More than ever, customers want greater transparency of most businesses’ processes. Photo: Shutterstock

Improving overall customer experience is the key to boosting the business and gaining a larger consumer base organically. Thus, customer satisfaction is a top priority in the majority of companies.

One blunder in customer services could gain the attention of a larger audience thanks to the overuse of social media, and jeopardise years of investment and hard work in company development. Thus, a company that does not invest in customer experience management will be left behind in the long run.

Companies that do well in customer experience could command more premiums on their services or products. However, poor performance in customer experience would result in losing customers to competitors just after one bad incident. This is a brutal fact in today’s digital world, which has made customer experience management a crucial aspect.

According to Allied Market Research, the global customer experience management software market is expected to reach $23.83 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 15.6 per cent from 2020 to 2027. The rise in popularity of the on-demand business model and the surge in adoption of Omni channel shopping behaviour have boosted the market growth.

There are five major trends in customer experience management. The first is finding the balance between automation and the human workforce.

The growing popularity of automation and its benefits has taken over several services in a company. It is a unique way to reduce costs related to customer services and speed up the resolution time drastically for simple, repetitive service requests. Some customers are thrilled to talk to chatbots as they offer required information instantaneously.

However, some are very reluctant to trust robots and demand human customer service agents. Thus, a combination of human customer service rep and chatbot could improve customer experience management drastically and help in offering the best customer experience.

The second trend is the use of AI, and the omnichannel customer relationship. Chatbots such as Drift can be considered more than just customer service tools. They are essential for marketing and sales as well. Integration of chatbots with social media channels and social media marketing to respond to direct messages to the consumer automatically helps build trust between the company and the user.

Chatbots offer many advantages over human reps and the prime benefits are availability and speed. No company can manage to handle 24/7 queries from customers. On the other hand, AI-based chatbots can handle more queries and solve them instantaneously and refer the difficult queries to a human customer service rep if necessary.

Next up is the ever-increasing demand for a personalised experience. Today, customers demand a personalised experience more than anything. Thanks to advanced technologies such as big data analytics, as well as predictive analysis, companies can offer hyper-personalised experiences.

The majority of customers use a service that knows their name and purchase history, and recommends products that match their personal taste. What’s more, offering a personalised experience is now a marketing gimmick.

Email marketing and e-commerce web pages that we are familiar with are now changed according to the people who are visiting the site. This is the easier way to grab the attention of customers and offer them a personalised experience.

Furthermore, transparency and honesty are now part of a company’s marketing as customers have high regard for them. Being transparent about the cost of products, and business practices, in advertisements can help build a loyal audience and consumer base. For instance, information about how the company is gathering consumer data should be conveyed to the customers. What’s more, several countries have made it mandatory for companies to disclose such practices.

Customers appreciate honesty and the marketing efforts that match with company’s values. Furthermore, dishonesty in today’s world could be exposed and break customer trust that took ages to build.

Finally, the growing concern for cybersecurity and the surge in the number of cyberattacks has increased the importance of data privacy and security. While customers agree there are too many terms and conditions before offering their private data to a business, they value their data and expect that the company should take firm measures to protect sensitive information. Thus, it is the most important trend in customer experience management and companies are willing to pay a colossal amount to ensure the safety of customers’ information at their disposal.

There are several important trends and technological developments in the customer experience management industry. However, the bottom line is that the interest in customer experience has increased more than ever. From major tech giants to even small startups, customer experience management has gained importance as it is the best way to gain a huge customer base over time.

Having said that, organisations intend to reap benefits from customer experience management initiatives and are open to using an array of advanced technologies. While these include AI and big data analytics, in the future, machine learning, smartbots, and several other technologies will make their way into the customer experience management market.

While there is plenty of software options available in the market, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Thus, it is vital to stay updated on trends in the customer experience market as customer satisfaction is the only way to build a loyal, global audience that every company dreams of.