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Everyone has their eyes on the future, but Bluewolf’s Chief Platform Officer, Steve Faris, says that’s a mistake. Speaking yesterday at CRM Evolution in Washington, DC, Steve discussed top strategies to keep pace with rising customer expectations. The desire to predict the future is so great that it drives entire consulting engines dedicated to this task. What everyone seems to forget is that all we have to work with is what exists today, right now. The best strategy, Faris says, is to use the tools at your disposal to find out what your customers want and keep a finger on the pulse of your organization and industry. Here are three things you can do now to get ahead:

Customer Journey Mapping
The best indicator of current and future success is customer experience. But before you can really understand how and why your customers are having a good or bad experience, you have to understand their journey using your products and services. Identify all customer touch points from beginning to end, pinpointing how and when your employees interact with them, both directly and indirectly. Once you have a complete picture, flag the points where customer experience needs to be improved and design a strategy to achieve it.

Predictive Analytics
This topic dominates every trend chart on every tech website for good reason: it works. If you have good, comprehensive data and ask it the right questions, you can begin to identify and understand problem areas: attrition patterns, lost sales, dips in web traffic. This deeper understanding of actual customer data drives targeted strategies to improve the customer experience and related business outcomes. Building on the power of predictive analytics, Steve went on to discuss the potential of cognitive intelligence (have you seen IBM Watson’s Met Gala dress?), which not only tracks analytical data, but the emotions behind it too, allowing for an even more poignant connection between your business and customers.

Art of the Possible
Despite claims of “forward-thinking,” most companies’ strategic goals are surprisingly limited. One of Faris’s exercises asked the audience to consider how their mission statements would change if they replaced their company name with Google and imagined they had all of Google’s resources at their fingertips. Now, ask yourself that same question- what would yours look like? Now, take what’s changed and make a plan to get there.

The beauty of these three tools and exercises lies not just in their initial insights, but in repetition. They are infinitely replicable and reusable, allowing you to adjust and course correct as your customers, business, and the market change. Take these strategies and help create the future while everyone else is busy trying to predict it.

Interested in learning even more about improving customer experience? Connect with our team of experts.