Top 5 Prediction Goals for 2015

Rather than predicting what other people will do in 2015, a better use of my time is to focus on my goals -- specifically within digital experience strategy.  

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."- Alan Kay (at PARC in 1971)

Here are my top 5 areas that I predict will come true in 2015

The overall theme for digital experience in 2015 is integrating customer needs with business strategies.  This will be done through simplifying, combining shared elements and introducing new items when appropriate.  More authentic experiences will be designed and push creativity further by matching human understanding with technology.

1. Organizing Around Customer Journey Map

   A vital step in understanding the end-to-end digital customer experience is building a customer journey map. Providing a single view of the customer's experience, the journey map structure offers a clear view of customer interactions as they navigate throughout the digital touchpoints with a brand.

   Turning insights into action.

   Measuring touchpoints reveals how internal departments can be redesigned to better optimize the digital customer experience. With new technologies that change of consumer expectations, the digital experience landscape is growing more complex and the importance of gaining a unified view cannot be overstated.

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2. Greater Digital Experience Measurement

   To improve the end-to-end digital experience, brands must measure what matters. This requires a shift in thinking to move the basis of decision-making from less clear criteria to more measurable insights. The holy grail of measuring the digital customer experience is combining these inputs into meaningful metrics that span across the enterprise -- creating a cohesive corporate focus on digital experience.

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3. Data-Inspired Creative

   Having a customer-first digital strategy means listening to customer needs to inform the experience design. Moving up the maturity chart leads towards the ultimate goal of delighting people.Having deep empathy and understanding of why people respond in research triggers more brilliant thinking.  The future of creating digital experiences will move beyond being data-driven or data-informed to becoming data-inspired where the wisdom within the data delivers what people don't even know they want yet.No one ever asked for a telephone with a camera on it. But today, we can’t live without it.

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4. Creating Personalized Experiences

   Designing personalized experiences pulls from a spectrum of behavior patterns and algorithms. Companies that anticipate their customer's needs are creating an unbreakable competitive advantage creating a customer experience that is more valuable than the competition.Personalization is key to helping customers discover new products and services. Amazon uses customer shopping patterns to make contextual recommendations based on the item currently being viewed. On Facebook, customized newsfeeds are based on customer behaviors and network preferences. When signed into Google, the user's search results appear differently than what other people see.  The challenge here is the limitations created by "filter bubbles" over time (TED talk).

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5. Brand Loyalty Triggers

   Brand loyalty has expanded beyond profits and customer retention to building and maintaining personal relationships with customers. Often times, loyalty is built not by delighting customers, but in reducing the customer's effort - meaning the work they must do to get their problem solved.Even the best loyalty programs are designed to trigger emotional engagement with their customers. Without customer engagement, brand loyalty being a member doesn't drive business results. Increasing the brand perception comes from communicating the value benefits to the loyalty program members.

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There are so many great opportunities in the new year. It will be fun to see these areas come into focus as I move through making these into reality.  Stay tuned!