Why should you constantly watch out for new customer experience trends?
Well, because consumer expectations are constantly evolving.
Furthermore, in today’s customer-focused business world, offering quality products or services at better prices isn’t enough.
Customers want businesses to deliver outstanding experiences and will even purchase more from those that do.
Here is the proof:
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A satisfying customer experience is vital to the success of any business. In fact, 77.3% of companies believe it is a competitive differentiator:
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Furthermore, 45.9% of business professionals say customer experience is their number one priority for the next 5 years.
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With exceptional customer experience now at the heart of every brand’s success, it’s no wonder 62% of companies are planning to increase their CX budget to meet the changes in customer expectations.
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What do all these stats mean?
Great customer experience is a given these days so, you should constantly keep up with these customer experience trends to provide outstanding services to your customers.
1. Personalization is Very Important
Personalization is still one of the key customer experience trends as customers continue to demand companies to deliver personalized interactions.
In fact, 76% of customers say personalization encourages them to buy from a company and 78% to make repeat purchases.
Image via McKinsey & Company
Today’s customers want everything to be personalized from product offerings and recommendations to the contents they read.
Personalization is also vital if you want to craft the best Inmail subject lines to improve open rates and increase your Inmail response rate.
Here are practical tips to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
- Develop specific customer profiles
- Gather more data and leverage customer feedback platforms
- Train employees to be customer-focused
- Leverage AI and automation
- Coordinate your efforts across all channels
- Provide relevant content
2. Increased Reliance on Predictive Analytics
Whereas traditional data analysis focuses on past events, predictive analytics leverages historical data to predict events that are likely to occur.
Predictive analytics helps customer support teams determine actions that customers are likely to take so they can launch effective campaigns.
This is the reason the predictive analytics market is expected to increase to $28.1 billion by 2026.
Savvy marketers want to leverage their data to deliver more exceptional customer experiences than ever before.
Furthermore, predictive analytics helps you to know which customers to target with your marketing efforts. It can help you pinpoint potential risks and boost your customer relationships.
What’s more, reliance on predictive analytics helps marketers foresee customers’ needs.
Even better, predictive analytics can help you identify customers who are at risk of switching to your competitor so you can quickly act and retain them by offering them incentives or discounts.
3. Customers Want Brands to Keep It Real
In 2023, customers want brands to create great customer experiences by being authentic.
Customers want open and honest responses to important questions they ask during the customer journey. They also want brands to remember their values and stick to them in all their marketing efforts.
Typically, integrating authenticity into a brand’s customer experience encompasses humanizing every customer interaction.
Customer service needs to be honest and quick to resolve any mistakes that happen during the customer journey.
Marketers also need to be transparent about data protection. In other words, customers want to know what data brands are collecting and what they intend to use it for.
4. Customer Service is Becoming a Top Priority
Today’s consumers have higher expectations when it comes to customer service. No wonder business priorities for the next 12 months are service-related according to a recent Zendesk study.
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Customers want fast response times with many of them revealing that they will stop doing business with a brand that delivers poor customer service.
To up your customer service game, empower your sales and customer service representatives with a robust CRM system that offers automation tools for personalization, detailed analytics, better segmentation, etc. Here is Attrock’s list of the best Hubspot alternatives to help you choose the best one for your business.
5. Omnichannel Customer Experience is the Name of the Game
In 2023, customers are interacting with brands on multiple channels including websites, brick-and-mortar storefronts, mobile apps, phone, emails, and many more before making their final decisions.
Here is the evidence.
Image via McKinsey & Company
During all these interactions, customers expect a consistent experience with your content and processes.
Everything you leverage in your marketing efforts whether it’s brand videos, podcasts, or text-based content, customers expect on-brand experiences across all channels.
Additionally, customers want the experiences to be personalized.
Delivering outstanding omnichannel experience improves the quality of customer experience and satisfaction.
This trend is expected to increase even more as brands continue to explore new channels to avail their products.
ING is one of the popular banks that have mastered this customer experience trend. The bank allows customers to transact globally and offers unique customer experiences.
The bank’s sales reps are trained to handle customer support in different languages and offer omnichannel support to customers.
Here is how to improve your omnichannel customer experiences
- Understand your customers’ journey
- Gather feedback from existing and potential customers
- Make it easy for customers to interact
- Invest in tech
- Leverage analytics
6. Adoption of Chatbots and Virtual Assistants to Deliver 24/7 Customer Support
Today’s customers expect faster response times than humans can. To help meet these customer expectations, brands are investing in AI-powered Chatbots and virtual assistants.
This is to help automate sales and marketing processes and respond to and resolve customer issues faster.
In a recent Zendesk study, 60% of business leaders believe chatbots are driving large cost savings.
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Chatbots are increasingly becoming the first point of contact to aid customers get instant answers to their questions.
Brands are currently using chatbots to provide knowledge-based resources, troubleshoot problems, offer product recommendations, and more.
What’s more, with the help of natural language processing(NPL) chatbots can gather and analyze customer data during interactions.
Brands can use these sentiments to understand how customers feel about the support delivered and whether they are getting their problems solved successfully.
By offloading a bigger chunk of customer support operations, brands can deliver greater customer service experiences while also reducing operational costs significantly.
HubSpot is one of the leading CRM platforms leading in this trend. The brand delivers proactive customer support with the help of AI-powered chatbots that help to connect and welcome users.
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HubSpot chatbots help customers to find what they need and direct them to helpful resources where they can get answers to their questions.
7. Increased Investment in Self-Service Resources
Investing in self-service resources is one of the greatest customer experience trends that’s here to stay.
But why?
It offers faster resolutions, a better customer experience, and is convenient.
According to a recent survey, 95% of companies reported growth in customer self-service requests in 2021.
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Due to this, brands are investing their time in creating detailed FAQs, instructions, and help centers with detailed information, as well as other helpful resources.
This is to help customers solve their own problems without engaging a customer support agent.
Investing in self-service resources doesn’t only help to save time and offer quick solutions to customers but can also translate to a massive ROI and great customer retention.
Conclusion
According to a survey by Insider Intelligence, 88% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
Furthermore, as consumer expectations continue to increase, brands must constantly strive to deliver outstanding experiences.
Customers want personalized experiences so brands must leverage predictive analytics to understand what customers want.
They also want brands to be authentic and deliver digital experiences.
The good news is that brands have massive amounts of data that can help them uncover useful insights into their customers to serve them better.
