Customer engagement is evolving at a blistering pace, as are customer expectations. The technology we use today to manage customer experience (CX) feels light years ahead of where we were ten years ago. So where will we be in another ten years? What does the future of customer experience management look like?Â
You’re about to find out.Â
Between web browsers, social media, email, and apps, people engage with the commercial world in an omnichannel way. Omnichannel, meaning a multichannel approach that focuses on seamless customer experience, no matter where your customer is shopping from. For example, a clothing brand might sell its products on its website, Facebook shop, Amazon, as well as brick-and-mortar stores.Â
Customer experience management will need an omnichannel approach to keep up. Reaching individuals on their preferred platforms, in their preferred language, will ensure higher response rates to customer surveys and better data sets.
More and more management tasks will shift to automation, decreasing human error and labor hours. Data sets will expand as algorithms continue to evolve, processing data in more nuanced ways and at stunning speeds.
This tech all becomes more compact and affordable by the day. Robust, data customer experience campaigns will become more common and the public will expect their chosen brands to keep up.
There's no longer any need to build a customer experience system from scratch. APIs will allow you to integrate customer experience with CRMs, correspondence, and project management platforms for more fluid and coherent CX campaigns.
Heightened collaboration will be a feature within company offices as well. The elimination of departmental silos is long overdue. Opening up communication between marketing departments and engineering teams will improve everyone's comprehension, performance, and morale.
It's nice to feel like a real person and not just another anonymous revenue source. Customers want to be treated like individuals – and this goes beyond simply personalizing the promo emails you send out. It's about knowing your audience, their expectations, and leveraging that knowledge to build relationships. Customer experience will depend on how well a brand holds up their end of the relationship. This comes in the form of direct, sincere, real-time responses to negative customer feedback. Keeping communication lines open with individual shoppers and the community at large will have at least two major effects: empowering a company's customer experience to evolve at a more rapid pace while building its brand around a customer-centric culture.
Many of us have experienced first-hand digital privacy invasions in mild or outright fraudulent ways. And yet, shoppers understand the value in sharing their data in exchange for improving customer experience.
To stay competitive, a business will need to respect this delicate balance. Trustworthy, reliable infrastructure for customer experience data is the first step any business should take in this mission. You need to be confident that your systems are not vulnerable to hacks. Businesses must make their data collection purposes transparent and their privacy policies clear for every customer they engage.
Tech tools and automation are essential, but these tools are only as strong as the people who use them. All the tech in the world can't replace the power of human creativity. How well a company can invest in their staff will determine the caliber of the customer experience they provide.
Provide professional development opportunities so team members can better understand the ins and outs of how they manage and deliver customer experience. Rely on the automation and analytic tools at your disposal to free up more labor hours to focus on these higher-order pursuits. Get a better understanding of how the team is feeling about its work by sending out surveys to everyone through your established CX management system. Google already does this, calling it 'employee powered data.'Â
Watch an exclusive video interview with the co-founder of one of the world's largest chains of hotels to see the top 5 employee engagement strategies.
More open communication, better relationships, a more humane approach to nearly every aspect of business operations – this is where customer experience is headed. We'll get there by harnessing the power of tech to make the process of customer experience more precise and less laborious at the same time.
The tools are already here. More and more businesses are taking advantage of them. The future of customer experience will be even more competitive than it is today. Where does your team fit in?Â
Explore your options to deliver more satisfying customer experiences.
