With digital advancements, customer experience trends will be continuously shaped. By encouraging AI chatbots, predictive analytics, video marketing, personalized and consistent communication, businesses can now take new paths to engage their customers. They are constantly developing opportunities to strengthen their customer relationships and retain their targets. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must make customer experience their top priority.
Customer experience (CX) best practices are no longer just a nice-to-have, but rather an essential part of marketing success. CX technologies and trends advance quickly, and while that’s part of their strength, rapid evolution can also make it difficult to navigate CX trends and determine which ones are best for your brand.
To help you see more clearly and focus on the CX practices with the most compelling promise, here are the top digital CX trends worth mastering.
1) Personalized content
Now more than ever, customers are carefully evaluating the brands they choose to do business with. After experimenting with new ways to shop and engage with businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve seen what exceptional CX looks like – and many won’t accept anything less. Personalization offers a powerful way to connect with your audience on their terms, recognize their unique preferences, and recognize that the customer journey is no longer linear.
Closing this gap is easier said than done. From a content perspective, personalization technology requires you to create content at scale, modularize all that content, ensure it is tagged with the appropriate metadata, and configure all necessary integrations in advance. You also have to navigate a learning curve as you master personalization practices and technology.
The best way to start personalizing your brand content is to define a clear personalization strategy rather than making ad hoc or case-by-case decisions. To do this, you need to identify the personalization triggers that work for your brand, taking into account when and how your customers can most benefit from personalized and useful information. From there, it will be much easier to make strategically sound decisions, not only about the content you deliver, but also the digital CX technology that delivers it.
2) Conversational experiences
Not only do customers want brands to approach them in a personalized way, but they are also looking for a more conversational experience. This is due, in large part, to the influence of messaging apps, which have exploded in popularity during the pandemic.
According to Zendesk’s 2021 Customer Experience Trends Report, the usage of messaging apps on platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger has surged to approximately 2.2 billion monthly users worldwide. Now, customers interact with brands like they would chat with friends and family. Plus, they expect these conversations to be just as hands-on and personal.
Many brands use chatbots to engage their customers on these same applications or on their websites. When implemented well, chatbots can create rewarding digital CX. However, many interactions with chatbots still feel unnatural, lacking relevance and human warmth. Without the right investment in technology and strategy, you could unintentionally create conversations that don’t reflect the brand or satisfy customer expectations.
That said, chatbots can still benefit from natural language processing, which allows them to more accurately perceive customer intent and provide the right responses. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) also makes it easier to understand customer sentiments and provide highly relevant answers to their questions across multiple channels, including (but not limited to) chatbots on messaging apps.
However, the success of conversational experiences depends on your team’s ability to proactively address a few common challenges. As with any good personalization strategy, a great chatbot or conversational AI experience needs access to a large volume of high-quality data. AI also depends on the right training model to deliver the desired result. Building the right model for a truly engaging AI experience can take time, domain-specific expertise, and the right scale.
3) Predictive artificial intelligence
While AI plays a vital role in creating a conversational experience, it is also a key customer experience trend in its own right. Learning how to leverage AI for winning CX is a skill set that will only become more central to how brands engage customers in the future.
For example, customers already value self-service options that allow them to solve their own problems and access resources independently. However, underpinning it is a desire to feel understood and that the company will meet their needs as they change.
In the future, brands may turn to AI-based technology to proactively uncover customer needs and preferences on a deeper level. By collecting rich customer data in the form of complaints, questions, feedback and other types of comments through chatbots and other touchpoints, brands can develop a much more sophisticated understanding of who their customers are and what they want. They can then use this information to create relevant content and conversational experiences that meet customers precisely where they are.
Nurturing such relationships with your audience is essential to creating lasting customer loyalty, but doing so successfully also presents a challenge of scale. AI can not only help you collect the data needed to quickly identify customer pain points as they evolve, but also engage customers with a personal touch at the scale required. Ultimately, your team can use AI to map, orchestrate, and support your customers’ journey every step of the way.
Here on the other hand, there are a variety of factors to keep in mind. Your team must ensure both choosing the right AI tools to enable this approach and developing proficiency in their use. Consider dipping a toe in the water with a smaller pilot project rather than jumping straight into the deep end with an entire company, particularly if your marketing team and the company as a whole don’t yet have significant expertise in AI. By achieving a significant win with a smaller AI project to start, your team can build momentum toward successively more ambitious CX innovations.
4) A total experience
Brands have focused heavily on CX in recent years, and they’re right. However, employee experience (EX) is also becoming increasingly important from a business perspective and is starting to converge with CX. Industry experts call this trend total experience (TX), a strategy that integrates employee, customer, and user experiences to accelerate growth.
As companies rely on fully engaged employees to deliver superior CX, many brands are turning to many of the same technologies listed above to improve the workplace experience as well. For example, some companies already offer employees access to self-help chatbots or AI assistants that can respond to customer questions and requests in real time. Just as customers use self-help chatbots to get the resources they need, the same goes for employees. AI assistants and other tools have the potential to break down organizational silos, provide rapid assistance to their human counterparts, and help them work more effectively in remote environments.
This innovation may even begin to help solve another problem of scale: employee overload. It’s no secret that marketing organizations create exceptional content with small teams. Now, leveraging the right combination of technology and external partners can take the burden off your team. Businesses across many industries have achieved this through the use of automation and self-help tools, like those described previously. However, these are far from the only solutions having a significant impact on the employee experience.
Although TX is still an emerging trend, it is worth exploring here and now. According to CMSWire, the stage is set for total experience to be a determining factor in an organization’s post-pandemic success. Making progress in this area can be valuable from a branding perspective, as customers have made it clear that they care about how companies treat their employees. It can also unleash employee creativity and allow your marketing team to create truly exceptional content that resonates with your customers and advances the company’s customer experience.
Understand the biggest trends in digital customer experience
The customer experience is a content experience. With this in mind, updating your team’s knowledge on CX trends and practices can help pave the way for them to achieve the best ROI. Personalization, conversational experiences, AI and delivery can all play a role in customer experience in the future. By exploring what these CX approaches have to offer, you can position your brand to create meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers well into the future.
