15 CX experts share their views on the state of the CX industry

While Generative AI is a critical evolution in the delivery of customer experience … 48% of customer’s still want the brand to empathize with them as if the agent was a customer, and 60% said they would prefer to wait in a queue if they get to talk to a human. …

Machines aren’t capable of sitting in the customer’s seat, understanding the question/challenge/issue from each and every customer’s point of view real-time, and then delivering a unique experience based on that customer’s perspective – while drawing upon their tribal, experientially-based wisdom, problem-solving capabilities and insights – which are best delivered by a true customer service advocate Expert.

Empathy and trust are very important now. Customer service is where companies and organizations meet their customers in the real world. And the world, at the moment, is quite an uncertain place. Customers need help beyond what they might have needed previously. The heightened sense of lack of certainty is where empathy really comes into play.

Are you getting the best and brightest people, or are you simply filling roles? This is the question that organizations are facing when looking to get new capabilities in their organizations. 

Career journeys are becoming much more fluid as the relationship between companies and talent continues to evolve. In many top fields, we are starting to see the top tier of talent opt for more consulting and project-based engagements vs. engaging in a captive employment structure. Many companies are not able to adapt quickly enough to ensure that the talent's skills are continually evolving towards the future, and many organizations still work very inefficiently with endless meetings, emails, and other noncritical aspects that contractors can avoid. 

The pandemic has started to address the location bias that organizations were facing, and we are in a moment where talent is driving change in the way companies think about geographical diversity and its benefits.

We see in our own research, in surveys, in roundtable discussions, and in questionnaires to the app-based workforce, that 70 to 80 percent of people are not just satisfied with working in the nontraditional way, but are hugely enthusiastic about gig work.

They are enthusiastic about it because of the flexibility and because of the ability to control their schedule. For example, they like the ability to work in one city and visit another city and continue having access to clients and income.

They also like the ability to look at how much money they want to make and jump on at particular times, work around their schedule, and be able to meet a particular financial goal. That sense of control and agency has revolutionized the role of work in their lives.

The way we hire, manage, and lead the modern workforce has fundamentally changed, and CX leaders are quickly adapting. This includes looking at GigCX as a game changer that opens the window to distributed labor models and workforce structures while managing to the same performance standards and ultimately the bottom line.

In a report that we did with MIT Technology Review called Customer Experience in the Future of Work, 94% of the CX leaders that we spoke with said brand advocacy and specialized product knowledge will increase over the next couple of years. And the same percentage also said that they expect to hire more agents with emotional intelligence, listening and interpersonal skills. 

And if you think about the future of GigCX, this is who GigCX workers are! 

They have that specialized product knowledge. They're brand advocates. They want to listen and understand what the customer needs so they can solve that problem.

That's what they're all about.

The magic sauce for me is the passion that you should be tapping into with your customers. If you've got a long-term customer who knows your product inside out and is prepared to help others navigate that product, and you are incentivizing them to be even more of an advocate, that's just an incredible combination of values that the marketing department and the community and the digital and the operations guys should be benefiting from together.

If you can create a platform that connects a consumer to those knowledgeable and passionate individuals and progress the two towards a speedy resolution and in a cost-effective manner that also addresses a workforce need within a business, that to me is nirvana. That's what the business needs. That’s what the consumer needs.

Forecasting is becoming increasingly complex these days . . . We always recommend our clients to have flexibility because forecasting is not going to be 100% accurate. Even if you try, you have all the data in the world and you have all the right techniques . . . and that's where I think GigCX could play a really important role.

I absolutely endorse GigCX. We as business owners and business leaders have to be flexible. Needs are changing, expectations are changing, times are changing. Businesses need to be able to staff up and staff down to bring in the right kind of expertise for the right situation, whether it's specifically GigCX for customer support, whether it's UpWork or Fiverr or other things or any other skills.

The world is going in this direction, but from the CX side, there are people who bring great expertise and they're all over the world.

It's nice that you can do it at low cost, but the most important reason for using GigCX is to slice into the resource pyramid and get flexibility with a human angle and quality.

Seasonal variances are also so much easier to handle with gig. Look at the holidays with Xbox. You've got this huge rush for about a three-month period, and it happens to coincide with the time where a lot of passionate gamers, maybe take vacations because of the holidays, and so they have some spare time, and they can hop in, answer a couple of questions, actually get paid for it, and it handles our rush, and we don't have to hire a whole bunch of advocates just for three months, who then become unemployed. So it's much better for everybody, really.

GigCX was wildly successful. We were much more cost-effective and much more successful from a customer perspective.

Particularly in the macroeconomic state that we're in, cost will be something that everybody looks at. And it's not uncommon that some organizations view support as a cost center. One of the things that is going to be more important than ever is how do you use your support center, and how do you use that moment when your customers or members reach out, and how do you turn that from contact center into business insights. They don’t contact you when things are great and say, ‘Love you guys.’ They contact you when something's wrong, and that's a moment of truth around your product or your brand. That's going to be a real differentiator: how do you think about the move from cost center to insight center, and then really strengthen your product.

There are a lot of benefits to organizations as well. We talked about the struggle to get talent and the need for that expertise. But I think it's also a really good way to have flexibility and to have scalability without growing the cost base. Looking at the cost base is something that organizations are really laser-focused on at the moment. The ability to maintain that quality of service, even grow that quality of service, without growing costs is a huge advantage.