Takeaway: For businesses to navigate difficult times and remain competitive, it is imperative to explore the potential and use cases of the latest technologies and understand the evolving trends in customer experience.
It is safe to assume that you know what is customer experience. Yes, it is the sum total of the perceptions and feelings of a customer resulting from the interactions your customer has with your brand. This can happen throughout the entire customer journey with you, starting from identifying a lead to becoming and remaining a happy and loyal customer. Many brands, however, seem to believe that their products and customer service are superior, but you must keep in mind that what the customers think and feel about your brand is what matters.
You may also accept that the lifestyle, perceptions, and expectations of customers are not static anymore, but keep shifting with the changes happening in other areas of life and economies. What does it mean for you? You need to adopt an approach that can maximize the customer experience by assessing the constantly evolving CX trends and aligning them to your brands. How do you do that? Maybe, you will need outside help to understand the evolving trends in CX in the right contexts to help you build a customized solution, right?
We help brands by collaborating with them to provide insights for creating a customized marketing solution for their brand, factoring in their target market, company strategies, vision, and other relevant factors. For example, we use our AI tool to deliver critical insights on how we can better the experience for the customers even before they spend money or launch the program. Let us check some of the top cx trends that you should consider while working on enhancing the experience of your customers.
The top customer experience trends that you can’t ignore
Understanding your customers
Can you sell your products or services without knowing your target customers well? Doubtful, especially these days. A business should have a deeper understanding of its customers; if B2C customers, you must know who the customers are, where they live, how old are they, what are their income brackets, etc., and in case of B2B customers, where are they located, what is their business, which all geographies and regions they serve, what are their sales channels, how many years they have been in business, how is their financial health, and other related information.
Customers with impactful experiences will keep coming back to the same brand. They are also willing to pay extra if they get exceptional experiences as one of the studies by PwC has reported that the customers are ready to pay up to 16% more for a better experience.
Build an emotional connection with your customers
There is a saying “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it”? It sums up how the best customer experience is achieved when you create an emotional connection with a customer. It is about your ability to understand what customers think and feel by listening to your customer’s concerns rather than making the customers feel pressed to buy your brand.
Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of a customer experience is based on emotion. Another study says businesses that understand the importance of an emotional connection outperform competitors by 85% in sales growth.
Capture feedback in real-time
Are you delivering a WOW experience to your customers? You may ask how will you know. Ask for feedback from your customers in real-time, using live chat tools, having real-time conversations, or sending a follow-up email to every customer. Customer feedback helps build the customer’s trust in your brand and enhance the customer’s lifetime value (CLV). There are surveys that suggested that about a third of consumers would consider switching to another brand after one bad customer service experience.
Omni-channel experiences
Have you ever felt frustrated due to limited options to contact the customer service of a vendor? These days, most customers expect different ways and multiple channels to contact you, making omnichannel experiences a key customer experience trend to be considered in the future. In fact, studies have shown that majority of the companies are planning to spend money on building multiple channels for customers to choose their preferred channel to contact you.
Adoption of the latest technology
Customers expect a high-level experience on your online portal or website for searching, selecting, comparing, and checking out. They look for a similar experience in offline businesses.
Emerging technologies including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality have opened up the way for companies to deliver innovative experiences to their customers, including allowing customers a chance, for example, to virtually wear their apparel brand through any device like a smartphone. The best experience coming from technology adoption can include the facility for customers to track the shipment and even alert you on your inventory level or next replenishment date.
The expectation of today’s customers exceeds the personalized greetings and emails to expecting, say, product suggestions based on their purchase history or learning from their website activities. 70% of consumers say that they will purchase exclusively from brands that understand them and their needs.
Securing customer data
Customers expect their personal information to be stored securely by protecting data privacy. Clearly explaining your privacy policies, seeking customer consent to use their data, and describing how their data will be used, will go a long way in increasing customer trust.
Concluding Note
To sustain and remain ahead of your competition, you need to understand emerging customer experience trends and address them in your marketing strategy. It sounds difficult, but it is feasible if you engage with B2B tech company in the consumer and user research space – which can get you a 360-degree view of customers and markets, and better predict what the customers might need in the future, using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics (DA), and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others.