski, made a salient point; everything we do, whether it is defining, designing or delivering a product or service, needs to be driven by customer insight. All too often we can get caught up in great ideas that aren’t solving a customer problem or meeting an unmet need.
We took a deep dive into the topic of customer experience management and discussed why, after 20 years practicing CX, does a ‘customer-led culture’ delivering CX excellence remain elusive.
Our discussion unpacked some of the leadership and organisational issues in making customer centricity sticky: service / product line P&L’s, businesses’ short term focus on revenue and profit, and competing priorities. One of our panelists suggested, “we are too busy with business instead of customer.”
We also discussed how, in the last decade, we’ve seen disruption of whole categories. Now we have a handful of brands that fulfil our needs so well that we could not live without them: UberEats, Netflix, Sephora, Airbnb, Google, Instagram, Apple etc. We dug into the industries and brands that will pioneer our CX future.
Panellists shared a future of organisational partnerships with customers; sharing data to enable essential services to function more effectively. We discussed, the disruption of the motor vehicle industry, autonomous cars and Tesla.
Lastly, we considered the challenges traditional businesses with legacy systems will face in remaining relevant; one example was the limitations experienced in basic online customer service chat-functions utilising bots. In closing, the panellist all agreed that rapid change; the sheer speed and scale of disruption across industries will continue at a pace that we haven’t seen before.
Our next CX Folk meetup will be in Sydney on April 8.