Customer care is the work of looking after customers and ensuring their satisfaction with your business and its goods or services; It's just one of those interactions or a type of interaction.

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all interactions a customer with a company over the course of the relationship lifecycle and the customer's feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand over the course of those interactions.

Customer experience in 2014

1. Renovation of VoC programs Many organizations spend a lot of money on collecting customer feedback. Yet, too few of them gain the value they could—or should—from those investments.

This year it’s expected that companies will scrap their overly burdensome customer surveys in favour of more targeted feedback – Voice of the Customer initiatives.

They'll rely less on multiple-choice surveys and more on topic-specific surveys and text analytics of unstructured content (like comments on surveys), calls into the contact centre, social media conversations, and chat sessions with agents.

2. Lots of customer journey mapping One of the most effective tools for customer experience professionals is customer journey mapping (CJM). These tools identify key areas of improvement and opportunities for innovation.

The customer journey map will plot touch points, service interactions and gestures of users having experienced a service. The method helps us understand the intentional and unintentional aspects of the customer journey.

The map is humanised with personal insights, anecdotes and photos, using the users language, their successes and even failures as a very user-centred visualisation of the customer journey.

3. Integration of customer behavioural data While feedback is a form of customer insight, it's by no means the only form—or even the best form. All the data sources combined will provide the rich content required to fuel predictive models.

This trend will continue with more companies blending together customer feedback data, CRM data, and data from customer transactions and other value systems. This will enable companies to accurately target experiences to reduce churn, improve metrics (e.g., satisfaction, NPS), and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

4. More anticipatory service As companies gain a deeper understanding of customers through research and analytics, they'll develop more individualized customer experiences.

Companies that route callers to the phone agents are most likely to help them based on the anticipated reason for the call. Companies will also train frontline employees with different scripts based on anticipating customers' needs/interests/emotional style.

5. Experience infused into product

development

Product teams will define usability requirements, set minimum experience thresholds for product launch, and design the entire service lifecycle. Organisations will evaluate all new product and experience efforts using a CX scorecard that determines the level of customer experience risk involved in a proposed project.

Its “Customer Lens” process delivers more customer-centric experiences by incorporating standards and checkpoints into business cases and new product development methodologies.

There will be more companies creating products with customer experience embedded throughout the entire development process.

6. Consolidation of CX process

methodologies

As CX efforts highlight the need to redesign more operational processes, companies will combine CX efforts with other process improvement efforts, such as lean sigma and design thinking. These combinations will merge process-centric tools with the power of deep customer empathy.

7. Contact centres morph into

relationship hubs Contact centres are on the verge of a major change. Driven by shifts in technology, capabilities, and consumer behaviour, organisations are refocusing the primary purpose of contact centres from handling individual calls to building customer loyalty.

These changes will morph contact centres into what some call Relationship Hubs.

Relationship Hubs will establish success metrics tied to long-term customer loyalty (from average handle time to a combination of metrics such as first-call resolution and likelihood of customers).

8. Deeper appreciation of employee assets Companies are beginning to see the deep connection between employee engagement and customer experience. Engaged employees are more than twice as likely to stay late at work, help someone at work even if they're not asked, and do something good for the company even if it's not expected of them. In 2014 we'll see more employee surveys, executives developing employee engagement goals, and managerial training focused on employee engagement.

9. Mobile, mobile, Mobile & Personal

health monitoring takes off Devices will have more apps and sensors that will enable

consumers to do more things wherever they go.

We'll see a surge of personal health monitors.

This isn't about mobile phones: It's about digital experiences integrated into everyday life.

10. Software as an experience continues

The initial rise of cloud-based software (a.k.a. SaaS or software-as-a-service) focused on

renting access to software instead of selling licenses. That makes sense, considering that

Net Promoter Scores for tech vendors are more correlated to customer experience than

product performance. As cloud-based software expands, we'll see these offerings

cater more explicitly to the needs of customers. How? Simpler, more focused, more specialized applications (like smart

phone apps), more emphasis on quick initial usability, more sharing of best practices

(usage, not technical), and more customization based on the behavioural

analysis of users.

11. Resurgence of purpose

As companies push forward on their CX journeys, they'll find that there's nothing holding their efforts together. The desire to improve customer experience will fall victim to other priorities if the effort is not tied to the core values of the company.

But many organizations focus so intently on their operations that they

lose sight of their raisons d'être.

12. CX certification accelerates

CX education The Customer Experience Professionals Association has launched its Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) certification in 2014.

This industry-wide certification helps solidifying the role of CX professionals and creates demand for more CX training.

13. The rise of “empathy” As companies increasingly focus on CX in 2014, they'll recognize that their organizations lack a deep understanding and appreciation for their customers. It's not a flaw in the people, just a natural result of an internal focus on day-to-day operations. From now on, we'll hear more executives talk about the need to build empathy for customers, making “empathy” the CX word for 2014.