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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience Trends to Watch out For in 2021

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As 2020 was a defining year for most companies, businesses having a robust customer experience foundation came out stronger – which helped them reap the benefits of better loyalty and revenue. With the US Federal Government launching a customer-experience mandate for its 25 public-facing agencies, the importance of CX cannot be denied. According to Forrester, 25% of brands will achieve statistically significant advances in CX quality in 2021. 

So, what are the top Customer Experience trends to win over your customers’ hearts (and loyalty!) in 2021? Let’s find out:

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The omnichannel approach will (still) be the key to success

CX programs are becoming complex day by day, with 51% of companies using at least eight channels for CX only. While many brick and mortar stores moved their operations online in 2020, some are still struggling to provide customer service in the digital space. To drive sales and foster brand equity in 2021, it will be essential for brands to provide seamless, omnichannel CX. By integrating online and offline communication channels, a successful omnichannel CX plays a key role in delivering a unified experience throughout the customer journey.

How adopting an omnichannel strategy can help?

Discover the right channels – It helps you identify the ideal channels that customers prefer to get in touch with your brand. By staying active across those specific channels, you can deliver an engaging experience in real-time.

Effectively map customer journeys – By gaining visibility into your customer personas, it gets easy to map end-to-end customer journeys across digital and live channels. This empowers the customers to interact with your brand at multiple levels, leading to a cohesive experience.

Deliver a unified experience – No matter where your customer is, be it in-store, on a mobile device, or on your website, it lets you provide a consistent experience to your customers throughout the journey.

Customer Experience Trends to Watch out For in 2021 05

Personalization matters more than ever

There’s no denying that customers prefer a friendly and highly-personalized experience tailored to their needs. In 2021, businesses are expected to focus more on hyper-personalization in CX.
As customers need proactive and relevant outreach from their CX team, they want to feel valued throughout their entire journey. Moreover, 60% of customers expect to receive personalized offers and discounts based on the items they’ve purchased from a company.

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How to begin with personalization?

Unify & segment your data well – Ensure your customer data can be accessed by the customer service agents. Segment the data in your customer base for tailoring information to every specific customer persona. As customers can rapidly change segments, it’s crucial to use software that lets you use data in real-time.

Analytics makes the difference – Analytics should be easy to understand, instantly accessible, and generate relevant & actionable insights for demonstrating ROI. If your analytics fail to provide any actionable advice, they’re an absolute waste! 

As 70% of buying experiences are based on the way a customer feels while interacting with a brand, price or convenience are no longer crucial factors for influencing the purchase decisions. 

Artificial intelligence to enrich CX

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has completely restructured the ways brands communicate with their customers. According to Microsoft, 95% of customer interactions will happen through AI by 2025. With the use of AI, businesses can understand their customers well which contributes to higher conversions & improved customer loyalty. This customer experience trend will gain more popularity as the use of chatbots and virtual assistants are expected to rise in 2021.

How Chatbots can make a difference in CX?

AI-powered chatbots are self-learning and play a crucial role in creating contextual customer engagement. 

By understanding customer needs, they’re able to provide answers to customer queries instantly which builds better relationships. 

By automating low-level support, bots can help to reduce the workload on the customer service staff, empowering them to focus more on the difficult inquiries.

The chatbot market size is estimated to reach $9.4 billion by 2024 as more businesses will leverage chatbots for streamlining their customer service processes.

Video marketing strategy will boom

You cannot deny this fact – no matter how great your products or services might be, it’s impossible to maximize your reach without providing customers a solid reason to choose your brand. That’s where the role of video marketing strategy comes, which helps to engage the customers at every stage of their journey. In fact, 97% of marketers believe that videos can play a pivotal role in helping customers understand the products (making it a popular customer experience trend).

Why is video marketing strategy crucial? 

For demonstrating pain points – Every video comes with a purpose. By effortlessly covering the customer pain points, it can actively enhance the CX. In the case of video promotions, an emotional angle should be included to pique the interest of the potential customers. The video, potentially created through an AI video generator, should resonate with them on a personal level and ensure to provide something beneficial.

To explore psychological triggers –  For creating a long-lasting impact on your customers, triggers are the best way and that’s where video storytelling can help. To effectively improve the digital customer experience, businesses can leverage emotion as a psychological trigger for encouraging their prospects to convert.

To identify customer-preferred channels – You can spot your target viewers through the use of social media monitoring and analytics. Once you’re done with this, you can easily focus on various types of videos (create videos of different formats like instructional, length, live, how-to, etc.) and their respective performance across the channels.

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Virtual events will take the center stage

The COVID outbreak quickly transformed the events, moving them from in-person to digital. In fact, most businesses are likely to conduct hybrid events (a mix of in-person and digital) as they look forward to a COVID-free world. Thus, virtual events are here to stay. Moreover, this customer experience trend will be beneficial for those who want to target a larger audience with a small budget.

How to level up your virtual events?

Ensure your content is interactive – Any digital event featuring a salesperson reading a slide deck (without turning on the webcam) can be too boring! It’s important to make your digital events look more engaging. Including live polls, Q&As, or gamification features can help to keep your attendees engaged.

Branding should be consistent – When customers get to know about your event, their engagement journey begins at that moment only. Thus, the overall branded experience is crucial. No matter if they see a promotion, click through a registration form, or attend the event itself, you need to deliver a message with a consistent look and feel.

Become social –  To engage your customers, it’s important to figure out some interactive and informal ways. Including virtual games, virtual happy hours, or fireside chats can help to deliver a unique yet amazing experience.

More and more data transparency

To understand how a brand is perceived by its customers, one of the important factors is their transparency related to data collection and usage. Customers are highly concerned about the data they share and its usage like who is going to use it, where & how it is used. 

With a lot of scams and hacks happening around, customers hesitate to share their personal details anymore. As a huge amount of data gets exchanged during conversations, customers need more data transparency from businesses. 

While asking for customer details, there’s no point in hiding as customers have the authority to ask about their data and what happens once they share it. For instance, if you acquire data to offer a personalized experience or for some other purpose (without the intention of misusing it), then it’s necessary to keep everything transparent. It will not only improve customer communication but add brand credibility too.

Do you know 32% of customers would stop interacting with a brand they loved after just one poor experience? As customers expect a seamless and positive experience from brands in 2021, is your company ready to deliver on these expectations? Get in touch with Voxco to make the most of your CX strategy and explore new avenues for engaging your customers.

Check out our Customer Experience Hub and get a jump start on measurably improving the quality of your CX initiatives in this new year.

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Sahaj Sharma

Sahaj Sharma is a content marketer at Voxco. Owning a bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering, he loves exploring digital industry trends and creating content to help businesses shape their market presence. Apart from content creation, the other three things that vie his mind share are fashion, food, and travel.

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