In 2024, customer experience trends build on from the groundwork laid in 2023 and before. The digital age created increased opportunities for organisations to interact with the marketplace. Heightened customer expectations challenge businesses to stay on top of customer experience trends.
Changes in technology and customer needs make for a dynamic environment. Keeping up with CX trends is necessary for sustained, competitive success. The following CX trends for 2024 highlight critical factors impacting the business ecosystem, with a significant focus on the role of artificial intelligence.
Here are the CX trends we’re watching in 2024…
12 customer experience/CX trends to watch in 2024
1. Generative AI: The game changer in personalised CX
- Definition: Generative AI is the use of artificial intelligence software to produce data-driven assets such as text, imagery, synthetics, and other media.
- Application: Generative AI offers numerous applications, but has particular value in the service sector. It supports faster analysis of documents and service interactions, with supporting recommendations to guide reps more effectively through customer interactions. It also enhances self-service functionality through chatbots, including more accurate and efficient answers to customer questions.
2. Omnichannel evolution: Seamless interactions across platforms
- Definition: The term omnichannel describes companies that offer customers opportunities to interact across all major platforms. Doing so meets the demand for convenient, anywhere, anytime access.
- Application: Social media, email, chat, instant messaging, and voice are some of the common methods through which customers engage a business. Simply having a process on each channel isn’t enough; your customers want a seamless experience as they shift from one channel to the next.
- Highlight: As a unified communications system, RingCentral is specifically designed to enable seamless interactions across all popular communication methods. Each of your agents can interact with customers across all channels within a single platform. This service approach optimises efficiency and CX at the same time.
3. Smarter chatbots: Beyond basic queries
- Definition: Historically, chatbots have offered a lot of promise but limited practical benefit to the customer experience. However, AI-driven chatbots have grown in understanding of customer sentiment, analytics capabilities, and overall ability to meet customer expectations.
- Application: Enhanced by deep learning, modern chatbots handle much more complex queries on a multitude of topics. This capability reduces the workload on live agents to address common questions. Using AI, bots learn quickly from interactions and develop accurate predictive capabilities for customer needs.
- Highlight: RingCentral chatbots use the full power of AI. They provide a more proactive approach to ensuring customers get the best solutions, even before they realise they need them. In the competitive marketplace, this CX advantage is a game-changer.
4. Immersive CX: Engaging customers like never before
- Definition: An immersive customer experience is one that uses immersive technology to enhance customer engagement opportunities with a brand.
- Application: Augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are primary immersive technologies used to revolutionise the customer experience. These technologies allow for a variety of interactive experiences where customers engage more personally with businesses and products.
- Highlight: AI-enabled communication is the primary focus of RingCentral.
5. Conversation intelligence: Understanding customers on a deeper level
- Definition: Conversation intelligence is the use of AI software to derive meaningful data from customer interactions. The objective is to gain a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of dynamic customer behaviors during service interactions.
- Application: CI goes far beyond the previous capabilities of chat analytics. It allows a deeper dive into customer sentiment, needs, and preferences. These human-like features of interactions have long been the missing link to optimised AI analytics.
- Highlight: RingCX (coming later this year in AU) ensures that every interaction is a step toward understanding your customers better, which leads to improved training and more personalised, effective communication:
6. Customer journey: A more connected path to success
- Definition: Customers go through a process or pathway before connecting with your business, product, or service agent. Each key touchpoint or stage of the journey creates opportunities for positive or negative sentiment.
- Application: Much of the focus on CX analytics centres on the end result. However, the digital customer journey has long been disjointed, frustrating, and cumbersome for customers. By analysing the journey from a holistic view, businesses can better optimise the entire experience for customers.
7. Mobile CX improvement: Meeting customers where they buy
- Definition: Mobile commerce continues to evolve at a rapid pace. According to Statistica, mobile now accounts for 60 percent of all e-commerce revenue. Projections indicate the growth trend will continue into the foreseeable future.
- Application: The digital experience for customers on mobile is unique relative to traditional desktop or laptop experiences. Many websites still aren’t mobile-optimised. Apps are often clunky. Page-load speeds sometimes trail desktop versions. Addressing all of these issues is vital to attracting and retaining customers that primarily engage via mobile.
- Highlight: RingCentral is designed to enable reliable access from any device, anywhere, at any time. This reliability eases the burden on customers who need to make a connection. Journey-based AI analytics also simplify the process of evaluating problem areas in your m-commerce experience.
8. Prioritising security: A safer customer experience
- Definition: An unfortunate result of expanded digital engagement is increased opportunities for hackers. Cybersecurity is a major topic within the CX experience, as providing optimised security is a top priority.
- Application: Data warehouses, user logins and accounts, and electronic transmissions are all vulnerable to adverse agents. Implementing the most advanced security protocols for each area helps protect the security and privacy of customer data.
- Highlight: RingCentral prioritises the most advanced safety protocols to ensure all interactions with your business are private and secure. End-to-end encryption and multi-factor user authentication are primary examples.
9. More self-service: Balancing self- and agent-supported opportunities
- Definition: Customers want access to self-service tools for situations in which live-agent support isn’t necessary. However, many self-service tools have limited usability.
- Application: Self-service in the digital environment includes access to common resources online. It also includes interactive chatbots for simple or common questions. For more complex circumstances, the ability to escalate to an agent interaction is needed. Leveraging the capabilities of generative AI, companies now offer substantial self-service experiences that are more helpful than frustrating.
- Highlight: RingCentral equips businesses with generative AI that allows for highly accurate handling of complex interactions via chatbots. Giving customers access to this self-service opportunity benefits CX and preserves agent time for more challenging conversations.
10. Data collection: More emphasis on primary data gathering
- Definition: Much of the data collected in the digital environment has been through third parties. However, in light of cybersecurity concerns, privacy ethics and other factors, there is a push for a “Cookie-free” focus on data gathering.
- Application: Your company collects primary or first-hand data directly from customers. Contact forms, online and offline surveys, and digital interactions all provide data-gathering opportunities.
11. Buyer personas: More real-time adaptation
- Definition: A buyer or customer persona is a detailed profile of a customer type. It gives businesses real-person insight into the needs, motives, and behaviours of customers. Historically, companies could use personas for planning and development in advance.
- Application: In 2024, there is more emphasis on what is called the “synthetic customer.” This is essentially a real-time evolution of the buyer persona. It is a view of a customer based on new activities, interactions, and behaviours. The ability to more quickly adapt to the evolving customer creates enhanced opportunities for CX optimisation.
- Highlight: The sentiment data RingCentral supports through conversation intelligence is perfectly aligned with the goal of the synthetic customer. Tracking all interactions across platforms ensures your current customer view is accurate and thorough.
12. Continuous agent development: Training, cross-training and reinforcement
- Definition: Companies increasingly recognise that you can’t optimise your customer experience without enhancing the capabilities of agents that support it. Improved training, along with more awareness of employee wellness, lead to more satisfied, productive, and effective agents.
- Application: Initial training of new agents is used to introduce reps to primary job roles, activities, and technology. However, ongoing or reinforcement training is necessary to allow agents to refresh and review critical tasks and tools. Additionally, companies provide cross-training opportunities so agents develop a wider skill set, which improves satisfaction and productivity.
CX trends to watch: Stay on top with RingCentral in 2024
The trends discussed here are shaping the CX landscape for 2024. Customer experience is a determining factor in business success in the digital age. Customers expect you to meet their demands for seamless, omnichannel interactions. Embrace these trends and seize the opportunities they offer to optimise your CX.
Originally published 22 Feb, 2024
