Just moderate increases in tailored customer experiences could augment your company’s earnings around 90% over the course of a few years.
But are you struggling with making your customers’ experiences seamless and enjoyable? Various surveys over the past few years conclude that customer expectations are not being met.
In fact, marketers themselves are more unsatisfied with consumer experiences, stating the overall experience should be easier and more engaging.
So, how can you enhance your customers’ experiences so they are perfectly aligned with their expectations – and your own?
Why Customer Experience is Important
You want your brand to continue to grow, right? Sustained growth is a direct effect of incredible customer experiences. When your customers have positive experiences, it builds loyalty with your brand, affinity, and causes satisfied customers to share their experiences with family, friends, and coworkers. They’ll even share good reviews on various review sites if you really wow them. This helps you retain your hard-earned revenue while earning new customers for your brand.
This is something that, as a brand, you must take personally. You should obsess about why consumers feel how they do when it comes to your brand – if it’s good, great! If not, figure what needs fixing. Either way, this is a dramatic way to grow your brand, and there are several customer experience tools to help you along the way.
Trends Shaping Up to Make (or Break) Companies in 2020
These are the nine most important trends you should be focusing on this year. If ignored, you run the risk of alienating your audience. If done right? This might just be your year.
Hyper-personalization
This is the year for hyper-personalization through all phases of the customer journey. Your company pulls in all sorts of data at each stage and in every department. But, sadly, most of it probably remains untouched. If you leverage predictive analytics coupled with cross-departmental data, you can build relevant marketing strategies that put your audience in the crosshairs at an individual level.
Privacy concerns
With all the data you’re collecting to hyper-personalize your targeting efforts, consumers are becoming more and more concerned regarding how their information is used, as well as who will have access to it.
A call for greater transparency will follow. This means your company will need to enact customer experience strategy best practices that offer traceability, outline your company ethics, and prove that you can be trusted with sensitive consumer data. As consumers become more concerned over the use of their personal data, businesses of all sizes have the opportunity to showcase their trustworthiness.
Voice shopping
More and more consumers are adopting voice-assisted technology. As consumers continue to embrace voice-activated tech, such as Amazon’s Alexa, brands will notice a dramatic change in audience behavior. A recent study by Google illustrated that over 70% of consumers who own a voice-activated gadget use the device on a daily basis.
Using these devices to shop for products is already a huge market – but it’s expected to accelerate in 2020 and beyond.
Chatbots
Chatbots are the perfect answer for consumers who need answers, whether it’s during or after business hours. It’s helpful for consumers, but it’s an incredible business assistant, too. When you don’t have humans available to answer questions, chatbots can offer simple information to your customers. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to grow, chatbots are becoming more and more lifelike.
Don’t worry – humans aren’t being replaced. But using a chatbot isn’t just common, it’s providing a good experience for your customers when you’re physically unable to – it’s a win/win.
Predictive speech analytics
Consumer behavior provides invaluable data that can help you provide impeccable service and fantastic customer experiences. Predictive speech analytics showcase your opportunities to win loyal customers and pave the way for valuable customer experiences. Not to mention, it eliminates the need to endlessly go over your customer’s history with your brand.
Predictive analytics overall
By pairing your data with algorithms and machine learning, you can deduce future outcomes of just about anything. If nothing else, predictive analytics can help shape all your future marketing efforts by understanding how historical data can pinpoint a potential future outcome. This helps streamline your operations and forecast inventory while managing your precious resources.
Augmented reality
From the first time you ever witnessed the magic of augmented reality (AR), you probably felt like a kid again watching their first 3D movie. But AR is quite an immersive experience. Customers today want to meet you on their turf, and when they’re ready.
Each of your demographics are different. For instance, most millennial customers prefer online communication. While it may seem a bit odd to video conference with your doctor, AR allows the “patient” to feel as though they are right there in the doc’s office interacting as they would if they truly were.
Cell-centric
With over 80% of the population owning a smartphone, investing in mobile-first technology is good business. Today’s shopper doesn’t get in their car and drive to your local store – in fact, 90% of all buying decisions originate online. And, to hammer the point home, 47.2 million people in the United States only use the internet on their smartphone as of 2019. This number is expected to climb to 52.3 million by 2021.
Customer experience improvement requires all departments in your organization to be aligned – the same goes for the mobile-first, or cell-centric, approach.
Efficient delivery
The days of repetitive human processes are gone. Robotic process automation, or RPA, replaces this repetition with robots that can perform the same tasks more effectively and efficiently. And for much less cost! The RPA industry accounted for around $250 million in 2016. That number is expected to grow to $2.1 billion by 2021.
Customer Experience in 2020 – and beyond
Now is the time your brand should be considering your current marketing infrastructure. Some of these trends require a bit of an investment into an upgraded infrastructure across your entire company that allows for customer experiences across all touchpoints and channels. An SaaS model could be the answer – something that takes care of its own maintenance, updates, and security. With your time freed, just imagine the customer experiences you could deliver.
