Personalisation and the Human touch the key focus for consumer businesses in 2024

A new research report from Qualtrics has found an interesting trend: Based on a substantial survey of 1,200 consumers there has been a drop in the levels of customer trust, advocacy and intent to buy.

It’s important to understand that this doesn’t represent a crisis for consumer-facing businesses, however. Rather, it simply represents some disruptive macro trends, and that’s an opportunity for a forward-thinking and agile business to pivot and drive success.

Let’s dig into the numbers:

According to the Qualtrics research:

1)????? Consumers are making fewer complaints?to brands -?72% of consumers do not share feedback directly with a brand after a bad experience, up 6 points from 2021. However, this is in part because half of consumers will tell their friends and family instead, 14 per cent will leave an online review, and 13 per cent post to social media.

What this means for a business: It’s important to be proactive in seeking out and responding to feedback. Rather than taking things “behind closed doors” as with the traditional feedback process, now a brand needs to be actively responding to reviews – positive and negative – on social media and on the major review sites. Having the right tone and a positive approach to feedback that the public will see will go a long way toward building faith and confidence in a brand.

2)????? Consumers are placing a premium on human connection in 2024?– A full 64% of consumers prefer to engage with brands via human channels, and for all the hype behind AI, the reality is that they are concerned that AI-enabled services mean a loss of human connection, misuse of personal data, and sympathetic concern for job losses.

What this means for a business: Without a doubt, AI is a useful tool, and over the last 12 months we’ve seen an explosion in brands using AI to undertake a wide range of activities. We’re also now starting to see AI hit that trough of disillusionment where people are pushing back, hard, because we’re all suddenly realising that the moment you go off script with an AI, it all falls over completely.

How many of us have tried to contact a company, only to discover that the first (and only) point of call is a chatbot, and if the chatbot can’t help, you’re out of luck.

This happened recently to people with Raiz accounts. Raiz – an investment app that allows you to buy into the stock market in $5 increments – had a temporary technical issue that showed people’s accounts were vastly lower than what they actually had. People woke up in the morning and it looked very much like someone had somehow hacked into their account and taken as much as half their balance away.

The Raiz phone lines quickly melted down that morning, unprepared for an influx of the entire customer base calling in in a panic. The only other way to get in touch with Raiz was a chatbot on Facebook which directed people to call the hotline if it wasn’t able to help them.

The lesson here is that while you can invest in AI to make things easier, it’s important that customers still have a human-to-human option that they can rely on. Generally speaking, when things really matter, a customer wants a human contact to interact with.

3)????? Customer-facing employees are unhappy, poorly supported, and the least trusting?- compared to all employees morale and satisfaction is lowest among frontline employees - they don’t feel their basic pay and benefits needs are being met, they lack support to effectively do their job, but don’t feel they can propose changes to the way things are done.

What this means for a business: This one’s simple. Invest in your people. Especially when they’re all quite genuinely worried about AI replacing them. You need your frontline staff to be a visible and positive part of the brand.

4)????? Product & service quality still beats price?- Even in the current inflationary economy, the biggest purchase driver is product and service quality.

What this means for a business: When the cost of living is tight, customers don’t stop spending, but they become much more prudent about how they spend. This tends to mean the sales cycles become longer, and consumers look beyond price when making purchases. Again, providing the personalised customer experience that elevates the business is the key to success here.

Essentially, then, what the data shows is that the drop in the levels of customer trust, advocacy and intent to buy is a call for a renewed focus on personalisation and the human touch. Using automation and AI to support those efforts, rather than replace human interaction, is the key pivot for any consumer-facing business in 2024.

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