The marketplace is rapidly evolving, and competition has got a significant new dimension besides product, price, promotion, and placement – customer experience. As markets have become largely homogeneous in terms of offerings, what has really started to set brands apart is the unique experience that they provide to their customers. Customer Experience (CX) trends for 2021 will be largely focused on easing the customer journey and leaving a positive brand impression on the customer.
With the rising competition to deliver the best experience to customers, it is the need of the hour for brands to look out for these top 7 customer experience trends in 2021:
Personalized experience
According to Accenture, 75% of customers are more likely to buy from a business that knows their name, their buying history, and/or makes suggestions based on their past purchases. The idea is to make full use of big data by tailoring a brand’s offerings to best suit a market segment.
Transparency with customer data
Speaking of big data, customers value transparency when it comes to brands’ possession of customer data. For each data point that a brand asks from a customer, the brand should provide a reason for asking the same and what it intends to do with it in the future. Besides enhancing the brand’s credibility, this also ensures that more customers feel safe to share their personal data in return for some form of convenience.
Customer servicing will be more profit-oriented
Shifting from traditional ways of customer servicing that aims at resolving customer queries only, customer servicing in the modern world will be more focused towards enriching customer relations to facilitate upsell opportunities and increase revenue and profit margins. The key to this will be finding a loophole in the market’s customer experience standards and delivering an experience based exactly on that.
Customer servicing to go digital
According to Forrester, digital customer service interactions are expected to increase by 40%. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted customers indoors and it is likely to stay that way. It is now a requisite for brands to focus more on digital customer servicing to reach out to maximum number of customers with satisfactory standards of customer experience.
Contactless servicing
Pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have shifted to contactless customer servicing. This is indicative of brands actually caring for customers’ safety and the safety of a society as a whole, which further enhances brand credibility.
As per an IDC survey, a contactless service process will be used by over 36% of manufacturers for their service or product installation. IDC also expects that by 2021, 65 percent of businesses will have made the transition to digital first, with automated processes and contactless interactions.
Chatbots over human interaction
To automatically respond to direct messages from customers, chatbots are being integrated with social media platforms (most notably Facebook Messenger). This is one of the most prominent trends in the context of customer experience and service.
Chatbots have two big advantages over human-to-human communication: speed and availability. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can handle a greater number of queries than humans and do so at a near-instantaneous pace.
Creating an emotional connect
Standing out from the crowd and catching consumers’ attention has become a growing challenge for brands in the competitive digital advertising space over the last decade. As the battle for consumer attention becomes more intense, brands are turning to storytelling and digital marketing to find new ways to communicate with their consumers and create loyalty.
Many digital marketers are concentrating their efforts on creating emotional bonds and interactions with their audience rather than conventional product ads. This storytelling-based marketing trend isn’t recent but is just rising in popularity.
Each of these trends is in some way related to brand image, which makes each of these practices integral to stay competitive in the evolving market. Managing customer experience with Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the new way forward to gain an unbeatable edge in the competitive market. Simplify the journey to CEM implementation with Talisma and deliver a customer experience that sets a benchmark in the market. Visit Talisma to learn more.
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