The Future of Experience: Preparing for What’s Next
Learn how leaders can create data-driven, personalized, and meaningful customer experiences at scale.
By Josh Buchholtz, Tina Wink, Geoff Berkheimer, and Greg Lakloufi
When we wrote about the CX imperative of today, we shared how companies that prioritize customer experience can stand to gain competitive advantage. In this post, we’ll focus on the future: what the future of experience looks like, which behaviors and mindsets are needed to enable it, and what steps businesses can take to get there.
What does the future of experience look like?
Let’s start with a quick history of CX. Over time, we’ve witnessed three general phases of customer experience maturity, which we call “static,” “dynamic,” and “programmed.”
Level 1: Static
Static companies operate largely offline. Businesses don’t collect customer feedback or do so on a limited basis. They operate often in spreadsheets and have little (or no) adoption of sales tools. Segments are used to describe groups of customers, and they’re largely based on historical data and rarely prioritized. Customer experience as an idea or focus area doesn’t really exist. Common CX techniques like personas and journey maps either do not exist or are out of date.
Level 2: Dynamic
Dynamic companies demonstrate a higher level of maturity in capturing and acting on customer feedback, largely using online and offline survey-based methodologies. Customer experience is known and understood, but there is not a strong discipline attached to it. There is inconsistency in whether (and how) feedback is implemented to improve products, services, and experiences. Tools like customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation are in use, but they often sit in silos and are not connected to provide a single customer view.
Level 3: Programmed
Programmed companies have invested in technology and processes and are working toward (or already have) a singular customer view. They employ customer tools and systems like CRMs, CDPs (customer data platforms), and voice of experience (VOC) to deeply understand their customers and their needs. In addition, they have supportive and connected processes to enable the best use of such systems. These businesses build, activate, and nurture segments based on data and orchestrate customer journeys based on common pain points and challenges. Customer experience may exist as its own department or as a center of excellence, and the value of customer centricity is widely bought into and advocated for. Business units work to deliver consistent experiences across channels. These businesses are beginning to experiment with AI and machine learning to drive customer experience goals, but often they find there are key elements missing in their data architectures and level of maturity.
While a programmed level of customer experience is the North Star for many organizations, differentiated value is found at one level beyond. Level four is the frontier for companies to unlock data-driven, connected customer value.
Level 4: Living
At this level of maturity, CX exists more as a “living organism” than an individual capability. Engines of experience are powered by data science and advanced data architectures, enabling the deployment of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI use cases. Connected technology platforms deliver fully immersive, uniquely personalized, and highly adaptable products, services, and experiences in real time, at scale, to any target group. On the operating side, a customer-centric ethos is embedded and shared across all teams from the executive level down. Cross-functional teams are brought in under a shared set of goals and metrics. The vision for customer centricity and customer experience is known throughout the organization and a customer-centric mindset is used as key prioritization criteria in business decisions. Teams operate efficiently under these goals: iterate together, practice test-and-learn techniques, and include a customer-based, data-driven mentality in all key decisions.
This powerful combination of the experience engine operated by highly aligned teams unlocks more areas of customer value and enables companies to:
- Win with more customers by providing differentiated and compelling offers and products at the most opportune time in a customer’s journey
- Build need-driven experiences and adapt in real-time to drive customer connection and repeat purchases
- Proactively reduce churn through micro-segmentation and targeted engagement
- Reduce spend by predicting personalized experiences and offers based on unique needs and desirability
What behaviors and mindsets enable the future of experience?
Creating this future takes dedication, time, and desire from highly-aligned leaders. It also requires leading mindsets and behaviors. In our article, “The CX Imperative of Today,” we highlighted four areas of focus that CX leaders share to stand up winning experience programs:
- Create executive alignment on a shared set of goals and objectives
- Clearly define and communicate the business and intrinsic value of CX
- Make the required investments to connect teams, technologies, and data under a unified plan
- Welcome change
Underneath these core areas of focus are the shared behaviors that allow CX leaders to stand out. We’ve identified six common behaviors that CX leaders across industries invest in:
- World-class research capabilities to capture, digest, and act on insights across all multichannel interactions, informing customer desires and protecting against potential churn
- A culture of community, flexibility, and trust across the organization with a customer vision and strategy that’s championed and driven by a curious, collaborative, and agile mindset
- A shared understanding and prioritization of the highest-value customer segments to drive decision-making
- Nimble teams, including a test-and-learn and rapid-prototyping approach based on customer desirability and data feasibility
- An analytical mindset and data-driven behaviors that drive customer decisions
- Advanced decision engines that drive predictive and personal touch points with profiles for each customer and prediction algorithms to guide experiences and targeted outreach
Customers reap the benefits of these behaviors, as engagement is personalized, unique, and perfectly timed. Products, services, and experiences fit their individual needs. They have a two-way dialogue with the business and see their feedback represented in the market.
Leaders who invest in these behaviors and capabilities realize improved speed to value, reduced spend on product development, increased employee satisfaction, and increased customer revenue and experience measures.
So, what’s the path to get there?
Building the competencies required to enable the future of experience — world-class research, data science and decisioning, scalable technology, and highly aligned leadership — may seem daunting (and expensive) to many. But action and progress is necessary to compete in today’s rapidly evolving world. We recommend our clients take an iterative approach to realize value quickly while building a foundation for long-term prosperity. There are four intersecting stages:
1. Align and activate
Ensure alignment to the overall business strategy while setting the North Star and aligning teams to customer experience goals
2. Research, innovate, and design
Lead with customer research to understand and prioritize customer challenges. Define use cases and begin to build and test need-driven concepts
3. Build, pilot, and measure
Solidify the underlying capabilities needed to enable future experiences while going from concept to production on use cases that customers love
4. Iterate, support, and scale
Focus on the capabilities and requirements needed to build, maintain, and grow a culture of customer-centricity.
Deep dive
To start, you must align and activate on a future vision and key goals for customer experience. At this stage, you’ll also define the role each business group will play in supporting and enabling the overall customer experience. This alignment phase can be a simple workshop before diving into a focused exercise.
Your team should seek to answer these key business questions:
- What is our future vision?
- Do we have a defined customer vision and set of goals agreed upon?
- What role does each business group play in enabling a connected experience?
- Where do we excel and fall short in experience maturity?
Take a research-based approach to uncover the needs and use cases that matter most to your customers. Talk to your customers and work backward to understand the root cause of challenges. Identify key moments to win and differentiate across the customer journey. Combine this research into a prioritized set of customer use cases and testable concepts that you can use to build and test experience, product, and service proofs of concept (POCs) to take to market.
We recommend the Triple Diamond methodology to execute this second phase.
This approach is important because it addresses not only the customer’s end-to-end experience but also your organization’s surface-to-core support functions, ensuring a successful and viable deployment of an enhanced experience. In an ever-complex organizational ecosystem, this allows for a truly holistic approach that includes hundreds of macro and micro touchpoints of the experience across digital, physical, and virtual channels for consumers, employees, and vendors, bringing to life robust solutions at the intersection of desirability (people), feasibility (technology), and viability (business).
In this step, have your team consider these key business questions:
- Who is the highest-potential customer segment in the market?
- What is our value proposition to each core customer group?
- Where are key moments to win and differentiate?
- What experiences do our customers most desire?
- How can we quickly activate and test experience concepts?
- How do we successfully align cross-functionally?
Focus on designing, building, and scaling POCs and maturing underlying capabilities needed for customer transformation. Decision architectures, modern data infrastructures, customer technology systems (CDPs, CRMs, and VoCs) must be identified and woven together to create a symphony of experiences.
During this phase, ask your team these questions:
- What tools (and what gaps) do we have that can support our “engine of experience”?
- What is the most efficient way to modernize core platforms?
- What can we learn from customers and users of our minimum viable product (MVP)?
In this step, focus on building the internal teaming capabilities needed to create connected experiences. You should look to create repeatable processes and identify and prioritize change management activities. Create incentives to encourage test-and-learn, curious, fail-fast cultures. Enable executive leaders to champion the experience program while ensuring key employees across the organization feel empowered and enthusiastic about reaching goals and milestones.
During this phase, ask your team these questions:
- What organizational skill/tool set is absent and now needed?
- What is the most effective organizational structure to scale and create repeatable processes?
- What training and change management will be needed?
- How, by whom, and how often will evolving CX success metrics be determined and reported?
Wrap up
Program execution is highly collaborative and iterative in nature, and it carries on indefinitely as more functionalities and capabilities come to life beyond the original MVP launch. Companies that master this agile and iterative customer experience mentality create the internal speed, efficiency, and camaraderie that modern organizations require.
How have we proved this approach?
Stay tuned for real-life examples of clients we’ve worked with who are activating and realizing this future of experience. We’ll talk through some of their successes and challenges to ensure you are ready for your own journey.
Read additional articles in the series to explore this topic further:
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