CX Trends to look out for in 2020
Customer Experience has entered the mainstream over the past few years, and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere!
Because CX ideas and technology continue to evolve, marketers need to keep up to date on the latest trends to ensure they’re consistently one step ahead of competitors and consumers.
This blog post discusses some of the possible CX trends we might see in the next 12 months.
Data Protection
Data breaches are increasingly getting more press and negatively impacting brand reputations around the world. Regarding Customer Experience specifically, consumers are becoming more privacy conscious.
While in recent times there has been plenty of discussion surrounding this topic (especially with the introduction of GDPR in 2018), it continues to move towards the forefront of consumers’ minds.
Businesses are beginning to realise that customers admire transparency. With this, we’re likely to see a lot more brands address customers’ privacy concerns in the future.
Hyper-personalisation
Despite consumers becoming more privacy conscious regarding their data, recent research on personalisation says otherwise.
Accenture revealed that 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from retailers that know their name, purchasing history and shopping habits. Personalised experiences establish goodwill and increase loyalty.
Constant improvement in the technology used to analyse big data make it possible for marketers to create new personalised experiences for customers. The growing number of consumer devices in use means marketers get a more in-depth look at their customers’ behaviour.
Hyper-personalisation is more than just using customers’ names and addresses. It goes a step further to leverage real-time data to deliver a truly personalised experience.
Chatbots & AI
With constant improvements Artificial Intelligence, it brings with it more chatbots on company websites and in turn sparks debate regarding human customer service versus automated chatbots on websites.
The hype surrounding the topic of AI doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. Customer service automation through AI opens many companies up to opportunities to reduce customer service costs and greatly speed up resolution time.
Many consumers have argued that dealing with too many chatbots results in a loss of personal touch. Due to this, we’re beginning to understand that human interaction is still such an important part of the customer experience.
In the coming year we’re likely to see companies react to this by attempting to perfect the balancing act between human and automated customer service.
We’ve discussed this balancing act in greater detail in a previous post.
Employee Experience
Employees are an incredibly important element of delivering amazing Customer Experience. The customer journey often begins with an interaction with employees.
In 2020 it’s expected that many organisations will start to see the importance of the Employee Experience and how it affects the Customer Experience.
Organisations that recognise the importance of the Employee Experience will begin implementing programmes to measure employee satisfaction. This is often done through satisfaction surveys and incentives.
Happy employees mean happy customers, ultimately improving customer retention.
Data-driven Culture
A data-driven approach is when a company makes strategic decisions based on data analysis and its interpretation.
All the trends discussed utilise data in some way or another, whether it’s chat-bots, hyper-personalisation or improving the employee experience.
Organisations are beginning to move away from the traditional approach of management making decisions based solely on their experience and more towards data informing management on the best move to make next.
Creating a data-driven culture won’t be an easy move for many organisations, but once adapted it’ll become apparent how outdated and destructive their old approach can be for the company.
2019 saw some very interesting developments regarding CX. These are just some of the trends we’re likely to see over the next year!
Are you looking to find a customer experience strategy that best suits your company’s needs for 2020? Be sure to contact us today on +353 1 8041298!
