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The Gist
- CX trends emerging. Digital touchpoints transform customer journeys, enhancing engagement and interactions.
- Customer experience trends. Rising customer expectations fuel demand for responsive, hyper-personalized brand experiences.
- Latest trends in customer experience. Emotions drive customer decisions, urging brands to adapt rapidly to evolving CX trends.
Technology has enabled brands to remain connected with their customers at nearly every digital touchpoint — helping transform the customer journey and boosting engagement in an attempt to create more meaningful interactions. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the current CX trends.
As digital adoption continues to remain a buzzworthy trend within the realm of business development, similarly, customer expectations have been on the rise. Nowadays, customers expect brands to be more responsive, immediately resolving their pain points, while simultaneously delivering a more hyper-personalized experience.
The Zendesk CX Trends Report found that nearly 60% of consumers have made purchases from one brand over another purely based on the service they had expected to receive.
Customer decisions and satisfaction are driven by emotion — businesses improve top-line profits. As brands begin to realize how rapidly CX trends are changing, keeping ahead of the curve has forced companies to rethink their customer strategies, enabling them to capture consumer interest and focus on staying ahead of market competitors.
Related Article: Top Customer Experience Trends You Should Watch in 2023
Looking Ahead: CX Trends Redefining Business Opportunities
Understanding how customers’ needs have changed over recent years has led companies to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) tools that deliver more optimized analyses of the customer journey.
Additionally, artificial technology helps bring more light to customer experiences, enabling brands to create omnichannel communication that is not only specific to one business segment.
Today, customer experience is a cross-functional business activity that sees the collaboration between various departments. For business leaders, this creates an opportunity to grow their customer focus group, while developing strategies that address unique challenges and drive engagement among various touchpoints.
Current CX Trends: Mapping an Omnichannel Customer Journey
Mapping the customer journey can lead to developing key strategies through which brands have more visibility regarding the habits and behavior of targeted customers. As platforms become more digitally integrated and utilize advanced algorithms to improve user experiences, brands will need to develop a more omnichannel approach that can help them create customer personas based on these touchpoints.
Part of this process would require brands to understand the touchpoints through which they are attempting to reach customers, but more importantly, define their customer engagement approach.
Brands that are currently leveraging multiple digital touchpoints will need to build a more dynamic strategy that captures the full extent of the customer journey throughout. The deliverable here would mean that it’s no longer possible to group customers under one umbrella, but instead build a customer experience journey that directly meets various users’ needs and adapts to their changing behavior.
Most importantly, remember that these considerations will need to be applied both for in-store and online customers. While there is more difficulty surrounding the opportunity to capture a clear pathway to understanding the digital consumer, compared to in-person contacts, the ability to analyze consumer data, and apply this directly within the customer experience strategy, will play a vital role in application success.
Current CX Trends: Build a More Robust Customer Data Analysis
Aligning various ends of the customer experience journey with brand motifs requires the ability to understand, process and analyze customer data. Already brands have realized the valuable potential data sets can hold to build toward customer-centricity; however, the application is often a two-sided problem.
For starters, collecting consumer data, including demographic information, product and service preferences, and online behavior requires a vast amount of expertise. On top of this, there are often limitations to the amount of data that can be collected.
While companies have traditionally relied on digital forums and surveys to better understand their customers, these often only capture a small percentage of the wider picture. Research by the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that customer experience surveys often only sample 7% of a brand’s customers.
Secondly, sorting and analyzing customer data needs to have an existing, or overarching, objective. Brands need to clearly define what it may be that they’re looking to retrieve from this data, and how this will impact the process of developing a more dynamic customer experience journey.
Although consumer data is immensely important, as it provides key insights into market trends — without a clear objective these efforts often lead to a lackluster approach that can leave key questions unanswered.
Current CX Trends: Provide More Hyper-Personalized Experiences
Hyper-personalization continues to be one of the biggest, and perhaps most important, customer experience trends that are helping brands scale their business, improve customer engagement and build a more loyal following.
In a similar vein, however, it’s possible to see that brands leveraging data sets and metrics can create more tailored experiences for their customers, as they are able to better understand customer needs and how to reach them more effectively.
Research shows that personalization can help drive brand loyalty and retain customers for longer. Roughly 88% of online shoppers have said that they are more likely to continue supporting a brand or retailer if they’re able to offer a personalized experience via their website.
The same research revealed that younger shoppers are more concerned about brands’ personalization efforts compared to their older counterparts. Around 96% of Generation Z and 97% of millennials said that they will continue supporting a brand that provides them with more tailored marketing, service and productive delivery.
This goes to show that regardless of the business, or the industry in which it operates, personalization continues to drive customer loyalty. This would reflect not only on part of the company’s consumer engagement efforts but also their ability to invest in the necessary data tools that can provide them a bird’s eye view of their market while staying several steps ahead of their competitors.
Related Article: 5 Tips for Improving Personalized Customer Experience
Current CX Trends: Adoption of Artificially Intelligent Tools
One of the biggest, and perhaps most remarkable, developments that has enabled more companies to leverage specific AI tools is the level of automation that can be integrated along with these existing technologies. By automating specific pockets of the customer experience journey, brands can leverage AI-driven tools to focus on meeting customer expectations and resolving key client pain points.
At the same time, this helps to ensure that customers can have on-demand and real-time interaction with trained chatbots that can help provide the necessary information or guidance relating to the customer’s query.
By integrating these sorts of systems, brands will be assured that customers have a constant touchpoint with the company, without relying on human capacity to oversee these activities. This becomes an immensely powerful way to resolve staffing shortages in specific areas of the business and can help minimize the need for human interaction or the routine completion of mundane tasks.
Companies that have spent the necessary resources on developing, implementing or deploying some forms of conversational AI chatbots have found that this helps deliver a greater return on investment based on minimal financial allocation.
Current CX Trends: Voice-Enabled Customer Service
While the voice commerce market is actively growing, new opportunities are constantly presenting themselves to companies that are effectively looking for ways to create a more authentic and interactive customer experience.
Already there is a plethora of voice-centered digital tools, specifically designed to help customers search for services and products related to their needs. More importantly, these devices can help track and monitor consumer behavior, helping to create more optimized search results and execute demands more effectively.
Through voice assistant customization, voice-enabled devices can learn user preferences and further help transform the way consumers search for products and services online and make purchases.
For brand leaders that are not yet convinced by the possibilities of voice technology, some research found that 22% of consumers have managed to successfully execute a direct purchase using a voice-enabled device and voice technology. These services help to directly contribute to the customer experiences, allowing them more seamless access to the brands and companies they are most likely to support.
Customer satisfaction with voice-assistant purchasing tends to be higher. One study by PwC found that 80% of consumers who use voice-assistant purchasing technology were satisfied with the overall experience.
Voice commerce is still an upcoming industry that requires businesses to better understand and leverage more advanced technology. However, by investing in these systems, brands can become more accessible, not only to their more loyal customers but in reality, broaden their footprint and overall market visibility.
Final Take: Understanding Current CX Trends and Consumer Behavior
Building a more robust, and effective customer engagement strategy requires brands to become more agile while seeking to integrate more advanced technology to help improve their understanding of consumer behavior, while simultaneously standing out from their competitors.
Companies that are able to minimize the silos within the customer journey help to increase their overall view of how the customer engages with their brand, but, more importantly, allow them to create more meaningful interactions.
By understanding current CX trends and how consumer behavior changes, and what drives these trends, brands can align their strategies to address customer pain points, create more effective engagement through the necessary touchpoints and ultimately strengthen their customer relationships.
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