Top Customer Experience Trends of 2020

If you want to continuously improve your customer experience to keep up with your customer expectations, then ignoring the upcoming, hottest trends in customer experience is not an option for you.

The way we define customer experience is going to change in 2020, primarily driven by the rapid advancements in Customer experience trends, technology and tools available.

Here we will not only focus on the upcoming customer experience trends but also on the evergreen trends that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

2020 is going to be an exciting year for businesses that want to leverage customer experience to increase their ROI exponentially.

The predictions suggest an amalgam of advanced marketing technology with the right market strategy. So, let’s dive into what these trends are.

AI-Driven Customer Experience Trends

Different sectors are already benefiting from the speed and precision that AI analytics and technology has to offer to the business world.

AI, coupled with human insights, is going to prove very fruitful for the future of Customer experience trends.

According to an estimate, 85% of total human interaction will be replaced with non-human interaction.

The customer experience of the future will be based on intelligent devices and assistants powered by futuristic self-learning programs and AI algorithms.

There was already a 136% increase in the number of companies who adopted AI technology and AI chatbots in 2019.

We can only imagine what 2020 has in store for us in terms of AI technology. AI will give a new meaning to customer experience trends and with the right use of this technology, agents will be able to benefit from the relevant data and histories of their customers.

Companies must also provide a seamless transfer between AI bots and human agents and the agents will supervise and train the automated experiences being created by the AI bots.

It will change Customer experience in the following revolutionary ways:

Predicting Customer Behaviour Proactively

CX data, rich with elements of customer behaviour, is highly valuable to marketers who focus on delivering excellent customer experiences.

2020 is the year of identifying opportunities by embracing predictive speech analytics in order to provide advanced CX proactively.

These interactions have a direct impact on customer experience, thanks to their consistent nature.

Using predictive technology, marketers will be able to analyze and record not only live audio streams and voice files but also social media engagements, emails and chats, thus removing the need of going through the transactional history.

Analytic tools have the ability to assess more than 200 prosodic parameters of speech which will now be used to build a customer-specific profile that will shed light on customer behaviour and their preferences.

Using this valuable data, marketers will be able to predict long-term purchase patterns of their customers along with their other factors like related searches, their buying style and the time they spend while buying a particular product.

Easier Self Help

According to Nuance Enterprise report, 75% of the customers find it more feasible to resolve their issues through self-help and the majority of them also prefer it over agent support.

So, to accommodate the preference of every customer, a lot of service providers will be rolling out self-help tools and information with the aim of empowering their customers.

2020 will also see an influx in call centres making use of FAQs and investing in lucrative technologies like pre-recorded IVR messages and auto-attendants with the aim of winning their customer’s hearts.

Self-help tools have been a top customer experience trend in the past and they aren’t showing any sign of slowing down just yet.

There are a lot of reasons companies should focus on these tools.

With a constant change in business needs, or with the inability of the IT department to meet the business user demand, self-help tools come to the rescue of companies struggling with these issues.

Apart from that, any organization wanting to become more analytics-driven, must utilize from self-help tools and incorporate them in their customer care program. Some of the top examples of self-help tools that organizations must consider are given below:

Omnichannel engagement: Best Customer Experience Trend in 2020

2020 is going to see a shift from multi-channel marketing to omnichannel marketing with a focus on giving better control to customers.

Both multichannel and omnichannel marketing models involve selling to the customer via various available platforms.

The difference is in the customer experience of both channels. Usually, a multichannel company has its customer experience revolving around a website or a landing page along with a physical store and the interaction between these two channels are very different and offer different levels of customer experience.

However, in an omnichannel marketing model, the company reaches out to the customer at various points of his buyer’s journey. From the moment he googles a problem he is facing, to the moment he finds a solution.

Omnichannel engagement revolves around catching a customer in his buyer journey phase and instead of forcing him to stick to one channel, it allows for the company to create a unified customer experience by joining all the touchpoints/platforms of a customer!

Instead of customizing shopping channels used to reach out to customers, companies will start tracking the needs of their customers even before their engagement and utilize it to provide a unique yet rewarding Customer experience.

Directly tapping into the exact needs of a customer will give the companies a transparent gateway to building a loyal customer following to their products and services.

The key to omnichannel customer engagement lies in the fact that companies will be reaching out to their customers on the various channels where they mostly engage.

Voice Commerce

With sophisticated technologies like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Home becoming ubiquitous, people around the globe are becoming more familiar with voice commands on their devices, as a means of efficiently getting their tasks completed.

2020 will see this incorporated into Customer experience trends as well.

Customers will prefer voice commands to do online buying and companies will soon start rolling out voice command features to enhance the experience of their customers and reduce the friction between end goals.

The ultimate benefit of this technology is that it will allow customers to do online shopping in a real-time, hands-free way. Voice features along with display content will be used to make the overall experience more intuitive.

Smart bots, powered by advanced voice recognition, will also start replacing traditional bots that will redefine the way customers interact with AI.

Voice command technology will make it easy for customers to present their queries, or carry out their commands and that too without the touch of a button! But this technology has a rather noble use case as well.

Voice command is a gateway for visually impaired customers to interact with the brands they like, hence opening up a whole new customer base for companies who are willing to make provisions in this space.

There are a lot of benefits to voice commerce which would amplify the customer experience of any company. Voice technology is opening up new opportunities for e-commerce and the way customers prefer shopping online. Some of the major benefits are:

• The convenience that it provides. Consumers can now multitask and conduct online shopping with just voice-activated commands
• Voice commands also enable customers to make purchases 24/7 without having to deal with lengthy processes or long browsing.
• Voice commerce has sped up the online buying process which is something marketers should definitely leverage from in 2020. Customers now seek instant gratification and voice commands save a lot of time and hassle in online shopping.
• Voice commerce is also allowing marketers to gather more personalized data about their customers and providing them with even better customer experience. Devices allow marketers to gather information about customer behaviour and patterns and preferences and then use this data for future marketing campaigns.

An Agile approach to CX

Last but not least, we live in an era of instant gratification. This also applies to the way customers shop online or sign up for any services. 

Companies who prioritize serving their customers faster than they do today will eventually take the lead by the end of 2020.

Companies have to put themselves in the business of reducing friction, at all costs, between their customers and the products and services they want to consume.

Businesses who manage to successfully navigate this agile approach to doing so will find themselves standing on the CX battlefield.

Agile principles should not be limited to development teams as they have been.

This Agile methodology of testing CX and continuing to make small marginal improvements is making its way into all customer-centric organisations.

If implemented within your CX, it has the potential to transform the way your consumers interact with your brand, creating loyal brand ambassadors and raving fans.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest CX trends? Join GroHawk today and stay ahead of your competitors!