Experience management (XM) is a key focus for organisations battling for the hearts and minds of consumers. In 2019, businesses looking to achieve a competitive advantage through XM will need to understand the essential roles of emerging technologies and data analytics in delivering superior experiences, according to Qualtrics.

Qualtrics principal consultant Vicky Katsabaris says, “The field of XM is currently undergoing an enormous amount of learning and maturing. This has given rise to a number of key trends, most of which require organisations to understand and leverage predictive technology.

Qualtrics has identified some trends that businesses must be aware of in 2019:

1. Humanising through technology

Companies are starting to recognise that customers and employees have unique emotions, wants, needs, beliefs, and motivations. Data can help deepen this understanding and deliver more emotionally resonant experiences.

For example:

• Conversational listening will overtake traditional surveys to gain more customer and employee engagement.
• Customer emotions will be quantified and used to better understand and predict loyalty behaviours to different brands.
• The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to truly humanise experiences by making it possible to analyse endless reams of data.  
• Smarter self-service facilitated by AI will help organisations rethink operational processes and deliver immediate gratification to customers, whilst boosting frontline productivity.
• Augmented reality will redefine product and service experiences and improve customer decision-making by making experiential environments possible.

Katsabaris continues, “It's high time organisations start to incorporate the human element of experiences into their research and analytics. By recognising and categorising human emotions and drivers, organisations will be better able to respond to these appropriately, delivering a much higher quality experience.

2. Tailoring insights for action

While many companies recognise the value of data, not all are proficient at turning data into actionable and useful insights. It's essential for organisations to be strategic in how they collect information and tailor it to their separate audiences, and how they identify and act on improvement opportunities.

Trends in this area include:

• Delivering role-specific insights to agile experience teams to enable the entire organisation to take action – impacting at all levels from the individual customer and employee interactions to driving strategic cross-functional improvements.
• Organisations will pay closer attention to how their leaders connect with employees by activating engagement skills and removing the things that get in the way of empowering employees to be successful.
• Employee experience programs will become more strategic in driving business outcomes and move from an annual look backwards to a strategic tool in moving forward.

Katsabaris concludes, “To be successful, companies rely on engaged and motivated employees. This means they need to gather information effectively and analyse it appropriately to get the maximum benefit.