Technological Impact on Customer Experiences

The importance of operational and interaction data can now include many more factors that drive experiences including sentiment analysis, digital body language, facial and emotion tracking all gives us an insight into how brands can build their interactions to meet those the customer’s needs. All that rich information is gathered to get a 360-degree view of the characteristic traits of the customers. Many organizations are analyzing and using customer intelligence to define the impact of experiences and using machine learning, Chatbots, and Artificial Intelligence to help reduce effort, provide personalized service and enable more engaging interactions. Although technology is a highly valuable factor in customer experience, we can’t forget the human elements in our design of our experiences.

Personality Traits that Shape Leadership

I started my career as a clinical psychologist so my focus has always been about the human behaviour, personality, emotions. A trait that is evident in all the members of our association customers is the desire to connect the dots that let them look at all the touch points a customer has with a brand holistically. Customer experience professionals know that technology can enable fabulous experiences, but in the end, the human element and the customer’s perception of the experience is what drives their behaviour–to buy more, stay longer, or tell others about their experience with your brand. If you think about you last interaction with a brand, was it memorable? How did you feel after the interaction? Will you go back to interacting with the brand? All of these behaviours–as a result of an experience–are what impact our brand’s sales, costs, social presence and brand presence in the marketplace. In this fast-paced world, it is critical to deeply understand the customer's mindset and their behaviour that drives brand’s business performance.

Valuable Advice to Fellow Executives

Customer experience has a huge impact on every organization. There are many critical factors for creating great customer experiences including design thinking, building more collaborative working teams, or a council that is representative of a cross-functional, enterprise decision making. The ability to manage and leverage all the available customer intelligence and data, turn it to insights and define actions that will improve or optimize the experience is critical. Technology can help us achieve better customer experiences but in the end, it is the human experience and needs that we must care for.