JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 CX has become a hot topic in the corporate board room today. Since the mid-2000s, the term has been appearing with increasing frequency in a variety of corporate discussions on business strategy, marketing strategy, customer service, and general business management. The earlier corporate focus on customers, as traced by Lemon and Verhoef (2016), has been in the forms of customer satisfaction and loyalty (1970s), service quality (1980s), relationship marketing (1990s), and customer relationship management (2000s). However, recently, as customers' expectations and interactions with businesses have been evolving at a rapid pace in today's dynamic era of consumer empowerment and digital disruption, a variety of modern CX programs have been created, and more programs are in the making. New strategies and technologies provide a tremendous opportunity for practitioners to capitalize on this emerging frontier of CX. This paper explains the nature of CX industry, its emerging challenges, trends and opportunities, managerial issues regarding CX, and a variety of CX emerging tools and analytics. The discussion is useful for CX practitioners focused on customer service excellence, as well as academicians interested in carving out research agenda about the important customer experience topic that is triggered by the intricacies of consumer empowerment and technological disruption. CX INDUSTRY: NATURE, CHALLENGES, AND TRENDS Nature of CX Industry CX industry has three major players: (1) CX management and marketing practitioners (CX leadership, middle management, retailers, and front-line employees), (2) third-party digital-solution providers for example, SaaS providers, and (3) industry analysts, experts, bloggers, commenters, and researchers. In the report titled "The Global State of Customer Experience 2016," developed by CX Network (www.cxnetwork.com) in association with Forrester and CRMXchange, over 700 survey-respondents, from all three categories as stated above, provide insights into the trends, challenges, and investment priorities that may be shaping CX in the near future. CX industry leaders admired by the survey- respondents include Amazon, Emirates, First Direct, Metro Bank, KLM, Virgin, Starbucks Coffee, Apple, Facebook, Google, Nordstrom, Zalando, Australian Government, Vodafone, Bloomberg, The Ritz- Carlton, Zappos.com, Hilton, Chick-fil-A, CAT, USAA, British Airways, Hot Topic, John Lewis, eBay, Disney, BMW, Naked wines, GE, and Samsung. In the aforesaid survey, the top CX investment priorities for the near future as stated by the CX respondents are: customer loyalty and retention, customer relationship management (CRM), online customer experience, customer insights, customer centricity (creating a positive consumer experience at all customer touch points), customer experience data and analytics, customer contact-center solutions, Voice of the Customer (popularized digital customer feedback programs), digital marketing, customer acquisition, omni-channel integration, cloud services, and employee engagement. Table I provides these areas of CX investment in a systematic fashion. 139 JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 CX Challenges The 2016 Forrester survey identifies two types of CX challenges: investment-related and overall. The top CX investment-related challenges include the difficulty in calculating and demonstrating ROI from CX products and solutions; finding budget for CX products, processes and solutions; broad level buy-in of CX focus throughout an organization; complicated internal sign-off process for CX products, processes and solutions; getting regional sign-off for CX products and solutions in a large organization; too much "noise" in the vendor market about CX products and solutions, but not enough bespoke products within budget; and too much vendor choice. The top overall challenges for CX practitioners, as identified by the survey, include creating a customer- first culture throughout an organization, identifying CX-area priorities that are mutually-competing, ensuring consistency across communication and distribution channels within and across an organization, shifting the organizational mind-set from product-focus to customer-focus, engaging employees in the customer-focus, digitally transforming the business, linking CX initiatives to ROI, gaining senior management buy-in, understanding the customer expectations and experience in-depth, keeping up with the rapid changes in the mobile- and social-platform technology, and upgrading customer-focused legacy systems. Suggestions to overcome some of the above CX challenges include Increased awareness, at the corporate level, of the importance of CX Identification of strategy and tactics for organizational culture change to customer focus Better communication about CX across different units of the organization Better case studies demonstrating ROI of CX Best practices, and better knowledge and understanding of the CX digital products and solutions that are available to support organizational CX needs Increased budget for CX programs, customer experience management development, and employee training about the implementation of CX programs Executive leadership to work together to agree on the key CX initiatives, determine how to fund them, establish shared goals, define success measures, and establish governance process CX Industry Trends The trending CX areas, as identified by the CX practitioners in the Forrester survey, are customer loyalty and retention, online CX, CX data and analytics, customer relationship management, employee engagement, omni-channel, self-service/automation, churn reduction, digital marketing, and social media engagement. Further trends as predicted by the CX digital solution providers include mobile platforms, emotional intelligence, and trust in customer experience. An additional trend predicted by analysts and bloggers is the evolving cloud services. Suggestions for preparing for the above industry trends include Seek advice from the experienced non-competitive peers Draw-up a short list of usable CX products and services based upon recommendations from digital solution providers 140 . Continually redefine the CX business model JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 Communicate and internally market the CX transformation plan and roadmap Develop both digital and offline CX strategies Shortlist a few CX solution providers Research CRM alternatives, and invest heavily in online and self-service capabilities Build business cases to demonstrate tangible CX returns Engage with vendors and internal partners on CX best practices Conduct constant market studies to understand consumer behavior, consumer trends, and the voice of the customer Simplify CX scale and processes Use customer intelligence to target valued-customers CX Technology Trends Within the larger domain of overall CX industry trends, the CX technology trends need special attention as customers lately expect more from their company interactions because of the continually-evolving technological and digital innovations. Technological evolution has been taking place at an unparalleled pace for the last five years. Examples include the proliferation of mobile interfaces and devices, the commoditization of the "Internet of Things via sensors and monitors, the rapid adaptation of tablets and touch-screen computers, micro- and mobile-payments, etc. Kolsky (2016) asserts that corporations need to tender to these technological evolutions at the same pace they are released, for delivering innovative and satisfactory CXs. Further note that the social crises and social tantrums" generated by irate customers are on the rise. This reality is creating a movement to further empower customers and let them determine when and how they will engage with a brand (Kolsky, 2016). Businesses need to constantly attempt to learn and understand that it is the customers who decide when, how, and why to interact with a brand and then attempt to meet or exceed customers' expectations to have personalized, optimized, and. in some cases, even automated interactions (Kolsky, 2016). 141 JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 TABLE I Emerging Areas of CX Investment Areas Which CX Practitioners Must Prioritize Subject to Their Goals GOAL 1. Overall CX 2. Contact Center investment AREAS OF FOCUS Customer journey mapping Customer loyalty and retention Customer satisfaction measurement Multi-channel integration Online CX Training and employee engagement Voice of the Customer (popularized customer feedback program) Dashboards and analytics Call recording and quality monitoring Knowledge management Live chat Self-service/Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Workforce training and supervision 3.Customer insight investment Business intelligence and reporting Customer and data analytics Customer segmentation Data mining Online CX Predictive analytics Social insights and analytics Social media monitoring 4. Digitaland social investment Conversion rate optimization Customer insights for action planning Digital content development Digital design Mobile marketing Omni-channel engagement Customer personalization Programmatic marketing Social media engagement 5. Marketing investment Brand strategy Content marketing Customer insight/intelligence Customer relationship management (CRM) Data and analytics Marketing innovation Marketing effectiveness Mobile marketing and engagement Omni-channel engagement Social media monitoring, analysis, engagement Source: Compiled from The Global State of Customer Experience 2016 Report (www.cxnetwork.com) 142 JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 In this new customer landscape, A. Edmunds, the Chief Strategy Officer of MaritzCX, observes six major technology trends that facilitate customer service excellence: Big data: Big data, in the past, meant the storage" of large amounts of data. Now, it means the "quick access" to a large amount of a variety of data such as high quality data, relevant data, or even garbage data. Big data will become bigger" in the future with the "Internet of Things" that collects and exchanges data from a variety of inter-connected smart computing devices--thermostats, activity wristbands, cars, shopping carts, etc.--that previously were not connected. This means the view of customers will be derived less from traditional surveys, but more from operations data collected along the various touch points of the customer purchase journey. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): SaaS, also sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS has become a common delivery model for many business applications such as payroll processing, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resource management, talent acquisition, etc. Marketing, operations, and service departments can rent access to software globally- all without major IT department budget or help, thereby, shifting power to non-IT departments. SaaS makes it cost effective for a variety of organizations to get engaged in modern digital customer experience programs. Mobile platforms: Consumers are buying, researching, and interacting more through their mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This "anywhere, anytime" mentality drives the immediacy of CX programs, making them more impactful. Customer personalization: The technology has made it feasible to treat each customer as an individual, rather than a "number" in a market segment. A front-line employee in a service industry can have a quick and instant access to a 360-degree transactional view of a customer interaction, as all customer touchpoints are easily accessible digitally to the employee at the time of a specific employee-customer encounter. Application Programming Interface (API): API, a set of routines, protocols, and tools that allows other technologies to "talk" to it, has been significant in strengthening CX programs through some common APIs such as Google Maps APIs, YouTube APIs, Twitter APIs, Amazon Product Advertising APIs, etc. On their mobile devices, consumers typically use one piece of software, but share information with friends, family, and colleagues through another software by connecting to it, which is made possible through APIs. This makes the customer experience friendlier. Omni-channel integration: Today's technology makes it feasible to have a longitudinal and 360-degree transactional-view of the customer through collecting data in multiple channels--online survey, print survey, phone survey, unsolicited customer feedback capture, CRM, financial data, operations data, etc. This facilitates the maintenance of wholesome customer experience data. 143 CX-RELATED MANAGERIAL ISSUES JCS Vol. 27 (2), 2019 Based upon an exploratory and unstructured interview with a CX senior manager, the author of this paper compiled numerous CX-related managerial issues that are stated in Table II. Various CX managerial issues include setting CX corporate goals, capturing trust and emotions in CX, deciding and implementing CX tools and analytics, handling CX evolution, and crafting intra-organizational CX processes. Though the issues identified in Table II are self-explanatory, some of the issues therein are further elaborated below. CX Tools and Analytics Lately, numerous CX tools and analytics have evolved based upon the latest technological advancements. CX practitioners should stay up-to-date with the latest trends in technology as new technologies enable companies to make better CX decisions that, in turn, drive customer acquisition, retention, and growth (Magee, 2016). Some of the recently evolved CX tools and analytics are discussed below. Customer sentiment analytics: Delighted customers who "love" a company's brand tend to purchase more, stay longer, and recommend it to their friends, leading to faster organic growth (Magee, 2016). Traditionally, human feelings are captured through the self-reporting questions in traditional CX surveys (for example, benchmarking surveys and new account booked surveys). Now, human emotions can be captured through the emerging sentiment analysis techniques that include text analytics and voice stress analysis. Text analytics: Earlier, businesses detected customers' sentiments from the open-ended comments in traditional surveys. Lately, the increasing sophistication of text analysis algorithms enable computers to detect negative customer sentiment (causing customer anger) and positive customer sentiment or feelings (causing customer delight) hidden in constant inflow of CX unstructured data (free-form words), either directly or by proxy, from numerous sources-survey verbatim, inbound customer communications (call center notes, completed web forms, email messages, comment cards), online customer review sites, and social networking/microblogging (Facebook, Twitter, customer videos, Instagram). Numerous text analytic techniques that have become popular are word clouds, word pairs, keyword extraction, pattern analysis, and entity extraction. These text mining techniques convert unstructured text into categorized information or structured data that can be further analyzed and explored. Conceptually, text analytic techniques identify the "why" root cause behind customer issues, spot emerging customer issues on the horizon, identify hot button customer issues, and predict customers' future needs (Turner, 2016). 144