Customer Experience Management: 4 trends for 2023

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a hot topic. More and more companies recognize that offering a great customer experience is the route to business success and growth. Is your organization ready to apply CXM in practice? In this blog you can read the most important CXM trends of 2023.

What exactly is Customer Experience Management?

Consumers expect more and more in the field of online customer contact. To meet those expectations, companies are gearing up Customer Experience Management (CXM).

CXM is an approach to customer relationships that goes beyond marketing tools, business processes and software. The goal is to achieve a digital transformation that puts the customer first. This mindset prioritizes the orchestration and personalization of a seamless customer journey across every channel, in real time. Your customer is central to every process, in every department. So not just by your customer service colleagues or by marketing. Also by IT, Finance and HRM.

When you use CXM properly:

✓ You will have more satisfied, lasting customers.
✓ Improve your brand image.
✓ Reduce your costs thanks to more efficient processes.

Trend 1: Personalization

Did you know that 76% of your customers expect personal attention in order to commit to you? Personalizing customer communication has now become the rule rather than the exception. We make extensive use of merge tags in emails and target customers based on their purchase history or click behavior. This year, companies are going a step further. Investing in data & analytics is high on the agenda.

Yet real concrete personalization plans remain on the bookshelf. Four reasons:

1. There is no concrete roadmap available
2. Not enough budget available
3. IT processes are too complex; where do you start?
4. Other projects are given priority

Shame, we say. Because today's technology in combination with artificial intelligence ensures that you... communicate with your customer more personally than ever before. And customers expect that from you. If it is not personal enough, they will switch to your competitor.

When you combine data and technology well, you can always go one step further. You can fully personalize every channel, from emails, videos to streaming services. Take Spotify for example. An example that is now often mentioned, but that is not without reason. With machine learning models and based on playlists, listening and clicking behavior and audio analyses, the streaming service learns which content you find interesting. In this way, Spotify ensures customer loyalty, because your entire Spotify account will – if all goes well – be liked by you. The algorithm proactively thinks along with you.

But the most important reason for personalization as far as we are concerned: a customer who never has to reintroduce himself. There must be some form of recognition. When someone contacts you for the second time with a question or need, you should already know who he or she is. Regardless of which channel the person uses. This fits in nicely with the next trend, namely omnichannel customer contact.

Trend 2: Omnichannel customer contact

We expect a consistent customer experience at any time and on any device. The online experience must be just as good as the offline experience. And of course they connect seamlessly. With an omnichannel strategy you connect all your touchpoints, such as your social media, customer portal, store, app and website. This ensures that your customer can move smoothly from touchpoint to touchpoint. The rapid development of artificial intelligence ensures that the technology continues to improve to optimally enable digital self-service across all your touchpoints, without forced channel switches.

Many companies now offer an omnichannel customer experience or have this plan in place. And that's a good thing. An omnichannel strategy significantly increases your sales and ensures more efficient processes. Your customer introduces himself once and then you reuse and enrich that data at every touchpoint in the customer journey. For example, the technology to optimally enable digital self-service across all your touchpoints, without forced channel switches, is well developed and promising through artificial intelligence. The trick is mainly to draw up a good roadmap and optimally connect technology, processes and people. From a good CX ambition with central ownership in organizations.

TIP: Don't be blinded too quickly by all those technical highlights. First see where the need lies. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint, and then see which technology fits them.

Trend 3: Self-service

More and more people and companies are embracing self-service. Thanks to technological developments, it has become part of our daily lives. There are various self-service options, such as: customer portals, voice bots, chatbots or a Digital Colleague. Sometimes via the cloud and open source technology so that the system is more accessible for adjustments when customer needs change.

Self-service has advantages for your organization. Repetitive tasks are automated and you offer 24/7 service to your customer. Here too, in the case of a customer portal, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. People must be encouraged to use self-service options and the customer portal options must meet their needs. If you do this well and make it very simple, you can help more customers, reduce costs and increase the customer experience.

It is also important that your processes and systems are well coordinated when you offer self-service. When you send an offer from your marketing automation system, it must also be visible to your customer in the self-service portal. This also includes the omnichannel element. All customer journeys across the different touchpoints must flow into each other.

Trend 4: Conversational AI

Conversational AI uses data, natural word processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to increasingly mimic human interactions. This can be written or spoken text. Technology has now reached the point where conversations can no longer be distinguished from real human interactions. This gives you the opportunity to organize your customer service more efficiently, without losing sight of the human touch.

Chat and voicebots can increasingly understand the context of a conversation, recognize the customer and handle repetitive questions. This does not mean that customer service employees should fear for their jobs. Artificial Intelligence also has its limits. It cannot (yet) teach the level of empathy that people sometimes need when they are angry, sad or worried. And sometimes a customer simply cannot figure it out with an AI chat or voicebot. We therefore continue to advise our clients to always offer an escape to a live agent.

Ultimately, customer service agents and AI will have to embrace each other to make work easier, more efficient and more accurate. AI takes over the repetitive tasks, while your agents focus on the customers who really need your help.

* The translations on this website are provided by G-Translate from Dutch