3 key insights from Forrester’s CX Europe 2019

More than 500 of Europe’s top CX professionals came together in London last week at Forrester’s CX Europe 2019 conference to delve into how they can transform commercial success through human-centricity, organised innovation, and customer trust.

UserTesting was proud to be a sponsor of the event. We had the pleasure of meeting some of the biggest brands in the world, hearing about their CX challenges and opportunities, and learning their predictions for 2020. 

Throughout our conversations over the two-day event, three key themes emerged:

Enabling employee-led innovation is key 

Ground-breaking innovations happen when teams work in environments that foster creative thinking and innovation. In 1975, Steven Sasson, an employee at Kodak, developed the first-ever self-contained digital camera—a major innovation of its time. Although Kodak didn’t choose to make the switch from film to digital, Sasson’s innovation proved to be one that shaped how we interact with the digital world today.

 Because of this, and many other instances of innovation that weren’t capitalized on, businesses are now moving into business models that foster, support, and even fund employee innovation. In other words, support of internal innovation can’t be overstated.

Remove barriers to innovation 

Innovation is limited to short-term change. Ideas are rejected instantly. Lack of effective communication. The list goes on. Far too much gets in the way of creative thinking and action. To fully enable innovation, the following can be done:

1. Appoint a cross-functional leader; this person will align each team into the overall innovation goals of the company and keep communication flowing throughout progress and key milestones. 
2. Align your teams clearly on different horizons; are these innovation efforts to produce results in one month, one year, or one decade? 
3. Enable innovation; invest in supportive resources, bring in C-level advocacy (Tip: secure a senior executive sponsor to back the innovation team) and work around those functional silos.

The Age of the Customer is now the Age of Trust

As more organisations are challenged to deliver internally and externally on CX initiatives, it’s no longer viable to have a siloed CX team. CX is changing to become a company-wide mission to achieve long term success.

Consumers are choosing to do business with brands they trust, and that they’ve had seamless, omnichannel and cross-functional experiences with in the past.

It’s not just consumers’ trust companies need, it’s their employees, too. Employees want to work for organisations that believe in values that they can associate with and are known to have a good reputation. 

During multiple sessions at CX Europe, employee experience was highlighted as a critical element of a CX programme—when employees epitomise the value that an organisation stands for, customers associate with it.

So what do we need to know for 2020?

As a new year embarks upon us, we reflect on the never ending strive to be better, and to deliver a better experience—for customers, employees, and our business. 

Success in 2020 means we must ensure our teams align to achieve our overarching mission statement, through innovation, internal organisation, and building trust with our customers, internally and externally. And most importantly, we must never stop gathering insights and information about our customers as they rapidly evolve across behaviours and expectations.

Connect with UserTesting in Europe

We had an amazing time at Forrester CX Europe 2019 and we’d love to continue the CX conversation with you and your team.