Shorter Customer Journeys in 2024

The Gist

• Customer experience trends. Generative AI is transforming efficiency and storytelling, impacting both consumer engagement and internal workflows.
• Engagement and efficiency key. Effective marketing hinges on engagement and efficiency, with visual storytelling driving growth and profit.
• Future of consumer experience. As generative AI evolves, its role in consumer experience and technological trends like 3D imaging will become even more significant in 2024.

Taylor Swift was Time’s Person of the Year in 2023. You might love it, you might hate it, but it happened. If Time had instead captured the zeitgeist by naming a Technology of the Year, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun to debate. Nothing could have beaten generative AI for the crown. 

Customer Experience Trends: The Promise of Great Engagement & Efficiency

Once ChatGPT launched, everyone raced to test its power. We marveled at how much faster we could achieve our goals by outsourcing mundane tasks like research and summarization to an intelligent, highly productive intern. The promise of greater efficiency took us by storm. 

At the same time, our social feeds started to fill with stunning visual creations from Midjourney and Dall-E. We could see that the promise of AI innovations lay not only in its ability to help us gather, understand and share information more efficiently, it could also help us tell stories in the most powerful of ways: visually.

Effective marketing and a great user experience ultimately boils down to those two things: engagement and efficiency. Engaged users move much faster through the journey and convert at higher rates, and visual storytelling captures attention and drives engagement better than any other medium. And if Bezos taught us anything, it’s that efficiency = growth and profit. 

As we move ahead 2024, what will the next chapter of generative AI’s story be within the context of consumer experience? And which other trend is poised to become part of our technological “Love Story”?

Related Article: Generative AI in Technology: Unleashing Higher Productivity

Is Generative AI Primetime-Ready?

Marketers dream up the digital experience. Developers build it. And developers really like AI in all forms. 

A recent survey of web developers found that 48% already use AI tools daily. Sixty-eight percent cite improved efficiency and productivity as a top benefit of AI. 

That’s great, but AI broadly has been around for some time. What’s particularly telling is that 54% already use generative AI tools for workflow automation, and 64% use them to streamline the development process. 

But it’s not just to help them code faster. Developers are also turning to more creative generative AI use cases, including to help create UI/UX designs (31%) and to create and edit the images and videos (35%) that are foundational to great visual experiences.

So, yes, generative AI is already making an impact on both internal efficiency and consumer engagement.

Related Article: AI-Enhanced Contact Center Platforms for World-Class Customer Service

Or Is It Our Technological ‘Anti-Hero’?

We all know that only fools rush in. The same survey found that 60% of developers are still concerned about inaccurate results. Strict adherence to brand guidelines is far from a guarantee, and questions around copyrights abound. It’s also rarely clear which model is best for which use case, or whether open or proprietary solutions are best. 

View all

In 2024, it will become clearer which work can reliably be delegated to generative AI, which models or tools work best for certain use cases, and new guidelines for the appropriate use of AI in web development will emerge. Along with the benefit of time for training the models, it’s easy to believe that adoption — and impact — is only going to accelerate. 

Related Article: How AI Is Revolutionizing the Customer Journey in 2024

3D: ‘You Belong With Me’

Beyond generative AI innovations, there are plenty of other powerful customer experience trends ready to take center stage in 2024. 

Visual innovations such as 3D and 360-degree images are perfectly positioned to help companies better engage the next generation of buyers while increasing conversion rates. They provide a more granular look at the subject than a static image or even a video can achieve. It puts the user in control, which unsurprisingly, gives them confidence to convert quicker. 

In ecommerce, nothing lengthens the customer journey like an abandoned cart. Yet 46% of shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were unsure if the items would fit. Meanwhile 50% say they’d be more likely to complete the purchase if they have access to rich media such as 360-degree images (57%) 3D models (53%) and UGC videos (50%). 

Plus, they help reduce the margin-eroding cost of returns: 30% of shoppers have returned an item because it did not look as they expected from the product listing. 

Legacy Formats: ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’

Finally, a note on image and video formats. While disruption in this space is a bit more measured — and attention a bit more muted — than in the case of generative AI, their impact on trends is crucial.

Why? Formats have a massive impact on the efficiency of the page, and thus page speed. 

Our recent analysis of more than 8.5 trillion image and video transactions from 439 global brands, found that WebP remains the most popular image format, but has declined from 60% adoption to less than 50% in less than a year. JPEG, still second-most popular, is experiencing similar declines.

That’s because high-efficiency modern codecs promise such a better experience for the consumer. In October 2021, AVIF had less than 1% adoption. In August 2023, it was above 13%. It’s now the third most popular image format. JPEG XL has also been gaining significant momentum as companies like Apple, Facebook, Intel, Adobe and Samsung throw their support behind it. 

Know What I ‘Mean’?

Worried about how you can keep up with the pace of innovation and rapidly changing customer experience?

Shake It Off. 

Focus on what you can control. Look for opportunities to improve the customer experience with tools that promise greater engagement and efficiency. Develop strong internal processes and do what you can to foster marketer and developer collaboration. 

At the end of the day, your Person of the Year is your customer. Do everything you can to celebrate them.

Learn how you can join our contributor community.