Customer experience is becoming more complicated by the day and is gaining more attention today than ever. This is because customers are having bigger expectations these days from the brands that they patronize. For example, they expect brands to provide an exceptional but personalized experience across their different channels.
Understanding the latest trends in customer experience increases your chances of customer retention and overall satisfaction. This post will share four key customer experience trends you should watch out for in 2023.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience, in simple terms, is the customer’s impression of your brand through the different aspects of the sales funnel. It is also the total of the different interactions that your customers have with your business at different stages of their journey with you. One thing you should note is that a positive customer experience is essential whether the interaction results in a sale or not.
The main touch points that are key in creating customer experience are “products” and “people.” When you are impressed with a product, then you can give great reviews about it. The same goes for when a customer service representative helps to solve your problem. This is why customer experience is one of the keys to the success of any business. When you can achieve a positive customer experience, it breeds sustained business growth, customer loyalty, customer retention, and brand advocacy.
Customer Experience Trends to Watch Out for in 2023
To be sincere, customer experience is evolving rapidly. As such, there are so many trends that you can expect in 2023. Of all the trends, here are the ones we feel are the most important:
Personalization is essential
It is no secret that personalization is one of the biggest expectations of customers these days. For businesses that expect to serve their customers properly, it is no longer an option. Personalization is a norm that is proving to be highly rewarding for brands in different industries all over the world.
Figures show that companies that chose to implement personalization recently increased their revenues by around 15%. When you support personalization with marketing automation tools, you can increase revenues unimaginably.
Using chatbots
Once upon a time, customers were patient enough to wait for a customer service rep to respond to their needs. Today, everyone seems to be in a hurry, and customers can move to close substitutes if you don’t respond swiftly. This has raised a need for 24-hour customer service investment by companies.
The issue with this is that to run 24-hour customer service, you need to have staff that can be around all through the day. That’s going to cost a lot. A better option is chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. These chatbots have been instrumental in changing the face of customer service all over the world.
The adoption rate of chatbots globally is around 40%, mostly because of the pandemic. If your brand invests in chatbots, you can improve your overall self-service experience. This will play a major role in helping to create a positive customer experience.
Sincere data privacy
Data is everything these days. Businesses gather a lot of data about their products and services, customers, and the market as a whole using several tools. Because of this, customers are now exhibiting concern as to how businesses use their data.
For this reason, governments are requiring businesses to ensure customer data protection all over the world. To this end, there are new regulations in most countries guiding data security and heavy charges for data breaches.
One thing you must understand is that when you show clear security principles and transparency with handling data, you earn customer trust. This trust breeds loyalty and customer retention.
Voice navigation
Brands are constantly seeking better ways to help their customers navigate their products and enjoy their services. One such measure is voice navigation. This technology is becoming more sophisticated as it becoming better at processing natural language.
The expectation is that by the end of 2023, voice-based search would have risen to over $40 billion in value. Also, there is an expected increase in market share for spending through voice assistants. The expectation is that it will rise to about 18% in 2023.
Investing in voice navigation technology on your app or website can improve your inclusivity and accessibility. This means that you will be able to reach a larger audience.
Wrapping Up
Customer experience is a very important aspect of running a business in today’s world. This post has shown you four important trends you should watch out for in this area in 2023. What other customer experience trends do you know? Kindly share them with us in the comments section. Meanwhile, feel free to check out posts on SME360 to boost your business this year.