The TMI team played host to a group of customer experience professionals. The purpose was to get together to discuss key trends, share best practice and identify any emerging needs over the next 12 months.

1. Snapshots and Outputs

2. On 25 February 2016, the TMI team played host to
a group of customer experience professionals. The
purpose was to get together to discuss key trends,
share best practice and identify any emerging needs
over the next 12 months. So in a stunning penthouse
in London, ideas were exchanged, food was
consumed and yes, we confess, even the odd glass of
bubbly was imbibed!
As you will see over the next few pages, the
need to focus on customer experience has
never been more top of mind and is certainly
not just the next battleground but rather the
one that we are all in today!
Budgets and timescales often conspire
against desire and intention and the real skill
is to know where to invest for the biggest
return. Journey mapping and co-creation are
experience lies more in the upfront discovery
and deploy phase.
Inspiring and sustaining a workforce to
deploy great experiences remains the biggest
challenge. Everyone wished they knew how
to inject more fun, energy and commitment
into the workplace.
So in summary, as we look towards the rest
of 2016 and beyond, our take at TMI is that
customer experience is undoubtedly growing
as a key organisational priority. Whilst there
is a need to approach it in a structured
it’s really important to make sure we don’t
engineer the fun and the intuition out of the
process. Where once there was often just
one lonely customer experience voice in
an organisation, often there is now a whole
team. The real danger is that the customer
experience team doesn’t become a silo in
itself and instead should serve to knit and
from what can be disparate parts of the
organisation.
And the hero of the piece? Well – we’re all
in violent agreement that it’s the customer.
The customer is not the passive consumer
hothouse. No – the customer is front and
centre of the process. The trick is to involve
them in a way that taps into their intellectual,
their functional and their emotional insights
– at a conscious and subconscious level –
and to be able to transform that insight into
the day itself and the discussions had. If you
were one of the participants – thanks again
for coming. We hope you enjoyed the day.
And if you weren’t able to join us but want to
make sure you don’t miss out next time – if
for no other reason than to receive a coveted
TMI notebook! – drop us a line and we’ll
make sure you’re on the list because CX in
the City 2 will be coming to another stunning
venue before too long.

5. Whoever heard of a session hosted
by consultants without some sort of
matrix model? Well – we made sure we
didn’t disappoint and had a framework
They were asked to note where they
felt their organisation was across two
spectrums – product vs. experience;
long-term vs. short-term focus.
Long Term
Product Experience
Short Term

6. Interestingly most people said that they were
in the bottom left box i.e. product-led and short-
term focussed but in the conversations that
followed it was clear that in almost all cases
their organisations were trying to move to the
experience-led, longer-term focus box.
And in many ways, that set the scene for the
importance of our session. Organisations in the
main know where they want to get to when it
comes to a customer-experience focus but for
many, the means to get there is still unclear or
perhaps at best, a work in progress!

7. Customer Experience Trends to Look Out for in 2016
During the session we outlined 10 customer experience trends that
we are watching closely at TMI this year. Not an exhaustive list by
any means but one that piqued our interest……
1
Customer
It sounds almost absurd that it has taken us so long
2016 will be the year of the customer and customer
experience. In a recent report from Gartner 89% of
companies surveyed plan to compete primarily on the
basis of the customer experience by 2016, a stark
rise from 2014 (36%) and 2015 (58%). This rapid
advance highlights the growing need for businesses
to adapt, improve, and excel at providing exceptional
customer experiences. And if there was any doubt
that businesses are listening, just look at the number
6-12 months.
It would appear that all of this is not before time either.
According to Accenture, the “Switching Economy” is
up 29% since 2010 as companies struggle to keep
up with the non-stop customer. The challenge for
companies and brands across all service categories
and channels today, from ecommerce, contact centres
and brick-and-mortar, is to engender loyalty – but the
loyal customer is an endangered species. Customers
are empowered by increasing control, as the digital,
global marketplace delivers ever greater choice and
saves them time, money, and hassle. Consider this,
Uber didn’t even exist before 2009 and it is now worth
over US$50 billion.
Quite apart the importance of avoiding customer
churn, research by Bruce Temkin found that the
correlation between customer experience ratings and
likelihood to repurchase is very high. They found that
across 20 industries, a modest increase in customer
experience could generate additional revenues over
3 years of between US$472 and US$824 for every
$1 billion in annual revenue.
2
Personalisation gets more personal
Certainly organisations have been talking about
personalisation for a while but today, we need to
increasingly move towards being more personal. Victor
Milligan, CMO at Forrester Research recently said that;
who they are, to respond to their needs and in many
cases to anticipate them.” Research performed by
Monetate found that 94 percent of marketers agree
that “personalisation of the digital experience is critical
to current and future successes. In 2016,
personalisation will get increasingly personal moving
beyond basic recommendation engines to creating
individually tailored experiences.”
We would argue that as organisations become
increasingly digital, there is even more emphasis
required on “being human”. It is so easy to forget
that we’re developing and delivering experiences for
people. We see facts, data, trends and don’t see the
mothers, husbands, children, friends – people with
their own stories and lives. Surely that’s what being
personal is really about. And if that’s how organisations
and people who work in them thought, maybe
the NHS, the backdrop for the Leveson enquiry in
journalism and the many scandals in banking to name
but a few.
3
Emotion
Just as 2016 is the year of the customer, the idea
After all, even Facebook acknowledges that we
like to emote in many more subtle and complex
ways than merely “liking”! So in 2016 we believe
those companies that can incorporate the human
component into their service design will be more
successful. As customers we expect things to “work”
– those organisations who gain our loyalty give us
experiences that we “love”.
4
Social
Providing service via social media channels has never
been more important. And those who expect it the
most are our millennial customers. Research shows that
they switch between laptops, smartphones and TV on
average 27 times per hour. (Yup you heard that right!).
So they expect brands to be ready and available across
a wealth of channels and platforms all at once – and
they’re not hanging around! According to research by
Desk.com, “25% of millennials expect to get a response
within ten minutes of reaching out for customer service
via social media, and more than 30% expect the same
speed of response when posting a query via text
messaging.” And no, they don’t want to “ring customer
service”. In fact, 34% of respondents said they would
rather have their teeth cleaned than have to get in touch
with a contact centre!

8. 5
Culture
its work in culture change and over the last couple of
years, culture is once again a key topic of conversation
in the boardroom. There is a real understanding that
it is pretty much impossible to sustain a consistently
good customer experience without a genuine
customer-centric culture. Despite best intentions
though, today’s organisations are becoming more
and more siloed making the reality of a shared
responsibility for the customer a challenging one. Chief
department become another silo of its own!
and their fellow directors create the culture, middle
and junior managers can either become the enablers
or the blockers. It starts or stops with them so the
smart organisations will be those who really focus
on skilling up that level of the workforce to drive
the culture in their teams in a way that places the
regardless of whether they are customer-facing or not.
6
Mobile
The topic of mobility is nothing new in 2016 and
indeed developing apps for mobile devices will no
longer be an afterthought but a mandate up-front.
There are over 2 billion smartphones in use now and,
in developed countries, penetration is approaching
100%. According to a recent study, 77% of those
aged 18 to 24 use mobile devices at least once
per month for customer support. But it appears
companies still have some way to go. 90% of
consumers said they have had poor experiences
seeking customer support on mobile, according to a
survey by Software Advice.
7
Digical
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of physical’s
demise have been greatly exaggerated”. Most
observers could be forgiven for thinking that the
physical premise was heading for gradual extinction –
after all, the pace of the digital revolution of the last few
decades has been nothing short of dramatic. But the
truth is far more nuanced than that. What we are seeing
is not one replacing the other but how the two combine
and interact with each other. That’s where the new
sources of value really lie. As humans, we will continue
to seek out people, we will continue to want to touch
and handle things – but we want to be able to bring a
digital component to that experience as well.
8
DIY
A great customer experience is often about
consumers being able to look after themselves. 70%
of customers expect a company’s website to include a
self-service application. 40% of customers in a global
survey said they actually prefer self-service to human
contact for their future contact with companies. Self-
service adoption will increase year after year with
Gartner predicting that by 2020, the customer will
manage 85% of the relationship with an organisation
without interacting with a human. The real challenge
for organisations is how can we convey a sense of
“being human” and encourage long-term brand loyalty
where the interaction is potentially so one-directional
(no boy-band pun intended). One answer lies in the
need to continually innovate and ensure that this
service stays relevant and useful. After all, embracing
DIY demands that organisations start with an in-depth
understanding of what a customer actually needs and
9
Once again, we are seeing an increase in customer
trend alongside DIY. But we certainly would not agree
with an HBR article that came out a few years ago
organsations to “stop delighting your customers”. The
trick is to take the pain out of the areas that customers
expect to be easy and then delight them where they
are actually going to value it.
10
Simplicity
We end these 10 trends with a plea from the past. In
1960, the US Navy came up with a design principle
that came to be known as KISS (aka Keep It Simple
Stupid). Now far be it for us to call anyone stupid,
but we would urge teams and organisations to
remove as much complexity as possible from the
customer experience. It is so tempting to “do more”
for customers when often what is required is to do
less. One thing worth bearing in mind though is that it
if one is culturally complex, so a good starting point
might be to strip out complexity internally in order to
encourage simplicity as a cultural orientation. And
yes, it pays to be simple. A Siegel and Gale Brand
Simplicity Index found that 63% of consumers are
willing to pay more for simple experiences and 69%
of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand
and simplify!

9. Our discussion on the day was
split into 4 key areas. For each
of these areas our customer
experience professionals were
given an ‘exam’ question.
(That sounds a little scary and
conjures images of exam halls with
scratchy pens – it wasn’t like that,
promise!)
Our guests were walked through
these four pods and asked to
exchange their views and ideas.

10. Then this great customer
experience concept was
taken to the DEFINE pod
where we discussed what
we needed to do to ensure
this experience was ready
to implement.
we ended on a discussion
where we discussed
DEPLOY a desired
customer experience in a
sustainable way?
In the DISCOVER pod, we
discussed how we could
ensure that we uncover
insights in the best ways
about the most relevant
areas for maximum use.
As people moved into
DEVELOP, the question was
how we could build on the
insight from discover and use
innovative ways to develop
experiences with customers
and employees.

11. The key discussion area in this group
centred around the type of insight that was
done and critically how this insight was
used through the organisation.

12. We started this
discussion by
posing an image
of 3 concentric
circles of insight
– Customer,
Colleague
and Market. Some interesting things
emerged from this discussion. First of all,
the overwhelming weight of insight activities
focus is on customer. Most organisations
do some colleague insight but it is often
reduced to engagement surveys or at best
focus groups. Our guests all remarked that
they most likely did not capture enough
broader market insight to include trends and
competitor information.
More importantly this concentric model led
many people to comment that there was
very little triangulation of data between these
three areas to
uncover the
real ‘nuggets’
and that often
insight in these
areas were
coordinated
which often led to duplication on the one
It is also worth saying that lack of insight
is often not the problem. If anything, many
clients described “piles of research” that
were virtually left untouched. Again the most
pressing need is to “join the dots” in order
to pinpoint priorities or areas to explore in
more detail. This wasn’t currently happening
often down to time and a recognition that in
some cases they were “too close” to the data
and they often needed an objective eye to
unearth critical insight.
As far as customer insight is concerned –
customer journey mapping is a mainstay
but more innovative organisations are
experimenting with new ways of conducting
research. This includes mobile ethnography,
even getting customers to wear Google
Glass as they walk through the experience.
Organisations were still challenged by
their ability to bring this insight to life in a
way that was meaningful to the rest of the
organisation beyond graphs and PowerPoint
slides. Bringing customers into board room
discussions – something popularised by the
NHS – is increasingly prevalent.
Customer Colleague
Market

13. The groups moved from Discover to Develop
– the theory being that when armed with
key nuggets from the Discovery phase, we
can proceed to ideation.
The conversations in this section focussed
around :
HOW
WHO
WHERE

14. Co-creation is seen as a key tool to develop
new ideas in customer experiences. Most
clients favour face-to-face co-creation
although some extol the virtues of online co-
creation platforms. There is a sense though
that perhaps we are not mining existing
conversations enough e.g. tapping into
social media conversations where ideas can
be spontaneous and often highly practical
because the conversations can be borne out
of frustrations in the moment.
In terms of who should be developing great
to the process these days. Organisations
are sometimes missing a trick in terms of the
extent to which they involve people within
their own organisation – particularly those
in operational roles, the front-line or as we
the organisation. There is a sense that we
need to balance genuine creativity with a
level of pragmatism – not so much that it
the conversations about the rather mundane
elements of a customer experience that
lead to solving issues that are of real
importance to the customer. A missing link
from the development process is sometimes
seeking input from experts or 3rd parties
who can stimulate further thought. And
the groups admitted that they probably did
not do enough best practice gathering or
observation and agreed that often “stealing
with pride” is an underused skill!
We have already outlined that the
environment can be and in many ways needs
to be more often a digital one. But much
can be done to improve the environment
that face-to-face co-creation is done in.
Care must be taken to create environments
that genuinely help customers consider the
experience at hand but also ensure that they
are at their most comfortable, natural and
honest.

15. During the Develop stage, possible new
concepts and improvements to the
customer experience emerge. This next
relevant and explicit. Our conversation
focussed on 3 key areas :
• The need to trial or prototype before
launching
• The role of standards
• The importance of champions

16. Trials:
Virtually all our
guests trialled
their possible
improvements
or innovations
before rolling
them out across the organisation. Trialling
was seen to be as much about proving that
the concepts didn’t work as about proving
they did work. In fact, some went as far to
say that it was in the failure of some trials that
real learning emerged.
Trials were also seen as a critical engagement
mechanism – it often led to organisational
buy-in, particularly if key parts of the
organisation had not been involved in the
development phase.
What is critical is to ensure we are clear
about what success looks like before
trialling. Know what you expect it to deliver
for you rather than merely measuring the
outcomes of a trial. Also, try and measure the
unintended consequences – less easy to do
practically because you have not planned for
them upfront but close monitoring of trials is
therefore critical.
Our guests talked about the importance of
keeping trials short and sharp. Sometimes,
trials went on for too long and lost a sense of
organisational momentum.
Standards:
The conversation around standards balanced
the importance of clarity and consistency
against the desire for empowerment and
personality. Standards can stultify freedom
to act. Standards should be a framework for
action, rather
than statements
of what you
should or
shouldn’t do.
The degree to which we need to be explicit
when articulating standards depends
to a great degree on the maturity of the
organisation and the “sophistication” of
the audience. For some, explicit standards
provide a safety net from which people can
then build in their own personality. Perversely
it is the standards themselves that provide
A critical
consideration
around
standards is
not so much
what’s in them,
but how they
are launched. When introduced badly, it can
come across as if the organisation is a well-
run prison. Care needs to be taken to inspire
and engage people in the organisation –
especially those who may have been in the
organisation for a while.
Champions:
The use of champions was seen as one of
the most important enablers to successfully
introducing improvements in customer
forms – they can be your classic early
adopters, the
role-models that
others choose
to follow.
Equally though
everyone talked
about the importance of converting a cynic
could be created.
Word of warning – Keep your champions
supported and engaged. Having a group
of champions that are then left to their own
devices is entirely counter-productive and
can end up having precisely the opposite

17. around the area of successful and sustained
deployment of the customer experience
improvements that had emerged through
the previous stages. It would be fair to
say that this is where the challenges (and
therefore the opportunities!) most lay.
This part of the process is about involving
the whole organisation. This is often
about moving from a customer experience
initiative to a cultural orientation.
We introduced TMI’s 5 Box model for
cultural change as a framework for this
conversation.

18. The “big picture”
– i.e. the strategy,
vision and values
underpinning
the desired shift
in customer
experience is about providing clarity. Then at
the other end of the model, structure, systems
and processes are about ensuring sustainability
and repeatability. Skills is quite straightforward
– this is really about the extent to which people
in the organisation have the hard and soft skills
to deliver the desired experience. The most
important box in many ways is ‘SIGNALS’
– to what extent are the explicit and implicit
signals that we send as a business aligned with
our espoused
customer
experience
aspirations. This
between cynicism
and credibility, fad
and reality.
The comfort zone for most of our guests was
required, in the main their organisations were
quite good at providing the right support –
internally or externally – to develop them.
There was also a sense that the mere fact that
this session was full of customer experience
professionals on the client side highlighted the
extent to which this role had been structurally
integrated into the organisation. There was a
health warning from some though – and that
was in terms of the remit and reach of this role
and the ability to transcend the organisational
siloes in order to provide a truly seamless
experience.
Most guests bemoaned the fact that they did
not believe they had enough investment in the
systems that kept great customer experiences
going. These included innovation processes,
frameworks that aligned to the customer
experience etc.
There was also
a concern from
some quarters of
the genuine level of
alignment about what
customer experience
meant in their
organisation as well as a potential lack of clarity
of ambition and goals in this area.
And yes – signals was a shared concern.
There was an acknowledgement that maybe
organisations were in danger of “formalising”
the structure and governance around customer
experience at the possible expense of energy,
fun and inspiration. Added to this was the
very real concern
that customer
experience was
often still seen as a
long-term project
rather than an
urgent here and
now issue which meant that it could lack pace
and organisational focus and would sometimes
be side-lined as something “more pressing”
took over.
Strategy
Vision
Values
CLARITY CREDIBILITY ABILITY SUSTAINABILITY
Signals Skills Structure
Systems &
Processes

19. Summary
So, there you have it. It seemed
we managed to cram quite a lot
of conversation in a few short
hours!
This session was as much
about giving our clients the
opportunity to network with
like-minded peers as well as for
us at TMI to listen carefully to
you to see how we might hone
So what are we going to do as a
result of this session?
We are going to strengthen
and colleague insight. This,
particularly the former, was a
gap in your current insight. More
importantly, we will be honing
our skills in “triangulating” the
data that you already capture
in order to give you access to
more actionable insights without
having to invest further in
additional research.
We will also broaden our digital
support some clients in this area
and will continue to innovate the
way we do this.
Critically, we will continue to
give you access to best practice
ideas to stimulate your own
development – through our
regular trendsletters but also
more ad-hoc “spotting” that we
will share with you.
We are going to be developing a
“ready-to-trial” kit which helps
you plan your trials so that you
can leverage your learnings
during and after the trial and
potentially be able to shape your
trial so that you can proactively
outcomes. We will also provide a
structure for how you can engage
your stakeholders and marshal
your champions.
For some clients our role is to
create a customer experience
“narrative” that is shared in
to ensure engagement and
alignment. Your conversations
highlighted that this is an
area that you might need some
support in.
So – lots to keep us on our toes!
All that remains for us to say is
a big thank you to those clients
who came to our session and
gave us their thoughts and ideas.
For those who weren’t able to
make it but would like to be on
our invite list for next time, do
let us know.
And of course, if any of you are
interested in pursuing some
of the areas we have outlined
above, please do not hesitate to
contact me at
gillian.james@tmi.co.uk or on
+44 7740 771900.

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