Organizations only pay lip service to CX, and now, we have the numbers to prove it.

From Zendesk's The Trends Report 2022, you can see a clear dichotomy between what people say they will do and what they will actually do regarding CX.

You should read the whole report, but for starters, here are some stats I was surprised to learn (or maybe not surprised as much as interested to see it in print):

73% of business leaders reported a direct link between customer service and business performance
56% of organizations say they will focus on driving better customer experiences over the next 12 months.

However, later in the report we learn:

23% of organizations said that they were looking to increase customer satisfaction.
23% said they are looking to drive stronger relationships

Framing that one in reverse means 67% are not looking to increase customer satisfaction or drive stronger relationships. So, what is going on here?

In this episode, Chief Technology Officer of Zendesk Adrian McDermott (@amcdermo) joins us to give his take on these numbers. For the past 15 years, Zendesk has provided tools and technologies for digital CX and worked with companies to enable agent efficiency in customer service. McDermott has been with them for the past 10 years and scaled his product development from ten people to around 1,500. He also shares what he thinks organizations should do with their experiences.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

My regular readers will remember that customers satisfaction scores across the board are falling or stagnating for most organizations. The American Customer Satisfaction Index published a report that suggested customer satisfaction was approaching a 17-year low. What's more, customers care about this dissatisfaction. Zendesk reported that 61% of customers say that they would switch to a competitor off the back of one bad service experience—and that's just one dissatisfying experience!

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

05:04 Colin goes through the stats from the Zendesk report that show the dichotomy between what organizations say they will do regarding CX versus what they plan to actually do.
08:12 McDermott shares his take on how these numbers demonstrate two problems, one on the supply side and the other on the demand side, and how organizations should respond.
19:59 We shift the conversation to discuss Customer Science, and to get McDermott's take on how these tools will help move CX forward.
23:13 McDermott explains that he thinks these tools can aid in personalization, ideally down to a segment of one individual.
26:35 We talk about the strengths of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning in improving Customer Service efficiencies and where that is an appropriate application in customer facing interactions.
34:18 We all share our tips for taking this report's information and today's technology and doing something practical with it, proving once again that taking theory beyond the philosophy is the most significant way to make it useful in CX.

This episode of the podcast was made in partnership with Zendesk.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University.

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