This week I have been visiting Dublin for the Frost & Sullivan Customer Contact Europe event. It’s always great to visit Ireland and this conference has featured some great insights into the future of the customer experience (CX).

One of the most interesting talks I saw during the event today was Frost & Sullivan analyst Stephen Loynd speaking about customer engagement and digital flux. It’s clear that CX is being transformed by digital systems, but I was keen to hear Stephen’s take, as he is a global traveller and well known as a leading thinker in this area.

Stephen focused on how data analytics is changing the customer experience and customer expectations of brands. As we explore deeper and more immersive relationships between brands and customers, the insight brands can obtain from data is becoming more essential than ever.

Stephen’s talk focused on several key aspects of how data analytics is becoming so important to the customer experience:

• Omnichannel; you cannot deliver a true omnichannel experience without using data analytics. Offering the same great service across all channels is not possible unless you have some insights into what your customer likes and dislikes.
• Legacy; you need to plan how to manage disparate data sources. Some will be from old legacy systems and some will be new and potentially creating a very large amount of data – Internet of Things systems for example. Connecting all this together is the first place to focus.
• Innovation; insights from customer behaviour thanks to data analytics can feed directly into innovative new ideas – how can you constantly use data insights to improve service?

These were the focus areas, but Stephen issued a warning to company leaders sitting on the fence and waiting to see how this will play out. He said that this change will be exponential; you might not see it yet, but some companies are already putting data and AI insights at their core. Entire industries will change quickly – you need to be exploring this now. Stephen predicted that companies not transforming rapidly to use data analysis would simply perish.

It’s been a great event with Frost and Sullivan and I hope that I get the chance to hear Stephen speaking again soon.