Digital Transformation Impacting Customer Experience Trends in 2019
Customers are forever to stay but with changing shopping and purchasing experiences, demands and responses. With this change in the demands comes the dynamic trend of customer experience. 2018 is almost at the edge and the New Year is already here with lots of new opportunities, improvements and of course, disruptions that will impact the customer experience adversely.
One biggest disruption that has challenged all the industries is technology. Brick and mortar stores being replaced by online marketplaces, long queues of reservations being replaced with online reservations, the birth of online registrations for various exams, virtual classes, online tutorials, eCommerce, video conferencing, tech gadgets and the likes. Every field today has witnessed a drastic change due to the evolution of technology in one or the other way but with the same motive-delivering delightful customer experience. Therefore, the year 2019 will focus on bringing in technology, coated with many other factors that eventually keep the customers in the center.
Here are a few trends that will keep enhancing and impact customer experience in the year 2019:
Omni Channel Experience
Delivering the constant customer experience on all the channels or touch-points where customers interact with the brand, has been important and will remain to gain more importance because of IoT. As more and more devices are connecting with the internet like speech devices (Google Home, Alexa), wrist watches, smart TVs etc. the organizations now need to be more ready to cater the customers everywhere.
Prompt replies and action
Customers do not like to wait and to solve this issue, Chatbots are the new version to deal with the customers whenever the human customer support is not available. Besides this, many eCommerce stores will change the long processes of shipment, refunds and replacement to make them quicker because a frustrated customer is no less than a bane and the organizations are trying hard to delight them to every extent.
The overall experience:
Customer journey mapping does not depend on departments anymore, but it has become a combination of various stages that involve each element of the organization in enhancing the overall customer experience. For example, if the customer wants to replace a product, then the journey begins right from identifying the problem till the product is replaced finally. This helps the organizations to define CX strategies and understand how each and every one fits in the entire customer story.
Predictive Analytics
Organizations are now speeding up to deliver more than customer expectations and predictive analytics is a way through. Companies are making such algorithms that can predict the glitches in the software, understand customer behavior etc. to suggest solutions or options before their demands. This is helping the organizations to be proactive and curb the issues even before they arise.
Natural Language Processing:
As there is lot of data and information everywhere, NLP is helping organizations to bring out meaning from the scattered data. The increasing number of customer touch points will direct more and more CX professionals to use NLP and analyze the number of happy and unhappy customers. This will help them to define more customer centric strategies.
Customer data safety
With increasing personalization in delivering the best customer experience, companies are taking a lot of customer data and to convince the customers to give the right data, they need to first ensure their data security. Organizations and brands today are focusing more on protecting the customer data by using cloud servers, machine learning to predict anomalies and track any cyber-crime or data theft.
In the end…
Though Augmented Reality has also captured its place in delighting the customers, it has not spread out much till now but the year 2019 can be an opportunity to use such devices that will make the customers feel special.
Well, only technology is not the right card to play when it comes to make the customers happy. It takes personalization attached with human sentiments and the right solution after all. In the end customers do not want to know how will you help them, they will just see how prompt and accurate your results are.
Focus on your customers and survive the disruption!
