3 Things You Must Know About Customer Experience in 2019

The 2018 Customer Experience (CX) Index by Sitel Group features the results from a 17-question survey in late 2018 of 1,200 U.S. adults. The survey explored two key questions: “How does experience affect brand loyalty?” and “What forms of customer engagement are most meaningful to today’s consumer?” The CX Index report looked at customer experience themes like brand loyalty, preferred channels of engagement, customer service frustrations, and more.

Here are three main takeaways from the survey and what you can do in your business to improve customer experience scores:

U.S. consumers want convenient and personalized customer experiences, and they will pay for it. Consumers say they have better experiences shopping online (55%) vs in-store (42%), primarily because it’s more convenient. And nearly half of all consumers say they would pay a higher price for a product or service in exchange for a better customer experience. Interestingly, Millennials (51%) are much more willing than Baby Boomers (36%) to pay more for a better CX. Consumers also rated the best and worst industries for using technology to improve the customer experience; the best industries were online retail and telecommunication, while the worst were insurance and financial services.

What you can do: Look for places in the customer journey that can be more convenient – faster, simpler, or just more enjoyable. And if you are a retailer, pay attention to why the online experience might be better than the in-store one, and make an effort to leverage technology to make the in-store shopping experience just as convenient.

Customers are sharing their experiences on social media – good and bad. Many companies are afraid of social media – particularly Twitter – because of what they perceive as too many complaints. And while 30% of consumers say they would post a negative review online to prevent others from shopping with that brand, nearly half (49%) say they would post a positive review online or on social media. In both cases, Millennial women are the biggest sharers. While word-of-mouth marketing is important, keeping customers is even more so; nearly three-quarters of consumers (74%) say they would stop doing business with a company if they received poor customer support or had a bad experience, and 50% say they already have done so.

What you can do: Understand what kinds of experiences get shared on social media and focus on getting more customers talking about the positive experiences than the negative ones. The quickest way to accomplish this is to identify and remove simple pain points along the customer journey – like long hold times or slow website performance.

The human-to-human connection is key to a great customer experience. A whopping 70% of customers still prefer to talk to a human customer service agent via phone instead of trying their luck with an automated chatbot, with nearly half (48%) saying they aren’t confident digital “representatives” can understand and properly handle their request. To be fair, 26% don’t have confidence that telephone representatives are properly trained to assist their needs either. But the biggest frustration with telephone customer service is an old one: Having to repeat the same information to multiple people (38%), with waiting on hold (32%) a close second. Similar results were found with the question, “If you were experiencing difficulty with a product or service, would you rather reach out to a customer service rep or find the solution yourself if you knew it was available online?” where 60% said they would rather talk to Customer Service while only 36% said they would rather self-serve by searching for the solution online.

What you can do: Don’t look at technology such as artificial intelligence and chatbots as being replacements for human interactions; instead, they should be complementary. Most consumers still want to do business with another human being, and chatbot technology is not yet capable of handling complex requests. In addition, make sure you are handling customer service inquiries in the channels that your customers prefer, not just the ones that are easiest on the business.

[This article originally appeared on Forbes.]