Customer experience (CX) will be more in the future- more data, more technology, more unexpected and delightful experiences. Whether those interactions take place in-person or online, there is also increased pressure to keep those customers. Organizations’ customer experience (CX) needs to adapt to changing customer expectations and behaviors.
Research after research demonstrates that consumer loyalty is declining as consumers place greater demands on suppliers of goods and services and express their dissatisfaction by migrating to other brands. The best way to prevent customers from moving to another provider is to identify potential pain points and address them before they arise.
The primary motivation behind organizations’ growing adoption of digital transformation is to transform their customer service offerings. In order to guarantee that businesses are providing high levels of customer satisfaction, the future of customer experience and customer service must be integrated.
To experience transformation, adopt a data-driven, design-led strategy.
Gaining a competitive edge by providing excellent customer service
Here are five strategies businesses can use to improve customer experience and beat the competition:
Achieving total alignment throughout the whole customer journey
Businesses must prioritize customers. Profit, revenue, and business cannot exist without customers. Nevertheless, companies have a history of failing to guarantee that all pertinent staff members have access to the information they need to make critical decisions. Businesses that work to become “customer-centric,” or prioritize the needs of their clients, will find that their clients will be loyal and return the favor.
Articulating and disseminating a mission-driven plan
Recently, organizations have prioritized social justice, environmental conservation, and DEI. Although not all consumers agree with an organization’s choices, many prefer to do business with companies that share their values. Customers can tell that a business shares their values if it recognizes and embraces the important issues that its leadership and organization support.
Being an organization that prioritizes personalization
Every customer should be treated by organizations as though they are the most valuable in the world. That entails using personalization to give them the precise ideal user experience. Businesses can use data to more effectively personalize at scale.
Businesses can target consumers where they prefer to be reached with tailored messaging to make their marketing more individualized. By asking specific customers for feedback on their purchases, questions, and service requests, they can gain a better understanding of their needs.
Or a product-level personalization could take place. For instance, hotels are beginning to offer more individualized services depending on past visits and survey results. Hotel guests may want a free massage or a free first drink at the bar. If the hotel creates personalized experiences, it is more likely to retain customers than a competitor that treats everyone the same.
Keeping abreast of major technological trends
It’s obvious by now that innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will transform customer-centric businesses and increase value delivery to all parties involved, particularly their clients. These technologies will become more and more integrated into various customer touchpoints, such as prospects requesting additional information, personalized messages following a purchase, and customer support teams assisting with problem-solving.
To obtain the information they require, customers will use self-service tools powered by AI and ML, such as conversational AI chatbots and generative AI applications. Additionally, those staff members will use AI and ML to more effectively and efficiently respond to their inquiries if they absolutely must speak with a customer service representative. Additionally, businesses will employ automation more frequently to reduce labor-intensive tasks’ effort and enable customer care representatives to provide superior customer service.
AR is another important technology trend that companies should adopt. Customers and businesses suffer when unhappy online shoppers return items. AR may let customers try products in their environment before buying.
Utilizing more customer insights for real-time decision-making
Using more consumer data to make decisions in real time Businesses, particularly eCommerce ones, are now able to monitor and evaluate each and every consumer interaction. Utilizing customer engagement metrics can yield substantial business benefits. Future CX strategies will therefore be more data-driven than in the past.
For instance, because AI-driven chatbots were trained using historical customer data, they are able to comprehend customer needs more accurately and provide solutions to them more quickly.
Organizations and CX leaders are being forced to reevaluate their strategies due to the decline of the third-party cookie, which tracked users and allowed targeting on the open web. Companies now have to rely on first-party data, which comes from Omni channel tracking on owned websites, social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, and apps, as well as zero-party data, which comes from information a customer shares directly with them.
Even so, firms still find it difficult to make decisions in real time, even with the availability of CX insights. Real-time customer actions were prioritized by CX leaders, according to a McKinsey study, but only 13% of leaders thought their current systems could support them in doing so.
McKinsey suggests creating a data lake as a solution, where relevant parties can access aggregate information to make better decisions, and all collected data pools are housed. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools can then be used by CX and customer service professionals to take appropriate action based on this data.
Accepting the Customer Experience of the Future
For over ten years, IBM has been assisting businesses in implementing trusted AI in this field. Additionally, generative AI has the potential to drastically change field and customer service by producing more conversational, human-like responses. IBM Consulting helps you use conversational AI to provide consistent and intelligent customer care by putting customer experience strategy at the core of your business.
With the goal of assisting you in overcoming the challenges of conventional support and providing outstanding experiences, IBM Watsonx Assistant is a leading conversational artificial intelligence platform. Watsonx and IBM Consulting can assist you in leveraging best-in-class technologies to drive transformation throughout the customer lifecycle. IBM have deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, data, and AI consulting.
