9 Customer Experience Trends That Marketers Must Be Aware of in 2020

With so many companies making it a priority to transform their customer experience, any company not doing so will be quickly left behind. So why is the customer experience so important? And how do you influence customer experience? Well the customer experience statistics 2020 has thrown up would illustrate that it is incredibly important in regards to your brand.

Companies with a stellar digital customer experience can command premiums of up to 25% on their products, so it can pay dividends to put time and effort into providing a great customer experience. Conversely, a poor CX can lose you customers quickly. Over a third of customers said they would consider switching to a different company if they had just one bad experience with a brand. This is why focusing on your customer experience is such an important element of your overall company identity.

The Benefits of Good Customer Experience

While it may be difficult to measure with a KPI or a specific number, the importance of customer experience cannot be overstated. The impact it can have is huge and but it has an outsize impact on whether your customers are happy and loyal to your brand. In a lot of ways, the customer experience differentiator can be the deciding factor between someone choosing to pay for your products or services or electing to go with a competitor.

With customer experience as a differentiator, embracing new technologies and staying on top of current trends is important in order to keep your customers happy and engaged with your brand.

How Technology Changes Customer Experiences

The customer experience landscape has changed enormously in recent years. Modern technological innovations now mean there are a wide variety of channels from which customers can engage with a business. This includes getting i live help either via a website or direct video link. Technology now means that businesses can have live chat functionalities with website visitors via instant messaging or video chat immediately. These tools aim to improve the customer experience by taking a time that is usually stressful for the customer, such as troubleshooting, answering questions or dealing with issues and looks to make their experience as simple and stress-free as possible.

The newest channel companies have to incorporate is social media. Social media is now a key pillar as it is a new avenue for sharing content with customers, engaging with them and receiving negative feedback and information. Social media allows customers to like and share the businesses they love, but also personally speak to the businesses directly and instantly. In today’s climate, customer experience has to go beyond just the point-of-sale moments and extend into a variety of other channels.

What Are The Customer Experience Trends 2020 Has In Store?

Following and implementing strategies built around the CX trends 2020 has to offer can be incredibly useful for your marketing strategy. Understanding the trends and utilizing them effectively can really help separate yourself from the competition. When it comes to the coming year, the trends likely to be seen in regards to customer experience include:

• AI – Expect more brands to utilize improved customer experience features through greater use of AI and chatbots in 2020. By combining both AI and chatbot technology with social messaging, brands will be able to automate and personalize their responses to their users instantaneously providing a much improved overall experience for people who interact with their brand.
• Hyper-Personalization – Consumers want hyper-personalized experiences more than ever before. People have now become accustomed to brands reaching out to them in increasingly personal ways such as: personalized emails, newsletters, and product recommendations based on previous purchases. By making this a part of your overall approach to customer experience, you will be able to give them what they want without them having to tell you.
• Greater Usage of Bots – Besides providing quick responses to customer questions, chatbots have a wide array of capabilities. They can deliver product information to customers when no human agents are available and some can even maintain an engaging conversation without people realising they are talking to a bot. As long as they are receiving a good customer experience, people won’t mind having to talk to a bot.
• Transparency – Transparency in the digital age is one increasingly important. Being highly transparent in terms of your advertisements, pricing, business practices, etc. can help build and maintain trust. Customers appreciate sincere messaging that matches and emphasizes your values. Dishonesty will be noticed, and once broken, trust levels are an incredibly difficult thing to repair.
• Increased Security Measures – Brands are collecting more and more data about their consumers and it is up to you to protect this information. Finding ways to further protect their data through improved management capabilities is vital. This will likely be done through biometric technology such as voice biometrics, fingerprint ID and facial recognition, making customer’s lives safer and more convenient.
• Omnichannel Delivery – Delivering a seamless and consistent experience across channels and devices will continue to increase in importance. To best serve your customers you need to be everywhere, all the time. People shop in an increasingly sporadic method, they will bounce from device-to-device, and channel-to-channel so you need to be there to offer great experience to combat this.
• Predictive Analytics – Predictive analytics uses consumer data and machine learning to pinpoint future outcomes. This can help optimize marketing campaigns to determine consumer responses and improve operations by forecasting inventory and managing resources before they become an issue meaning you can be proactive to situations rather than reactive.
• Data Protection – While the collection of consumer data is one issue, the protection of data is a whole other world. A data breach can ruin digital customer experience and erode trust in the business as has been the case for many companies already. If you are not taking enhanced methods to secure data specifically, customers will think twice about interacting with your company and 2020 will only see this become more critical.
• Voice Control – Voice assistant technology is already being adopted by many companies. To keep up with this trend, brands need to invest in a headless commerce solution in order to make their products and overall customer experience available on a broader range of platforms; from voice-enabled speakers to phone conversations and voice searches.

Final Thoughts

The difference between a good customer experience and a bad one can essentially be boiled down to making the difference between a conversion and a lost potential customer. By repeatedly improving your CX and prioritizing the experience your customers have when interacting with your brand will build strong bonds of loyalty and has the ability to turn a one-off shopper into a repeat customer.

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