Aren’t you intrigued by how businesses have gone beyond limits to give a stellar customer experience lately? Whether a small business or large multi-national, the customer experience trends have witnessed a super-charged improvisation.
Of course, the pandemic acted as a catalyst since businesses and marketers had to act dexterously to improve and enhance the customer experience. It was the need of the hour.
However, these changing trends proved to be a great success and mutually beneficial for customers and businesses. Do you want to know these customer experience trends and why they have become so important lately? The coming sections would give you a clear idea of the customer experience trends of 2022.
So, without many deferrals, let us quickly peruse the 2022 customer experience trends.
Customer Experience Trends – 2022
Here is the list of the latest customer experience trends that marketers and businesses would find useful in refining their marketing strategies:
1. Transparency
We live in a digital era where almost any comprehendible information needed can be availed in a matter of mini-seconds. Customers have shown greater loyalty to the companies that offer high-level transparency.
Hidden charges, insufficient or ambiguous information, vague details, etc., could never work in the long run. Over the past decades, all these methods have been tried and tested, but only to fail towards the end.
Recent trends show that the buyers prefer to show better affiliation to transparent and trustworthy businesses. If you think about it from the customer’s point of view, they enjoy doing business when everything is out in the open. Nobody likes to feel cheated.
Paulo who handel’s marketing for SaaS firms with multiple products and runs a parenting blog Upside Dad says “Transparency builds up trust with your clients that enhances the retention rate and helps your clients stick much longer, dubois pricing often is seen as a sign of distrust.”
Tips to improve transparency
Dishonesty is not only frowned upon but completely disowned by good customers in the 21st century. Thus, if you want your business to succeed, then divert your attention to adopting transparent business management practices. For example, being transparent in terms of advertisement, displaying a clear pricing structure, informing clients about additional costs, etc.
Lately, GDPR has become very popular when it comes to transparency about collecting and using consumer data. GDPR is basically the transparency law in Europe but is used as a de facto standard in the entire world. If you are based in the EU or offer goods or services to EU residents or monitor behaviors of EU residents, then your organization’s website must be GDPR compliant.
2. Data-Protection
Don’t confuse data protection and data collection. You can collect the data on your online portals but keeping data safe is data protection.
A business can develop trust with its customers when it assures them of their data protection. This trust is vital to the digital customer experience. Companies that do not follow data protection ethics would erode the trust and eventually ruin the customer experience.
Not only that, any data breach can cost dearly to the businesses. As per statistics, the average total cost of a data breach in the U.S.A was $8.64 million. That is a tremendous figure that signifies the need to protect consumer data. Therefore, companies must invest in preventative data security for a better customer experience.
Tips to Improve Data-Protection
There are numerous methods that companies have adopted to improve their data security in 2022. This has given impetus to the improving customer experience trend. One of the best examples is the campaigns for digital security. Many organizations have lately made digital security training on their team management software compulsory.
Here are some of the other techniques that companies have adopted to improve data protection in 2022:
- The two-factor authentication for employees has become compulsory in many organizations
- Consumer data has a higher level of encryption standards
- Many companies adopt vigilant employee permission management
- The sensitive customer data has restricted access in many organizations
- Companies have started consumer awareness campaigns to educate customers about fraud prevention on a regular basis.
3. Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization refers to taking one step beyond knowing your customer. Customer experience can be highly enhanced if you already have certain information about your prospective customers. Personalizing a sequence of email messages based on data acquired from your website on how your target audience interacts with your business, and then sending tailored mass emails to people all over the world.
As per Accenture, 75% of the customers prefer to make purchases from a company that already has certain details about them like name, address, buying preference, purchase history, etc.
How to Hyper-Personalize to enhance customer experience?
Many digital marketing companies have started segmenting their marketing campaigns on the basis of their consumer characteristics. They use data obtained from campaigns to gather the personal information of the consumer. Therefore, the customer is approached with a personalized product or service with an easy check-out option (that already has their personal details)
Certain websites use cookie data to gather the information that represents the preference of the consumer. Therefore, when a customer makes a purchase of a certain item from a particular vendor, the data is stored in the form of a cookie.
When the same customer returns to the website, they are shown similar items from the same or different vendors to help them save time and make the purchase quickly. This is what enhancing customer experience is mostly about – valuing your customer’s time and knowing what they are looking for.
4. Blending Automation with Human Touch
When automation software like chatbots was first introduced, almost every organization adopted it to help them save costs. But as far as customer experience was concerned, customers got fed up with it quicker than anyone would have thought. Needless to say, talking to a robot is not what a customer would look for if they are looking for specific assistance.
Although the use of chatbots or automated software has escalated in the year 2022, the companies that actually cared about improving customer experience used it with human support. And so, in 2022, we witnessed companies using both human agents and automated software like chatbots to give the customers exactly what they want.
Several companies took this to another level and gave the option to the customers to choose from getting information from a chatbot or talking to their representative. This is what customers actually found most helpful.
5. AI Popularity
2022 witnessed high AI usage by the companies to enhance customer experience. Businesses have found many ways to implement AI in their different processes such as accounting and HR. As per dataprot, 9 out of 10 leading businesses have invested in AI technologies, and about 37% of the businesses use AI. Another amazing figure was that start-ups that used AI received more than $7.4 billion in funding during Q2 of 2019.
One of the biggest reasons behind AI’s popularity was its contribution towards transforming the customer experience. Most of the above customer experience trends are based on the use of AI. Organizations have become purposeful of the AI usage and hence use it adroitly to personalize the customer interaction.
Small and large organizations have understood the urgent need to invest in AI and use it in their business processes if they plan to excel in customer experience.
Final Thoughts
Marketers and businesses have realized the need to divert their focus on amplifying the customer experience to grow in the 21st century. Post the COVID pandemic, it has been clearly observed that companies have put special focus on customer experience.
This write-up was focused on the latest customer experience trends in 2022 that would help businesses and marketers. Hopefully, you find the information provided in this article useful.
