The customer experience (CX) is an area set to undergo rapid change in the coming years. Already, we have seen great shifts in how consumers interact with brands and contact centres.

While many CX leaders understand the need for change and have laid plans to execute them, they often find their organisations hindered by the same tools, approaches, and technology they have used for the past several years. For your organisation to thrive, all of this must change. Your CX strategy will need an upgrade with the latest technology, advanced organisational operating structures, and a fundamental shift in the company-customer relationship. 

Customer expectations especially are driving the need for these changes. Technology advances in automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and robotics are impacting CX delivery. In turn, customer expectations have evolved. For example, people who experience AI-backed CX from a platform like Netflix will come to expect the same thing from other streaming sites. How well you innovate to improve CX will define your competitive advantage. So, you need to understand why customer expectations are changing and the technology that will support these changes within your organisation.

Here are four ways CX will change in the future and what your business can do to keep up.

1. Customer values will drive spending behaviour

There was a time when customers procured products and services to meet their needs and at a price point that suited them. Now, with many digital channels at their fingertips, the buying experience has reached a point where customers shape it to their preferences. The ecosystem from where customers buy is now a lot more dynamic than it once was, so customers switch their choices and spending across brands that match their inclinations.

Part of this change includes the way that customers choose brands to purchase from. Their preferences now include their values, and they want to buy from companies that align with their values and beliefs. Where people might have purchased a product of the best quality or the lowest price point, many now go for brands that align with their values. While the price and quality of products and services remain key, some people are willing to pay a little more for a company that promises ethical practices.

So, your organisation will need to leverage data collected about the market and your customers to choose when and how to integrate customer values into CX to strengthen customer loyalty.

2. Hyper-personalisation will take over

Just as customers tailor their shopping experiences and follow companies that align with their values, they will naturally progress to expect hyper-personalised experiences. 

Personalisation has historically been a tricky feat to pull off. It requires a great deal of data about individual customers to be stored and accessible in connected systems. The problem is that too many companies grapple with data silos and legacy technology that cannot keep up. As technology platforms become more intelligent and better integrated, and the underlying data stores communicate seamlessly, personalisation ventures become more plausible.

Your company must embrace the power of hyper-personalisation to provide excellent CX. Doing so will help you retain existing customers and attract new ones. Embracing a personalised approach is essential for any company looking to gain an edge over its competition and make a lasting impression on its customers.

It is pertinent to note that as hyper-personalisation becomes more accessible, your organisation must be mindful of data privacy concerns and compliance requirements. People want hyper-personalisation, but they also want to buy from companies committed to protecting sensitive information.

3. Automation and AI will continue supporting CX

For decades, AI has been a possibility explored in science fiction – with some forms of media depicting it as a positive and others placing it in a negative light. Now, AI has become a reality and part of business and CX. 

When boosting CX, AI is an incredible tool for delivering personalised experiences to customers and has stretched the availability of contact centres to outside of business hours with technology such as chatbots. Automation revolutionises how customers experience businesses today by enabling companies to offer personalised, efficient customer service and faster response times. Doing so can save your business time and money while delivering higher customer satisfaction.

4. Real-time data and CX will become the norm

We are witnessing a delivery time reduction from five to three days to one day. Delivery or service time has become crucial in delivering high CX. Many companies have not configured their operations to suit, but this will change. Real-time experiences will become standard for most industries, exerting tremendous pressure on organisations to generate real-time CX signals with context, retool operations, and leverage automation to keep up with the market.

Real-time data and CX are quickly becoming the norm for businesses looking to boost growth and increase sales. In a digital world, customers expect more personalisation in their shopping experiences than ever before – they want personalised ads, product recommendations, and even customer service tailored specifically to them. As a result, businesses must ensure that they can provide a positive customer experience and collect data from their customers in real time. By leveraging real-time data and customer experience technologies, your business can stay ahead of the competition and create an exceptional shopping experience.

Premier Contact Point can guide you through the future of CX

Our cloud contact centre solution aims to improve digital CX and make life easier for your agents. We provide affordable, innovative contact centre features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities. Our solution also includes a mobile app that supports your agents when they work outside of your office.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre.

Many customer experience (CX) trends are bouncing around industry discussions; artificial intelligence (AI), automation, chatbots, and virtual reality are buzzwords promising to enhance CX. 

With all these words going around, it is essential to remember that you cannot implement tactics for improving CX without first measuring your successes or shortcomings.

Measuring CX in a contact centre is important because it provides valuable insights into how customers feel about their interactions with your company. It offers an opportunity to benchmark your performance against industry standards and competitors, so you can identify areas where your customer experience solution excels and areas that need improvement to stay ahead of the competition.

How can you measure the success of your customer experience solution?

By gathering data from various sources, you can better understand your experiences with your contact centre and use this information to improve. Here are some methods for measuring the customer experience:

Customer complaints

Customer complaints are the first place you can look to measure and improve CX. What kinds of questions are your customers asking your staff? Are they complaining about wait times or other inefficiencies as soon as they get on the phone?

Complaints are direct, real-time feedback from customers about their interactions with your business. By listening to customer complaints, you can identify areas that need improvement to ensure customers get excellent service every time they engage with your business.

Net Promoter Score

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) provides a benchmark for tracking customer satisfaction over time. Your NPS will be calculated based on customers’ responses to the question, ‘How likely would you be to recommend us to someone else?’ Customers will rate you on a scale, and their collective responses will determine your NPS.

It is a metric that measures how your contact centre performs compared to your competition. By looking at NPS scores, you can better understand how your customer service is perceived.

Data from the customer journey

The customer journey can provide you with some valuable insights on any roadblocks in the customer journey.

The customer journey might include the process someone goes through when they reach out to your contact centre. For example, perhaps they call your hotline, go through an IVR workflow and then get redirected to self-service or an agent. Analytics on the customer journey can help you identify inefficiencies and make improvements to increase customer satisfaction. For example, if you experience a lot of abandoned calls within the IVR, you should analyse the points at which the customer disconnected the call and implement incremental callflow changes to determine if there are fewer abandoned calls.

What can you do with these metrics?

There are so many strategies you can leverage to improve CX. In fact, we recently wrote an eBook addressing 23 of them. I won’t go into all that detail here, so here are three areas where you can get started:

Leverage omnichannel CX

Your customers have grown used to choosing how they interact with people in their personal lives and how they interact with brands. For example, people who dislike talking on the phone can communicate with friends and family via text; they now also expect this same flexibility from your company when they reach out with an issue. So, you need a contact centre that offers various channels, such as voice, webchat, SMS, email, social media, etc.

Omnichannel CX platforms allow you to leverage various communication channels without increasing the number of applications you use or the strain on your team. It is about ensuring that your agents and customers have the same positive experience, regardless of the channel they use.

Through omnichannel CX, contact centres become more agile in responding to customers quickly and accurately, no matter the channel or device they choose. Customers will appreciate getting the help they need promptly, which can improve customer satisfaction.

Omnichannel CX also creates a more personalised experience for customers by allowing them to transition between channels and devices seamlessly.  By utilising a variety of communication channels, customers have more options to get in touch with your business, allowing you to respond faster and more efficiently. 

Refine and connect the customer journey

Consider how you can refine the touchpoints your customer interacts with when they reach out to your company. For example, perhaps your FAQs page has not received an update recently and needs answers to customers’ new questions. If you have not already, you might introduce self service customer support options, such as automated chatbots or visual IVR workflows, streamlining communication between customer service agents and customers.

For the efficiency of your agents and the satisfaction of your customers, you should consider how you can refine the processes involved with customer contact. For example, you might add a chatbot function – driven by AI – to your FAQs page so that customers can easily reach out if they don’t find what they’re looking for. If these tools don’t help, you want to ensure that customers are able to be quickly and easily routed to a human agent to address their query in the shortest time possible.

Improve the employee experience

The experience your agents have at work can impact the quality of service they deliver to your customers. Agents who feel overwhelmed and agitated might appear short and less empathetic towards customer inquiries. People that feel happy and engaged are more likely to go above and beyond expectations and deliver meaningful interactions with their customers.

Improving the employee experience is one of the best ways to ensure that customers get the quality of service they deserve. By improving workplace conditions and ensuring employees have access to the resources and support they need, you can foster a culture of excellence and ensure that customers are satisfied with their experience. 

For example, you might investigate the customer experience solution that your agents use. Their stress can increase if they switch between too many applications to serve customers or deal with data silos, making it difficult to know if they have the correct customer information. You might also ensure that your agents are up-to-date on their training, especially regarding handling upset customers.

Premier Contact Point can support you in enhancing CX

Our cloud contact centre solution aims to improve digital CX, automated customer service and make life easier for your agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel capabilities. Our solution also includes a mobile app that supports your agents when they work outside of your office.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.