3 Big Trends in ‘22 and how our new tagline connects to them all

What’s in a company tagline? For Discuss, it’s four small words that pack a lot of punch: Turning Experiences Into Insights. 

We developed this framework and more when the Discuss leadership team recently coalesced in the Seattle headquarters along the Puget Sound to strategize around the company’s 2022 plans. Reflecting back on what has been a transformative year — not just for Discuss and the research professionals we serve — but for entire industries, workers, and consumers, we took a step back to re-imagine the future of CX, UX and insights.

We developed a new vision in line with the transformative changes we’re seeing. Most notably, we see a huge shift in the world of CX, UX and insights:

1. 1. Customer experience is rising in importance. At a time marked by supply chain disruptions, labor shortages and fewer brick-and-mortar experiences, customer loyalty is not as reliable as it once was and more consumers are open to new brands offering better customer experiences. To survive in this environment, organizations need to provide better experiences. And in order to gain understanding and empathy, they need to infuse the ‘voice of the people’ into every decision that they make. Real empathy starts with a shift in the narrative, the understanding that people are people — they aren’t just customers and consumers.
      
      
   2. CX and Insights are finding alignment. No longer relegated to silos, CX and insights need to partner more as organizations realize that customer feedback needs to be shared broadly to impact strategic planning. To that end, they’re converging under shared objectives such as getting closer to customers, often reporting to a Chief Customer Officer.
      
      
   3. Quantitative and qualitative data are merging. Moving into 2022, we know that there’s a new normal – people’s buying behaviors and expectations have forever changed and digital transformation on both the quantitative side, and also the qualitative side of research is now critical for every organization. The companies that succeed not only need to access big, quantitative data about consumer behavior, but they’ll need to extract insights from qualitative data quickly and at scale. The tools to do so have arrived; there are no more excuses not to leverage the VoC for evidence-backed business decisions. 

Organizations that understand people’s lifestyles, behaviors, desires and needs make better products and services and can anticipate what customers will expect at every step of their journey. With a purpose-built people experience platform, we are bringing people together faster and more efficiently to bridge the gap in empathy for people and their experiences.

As part of Discuss’s re-imagining of the future, we created a new tagline: “Turning Experiences Into Insights.” As I explain in the video: 

Because so much has changed in society so quickly, organizations can’t use past trends to help them better understand their target audiences. Being able to quickly understand customer experiences has rightly grown in importance for making business decisions. 

But it’s about so much more than business decisions. Companies are being evaluated on their impact on people’s lives — whether that’s their company values, sustainability goals, or perhaps most importantly, their capacity for empathy. It’s about truly listening in-depth to, understanding and valuing customer experiences, attitudes, beliefs and opinions.

That’s what we’ve focused on here at Discuss for over the past decade and we’re doubling down on helping organizations turn experiences into insights.

We wanted to stress that when we amplify the ‘voice of the customer,’ at the heart of what we’re doing is connecting people and their experiences to organizations, and from those rich, in-depth insights comes aha! moments and a new level of understanding that can inform decisions at every level.

The complete video can be found on my LinkedIn page here.