Spotting a trend doesn't require the services of a professional prognosticator. However, it does require knowing the difference between a trend and a fad.

One of my daughters, an emerging luxury fashion executive who keeps her thumb on the pulse of trends and fads, describes subscription video streaming services as a trend, but some of the popular content that these services carry are fads, such as Hunger Games, Squid Games, and Tiger King.

Because trends are much more reliable indicators of what's to come, as service designers we focus on them for devising new service ideas.

A host of customer expectations and behaviors have changed dramatically. Many of these changes are simply an acceleration of underlying market trends. These rapid shifts have revealed just how agile and evolving customer experience management (CXM) strategies need to be.