“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years”
John Von Neumann (1903 – 1957)*

‘Tis the season to be making predictions, and I’m not going to miss out on the annual opportunity to be proven wrong and demonstrate the world’s unpredictability. As smarter people than I have already made most of the well thought-through predictions, I’m going to try a different tack; my challenge is to come up with predictions you have not already thought of, or at least not heard somewhere else. This of course, increases the probability that they are simply wrong. Anyway, there are seven of them… as always your feedback is welcome! Here are the first 2...'

#1 Net Promoter Fusion

This is a trend that I believe is set to accelerate in 2011. It seems too self serving to simply say that Net Promoter will continue to gain adoption in 2011 (which it will) so perhaps a more interesting observation might be that it won’t be as distinctly “Net Promoter” as it was in the past. I believe that more companies will claim to be adopting Net Promoter, but when we look at their programs they may have little in common with prior years. This is not your father’s Net Promoter.

This is in part because NPS has always been a big tent. Beyond the standard calculation, and the notion of promoters, passives and detractors, there isn’t much else that is absolutely “standard”. Lots of companies run their Net Promoter programs with lengthy questionnaires that look more like traditional programs; adopt focus groups in support of their understanding of loyalty and otherwise do stuff that they have been doing for years without the benefit of the moniker.

On the other hand, some of our favorite staples of Net Promoter Discipline are well practiced in programs that don’t care about NPS. Closed loop action planning, verbatim analysis, widespread distribution of data to front line employees etc. can still be executed with the most arcane and compounded set of loyalty metrics.

During 2011, companies who claim to focus on NPS may find themselves with more in common with those who don’t, than with those who claim a similar methodological choice. So what? Well, it’s a timely reminder that companies are wise to stay clear of perceived methodological purity solely in the name of a flavor of customer loyalty program. Get the basic principles established and stay true to them, but don’t be worried about being wedded to chapter and verse.

#2 The Social Media Sandbox

The majority of industry pundits point to the inevitability of social media as a lynchpin of your customer experience program. And certainly there are lots of firms willing to sell you solutions – many quite useful – to the “opportunity” presented by twitter, facebook and their ilk. But in 2011, significant corporations will continue to treat social media as a sandbox; an opportunity to experiment and learn in an (ideally) fairly safe environment. In short, we will make less progress than we imagine.

The hypothesis that social media is primetime for customer experience has lots of supporters and few willing to disagree. If you are selling solutions, your incentive to push the idea as mainstream is obvious, but lots of companies desire the publicity from being on the cutting edge – or at least making sure they are not seen as social media luddites. So a stream of exciting ideas and case studies is virtually guaranteed. Don’t read that as an indication that the kinks are worked out.

We can expect a few, well publicized examples of major brands engaged in sharp swerves, if not u-turns, based on micro-communities of vocal social media users. These groups are now quite powerful relative to their size and, once empowered, are hard to ignore. Only time will tell if the choices companies make will be the right ones. We can also expect companies to experiment with social media favoritism: you might get a more rapid response to a problem by tweeting than calling the established 1-800 number. The consequences of such service bias are hard to estimate. 15 years of call avoidance efforts around use of the internet might look silly if we just found a new route for creating calls, and many firms will be hoping that their customers don’t catch on to the notion that going through the support operation is less effective than micro-blogging your unhappiness.

What is a well intentioned customer experience leader to do? By all means join the experiment, try a few simple ideas and see what you learn. But it’s pretty tempting to let others do the heavy lifting and make the mistakes. 2011 might be a year to watch and learn.

* John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history.