Top 5 Emerging Trends That Will Shape Customer Experience (CX) in a Post-Pandemic World

Customer experience is almost everything. It is the backbone of brand loyalty, customer retention, brand advocacy, sustained growth, and the bottom line. Based on the insights from 15K+ consumers and business buyers across the globe, 80 percent of consumers say that the experience companies provide is as important as their products and services. With new technologies, platforms, and strategies continually emerging in post-pandemic era, it can be tough to keep up with which trends will have the biggest impact on CX.?One key lesson that businesses are learning about customer service is creating more human-centric experiences. Supporting?research?shows that companies that provide an emotional connection will outperform the sales growth of their competitors by 85%. Want to learn more? Here are the five of the most promising trends that are shaping customer experience in a post-pandemic world.

1.?????A Customer-Centric Journey and Experience

Developing customer-centric marketing, and leveraging best practices for its implementation are becoming "must-have" for brand recognition, customer loyalty, and overall corporate success in today's competitive marketplace. The recent study by McKinsey & Company found that "71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions - and three quarters will switch if they do not like their experiences". The benefits can include but not limited to, promoting new value, unleashing new opportunities for growth, increasing existing customer value and satisfaction, building a unique experience and/or reducing churn. This approach embodies all of your customers' needs at every stage, from building awareness to consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. This is unlike the traditional one-way communication from the seller/manufacturer to the customer. Companies should strive towards this ideal by creating interactive processes with customers to establish lasting relationships. One way of achieving this is by providing tailored and enriched support backed by timely and personalized interactions, rewards as an appreciation of loyalty, streamlined communication, engaging and informative content, short video tutorials, know-hows on how best to use the products and services to meet individual goals.

2.?????Increased Focus on Data Security and Privacy

Customers are becoming more sensitive about their privacy and data security. The last 2 years "rapidly and abruptly consolidated our reliance on digital services and platforms", and we are not going back. Based on the findings from EY Global Consumer Privacy Survey, the pandemic shifted consumers' expectations of data privacy. When customers were asked about factors they considered when choosing to share their personal data, 63% mentioned the importance of secure collection and storage, 57% control over what data is being shared, 51% trust in the company collecting their data. According to the survey, while "younger generations are more trusting with their data, 66% of Baby Boomers say a lack of control over third-party access to data decreases the level of trust they place in an organization". The permanent business decisions made around remote work and cloud solutions enforces the essentiality of having a solid data protection-as-a-service solution. Customers want businesses to be able to provide adequate protection for their important asset. The companies that are capable of transparently showcasing how they collect and use customers' data, and have stringent security measures in place, are the ones to create greater business opportunities.

?3.?????Acceleration of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has been on an upward trajectory since the pandemic, and this trend is set to continue. Seven out of ten board of directors accelerated their digital transformation and half might change their entire business model in the wake of COVID-19 disruption, according to Gartner. If there is something that pandemic has taught businesses globally, they should be ready for eventuality at any given time. Many physical businesses were caught off-guard when the Coronavirus pandemic hit. Many of them had no choice but to 'close shop,' while online stores thrived.?With the onset of digitalization, customer service has been experiencing an acceleration in transformation. According to a study by Boston Consulting Group in 2019, companies with the highest customer satisfaction score have generated twice as much shareholder value over the last 10 years relative to the average score. However, "a true customer-centric transformation often entails rethinking business or even the business model itself" and it can only be achieved through a holistic approach. A Study by McKinsey revealed that digital transformation in customer experience can increase the company's revenue by 20-50 percent. There are several building blocks of achieving a strong digital transformation in customer experience, and a crucial one is redesigning new digital experiences for the customers by tapping into collective customer feedback loop. The acceleration of digital transformation is not set to just promote business continuity but also help improve firms' productivity. Adopting digital transformation may yield results such as faster turnaround time on customer inquiries, 24/7 support thanks to AI-powered chat bots, improvement in operational efficiency and product quality, and introduction of new revenue streams.

4.?????Increasing Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Customer experience (CX) is shifting with a new generation of technology, harnessing the power of AI, machine learning, data analytics, and digital solutions like voice-to-text, which are rapidly being adopted by leading organizations. A survey conducted by Gartner reveals a substantial acceleration in AI adoption. The average number of AI projects deployed in organizations will be 35 in 2022, which is almost 9 times of the projects deployed in 2019. Forty percent of the respondents considered customer experience as the top motivator to use AI to serve external clients by deploying chat bots or virtual personal assistants. According to the report by Drift on State of Conversational Marketing in 2020, chat bots played a strong role in customer acquisition and brand communication channel. Nearly quarter of customers who purchased a product or service used chat bots as a form of a communication, which is 13% increase from the previous year. The healthcare and banking industries, where high volume of human interaction happens, seem to benefit the most from increasing use of AI, having 75% of inquiries handled by bots in 2022. By 2023, ecommerce transactions powered by chat bots are expected to amount in?$112 billion. In addition to increasing quality of the communication with customers, application of AI fosters a platform for seamless interaction, helps improve lead generation, enhances organizational agility, increases customer retention, generates data-driven insights, sheds light on effectiveness and efficiency of consumer-facing processes, offer proactive, personalized, and immediate solutions to common customer queries.

5.?????Hyper-Personalization

Salesforce call it as future of customer experience. Hyper-personalization is an advanced strategy in marketing communication and CX, where brands use real-time data on user behavior by harnessing the power of AI, to better profile customers and understand their needs, and deliver tailored offerings based on their preferences. According to Accenture's Personalization Pulse Check, 75% of customers are more likely to purchase from retailers who recognize them by name, recommend options based on past purchases, and know their purchase history. There are lots of ways hyper-personalized experience can be created. For example, Netflix analyzes ratings, multiple other data points, tracks viewers' behavior e.g. start, stop, fast forward, rewind throughout the streaming, and creates hyper-personalized recommendations that will better suit viewers' needs and wants at any given time. Another company that leverages hyper-personalization is Spotify by providing highly personalized in-app playlists, push notifications, and CTAs in email communication to enhance customer experience and drive engagement. In addition to entertainment, hyper-personalization is also observed in finance industry. There is a rising trend in banking landscape where companies tap into power of predictive analytics to offer rewards and redemptions based on customers' spending behavior. The benefits stretch well beyond personalized recommendations. It can help enhance brand loyalty, contextual offers, increase engagement, drive up cross-sell and upsell opportunities, reduce customer acquisition and retention cost, provide 24x7 customer service, and unique landing pages. Deloitte study shows that well-executed hyper-personalization can deliver 8X the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales by 10% or more.

?Final Take Away

Pandemic accelerated the transformation in CX landscape. Exceling in tomorrow's marketplace will depend on early adoption of today's trends. These five emerging trends are shaping how companies interact with customers. Watch the growth of these trends and embrace them to stay ahead of your competition.