Last week, marketer Yogesh Chavda and a diverse group of professionals gathered in "the Polka Room" with a lofty goal in mind--to get a jump start on predicting the future of customer experience.

Chavda chose a place that would take people out of the mundane and straight to the heart of creativity—the Catalyst Ranch. Located in Chicago’s West Loop, the Catalyst Ranch is a creative meeting and event space designed to be an incubator for fresh thinking.

The Catalyst Ranch is wacky, warm and nostalgic. The owner, Eva Niewiadomski, has been collecting antique trinkets and tchotchkes to decorate and furnish The Ranch since 2002 when it was founded. It's a perfect environment for creative thinking given that you need to understand the past and the present in order predict the future--especially the future of customer experience.

“The future is already here,” Chavda said. “ It’s just not evenly distributed.”

Chavda led the group through a series of exercises to map out trends, drivers and signals across industries that might impact the future.

“Disruptions in one industry are affecting other industries,” Chavda said. “Understanding what and how to assess these disruptions is critical for defining the future of customer experience.”

Though participants came ready to innovate their personal businesses, he challenged everyone to step outside their fields and think more broadly.

“Signals can come from anywhere and everywhere,” Chavda said. “Clusters of signals start to tell a bigger story about the future.”

After some brainstorming in small groups, the sparks and ideas started flying.

Chavda introduced tools like the two curve model to equip participants with a framework to think more strategically about the future of their customer’s experience.

Participants left the workshop with an understanding of what the first steps to defining the future state customer experience looks like and an outline of how to turn insights into a roadmap for implementation.

As the workshop came to a close, Chavda spoke briefly about how this was just the first step. To make the vision a reality, key stakeholders have to be invested, too. He left the group with a few ideas on how to get their organizations on board with fair warning -- “The work has just begun!”

About Y2S Consulting

Y2S Consulting specializes in market research insights and works with businesses to build growth strategies, future state business models, innovation pipelines and go-to-market strategies in Omni-channel environments.

#Disruption #CustomerExperience #Innovation #Foresight #IndustryAnalysis #BusinessModel