Three priorities for the future
To navigate these challenges and the future of customer centricity, three key themes emerge:
Embedding customer centricity more deeply
Success is no longer just about designing better websites or apps. Instead, we need to help everyone in our organisations understand and serve customers better. This means empowering others to apply the same principles we have for many years, within their own specialist domains and operations. And it means creating value-chains that are customer-centric from top-to-bottom.
Keeping pace with change
As technology evolves rapidly, we need to become skilled partners with AI tools, understanding both their possibilities and their limits. This means learning about the material properties of the technology far more deeply. And it means using these new technologies to do what we do far more efficiently and at far greater scale.
Speculating on future scenarios
We need to get better at imagining and exploring potential futures. This means using design techniques such as Speculative Design, to show what tomorrow might look like, helping organisations spot both opportunities and risks before they become real.
What tomorrow’s organisations need to do
The organisations that thrive in the future will work differently from today. Success will depend on a deeper kind of customer centricity that shapes how the whole organisation thinks and works.
First, they’ll move beyond having specialist teams responsible for customer experience. Instead, understanding and serving customers well will be woven into everyday work across the organisation. Everyone, from finance teams to technology teams, will understand how their decisions affect customers’ lives.
