Terms like customer engagement, customer experience, and customer communication have been buzzwords for the past few years.
You might wonder why?
Engaging and interacting with customers frequently adds value to their journey and provides a holistic, personalized customer experience. It equips you with stronger connections with your audience by talking to them on the channel they most prefer.
Traditionally for years, businesses have focused on gaining market share and increasing revenues. But today, because consumer preferences have evolved–especially post-pandemic–businesses are looking towards newer and more interesting ways to nurture their customers.
However, this is not it. Customer needs and expectations are constantly changing based on new technologies and tools that understand their behavior and prompt proactive actions.
We have curated a list of five trends that organizations need to keep up with in order to deliver a long-lasting, memorable customer experience.
- The Metaverse
The term “metaverse” is still in the process of getting an accurate definition, but by and large refers to a virtual environment that allows creators of all sorts to recreate a digital universe of lifelike interactions. It might also include phenomena like 3D virtual avatars, live gaming, and many other advanced technologies.
Despite its maturity, businesses have started to incorporate applications of Metaverse in order to engage customers in a futuristic manner, creating everything from virtual concerts to virtual amusement parks.
For example, ‘Nikeland’ by Nike is a virtual space on Roblox where customers can enjoy personalized gaming, shopping, and social experiences.
This can be a great way of engaging customers and creating a small community of your brand by enabling the customers to even engage among themselves. Such an initiative can actually boost customer experience to a great extent.
- Perpetually work on standing out from the clutter by investing in the right tools
Traditionally, all marketers have been able to collect huge customer-centric data. With the dearth of smart tools, however, means that this data cannot be used fully for strategy and decision-making.
Personalized customer communication backed with relevant data points helps companies break the chain of spray and pray approach and make you stand out in a saturated digital marketplace. Another way to make yourself differentiated from the noise is to have an added layer of credibility with services like Truecaller. A verified business caller ID adds a lot more authenticity to your brand and helps customers identify you with ease among the rest of your competition.
Moreover, AI-based tools have minimized manual efforts, while at the same time adding a human touch to interactions and personalizing customer communication. Chatbots, for instance, are excellent tools to support omnichannel customer experience and also offer 24*7 support and boost engagement.
This is an important step in treating each of your customers as a unique individual and offering services that are relevant, and based on their customer journey.
- Omnichannel customer experience is the way forward
From online to offline stores, customers today have n number of channels to get in touch with your company as a brand–placing the need for a consistent, and fluid omnichannel experience.
The essence of an omnichannel experience lies in the fact that the quality of service and the consistency in brand messaging remains intact across multiple channels. This serves to unify the customer journey by creating a seamless flow of all customer touchpoints.
How to achieve an omnichannel experience?
> Offer a variety of channels for customers to touch base with your company
> Harmonize online and offline interactions
> Make your website mobile-friendly
> Install a chatbot and develop a mobile application for a holistic customer experience
Contact centers play a crucial role in an omnichannel world. Customers should be guided through crucial procedures via seamless, intent-based customer journeys that integrate digital and traditional touchpoints (pre-sales, order delivery, service, feedback, etc).
The secret is to engage in two-way, meaningful conversations that build trust and brand loyalty. According to the survey, personalization and promptness are important elements in building client trust.
Understanding what clients really want and how each channel, including voice calls, websites, emails, SMS, and push notifications, may contribute to an effective approach.
- Measuring the customer experience
Evaluating how well you are doing at delivering your customer experience is just as important as the customer experience itself–a concept many brands still don’t fully understand. The trend towards customer experience analysis is, however, rapidly growing. It allows companies to fine-tune their customer communication strategies in order to check what is actually working and what is not.
There are many common key performance indicators for measuring customer experiences like customer satisfaction scores or CSATs, and other industry-specific KPIs as well. In fact, customer churn rate is also a critical KPI to keep a tab on. Examples can include repeat purchases, and the use of multiple channels of customer communication like social media, email, and chatbots.
- Confidentiality and security of customer data
It’s a common phenomenon to hear a story of how a company suffered a data breach and the sensitive data of customers was compromised, causing customers to lose trust in your business completely.
With the rampant digital transformation that we are a part of, data breach becomes all the more consequential. This is why many brands have stepped up their cybersecurity game and ensured improved data security for their customers. Having a strong data security plan in place shows how sensitive your brand is to customer information.
In the near future, brands that do not share their customer information with other applications or sites have a clear advantage over their competition because it would be a tough task to secure customers’ information in a highly digitalized ecosystem.
Seize the opportunity now:
Contemporary businesses, being run mostly by millennials, know how critical customer experience is and how imperative it is to place parts of customer experience at each stage of the customer journey.
While new trends may develop and others may fade away, the ultimate focus of the companies would still be to delight their customers–always. Sometimes, it may also mean focusing more on the customers’ needs and wants rather than the profit margin.
Ultimately, it all boils down to the fact that the experiences you create for the customers are as important as the product or service you might offer. The industry of customer engagement is all about fast learning, fast failing, and adapting.
Business owners who realize that customer experience has evolved from only offering cheap prices to desiring a memorable experience, and positive and polite conversations with customer service agents—will be the ones who thrive.
We wish you all the best in creating your one-of-a-kind customer experience.nd, personalized customer experience.
Author Bio:
“Ashutosh Gupta is a Content Marketing Manager at Truecaller, taking care of their content outreach and customer advocacy initiatives. He is an author of Equations of Being, and is also passionate about creating abstract artworks.”