According to a study by consulting firm OC&C, the majority of decision makers factor price into their decision-making process, with 35% of them citing it as the main criterion.
Thus, companies will have to think about how to improve customer service without affecting the final price. Intelligent automation and artificial intelligence are technologies that can anticipate and respond to customer needs in real time in order to build loyalty and offer them personalized offers. Ultimately, these technologies are able to meet the new needs of consumers, which are also constantly changing.
It’s time for hyper-personalization
In 2022, customer service has reached a certain stage of maturity. Naturally, hyperpersonalization is the next step, and little by little artificial intelligence will replace human interaction. Whereas in the past, in terms of marketing strategy, companies preferred grouping by segments, today each client wants to be treated individually.
An example of a hyper-personalized experience would be a trip to a fast food restaurant that can recognize your license plate and offer you a 10% discount on your last order. This speeds up the process, increasing the chances of loyalty.
In 2023, personalization will become even more advanced. For example, a customer visits a clothing app on Wednesday and searches for discounted sweaters in the menswear category. He spends about 15 minutes on the app and exits without making any purchases.
Thus, after the company analyzes various data, the application can automatically send a personalized notification to the customer on Thursday indicating “Wool sweaters on sale today”, including brand names, prices, etc.
Customer trust as a priority indicator for companies
We live in an experience economy where speed, quality and price can be negotiated. The only non-negotiable element currently is trust, which is a priority in customer relationships. However, this is difficult to achieve because much of today’s customer experience is marked by a culture of suspicion. Therefore, it is important to find a way to measure it.
While all companies today know that trust is a priority for their customers, very few companies (if any) are able to accurately measure it.
Some organizations measure brand affinity with analytics firms that focus on customer experience. In contrast, there is no standard metric for trust in contact centers, as is the case in other areas, such as average request processing time.
Trust is thus based on several principles: honesty, reliability, consistency and attention. To maintain their competitive edge, companies will need to create a solution or methodology that allows them to predict behavior in order to gain a measure of trust from their customers.
Personalized surveys for better engagement
Most customers or consumers view surveys as a measure of experience and do not understand that a survey is an experience in itself. Most surveys are time consuming and irrelevant. The only way to fix this and increase the number of responses is to make surveys contextual and more personalized. Imagine that after making a purchase, you receive an email that tells you about your journey to purchase, from the item you paid for to Steve, the seller who made the transaction. After this email, you will find a list of questions about the job of the salesperson, such as “Would you hire Stefan?” For example, by giving a positive answer, you allow the seller to take advantage of the other partner store.
By feeling directly interested in this type of questionnaire, it will be easier for customers to interact with the brand, allowing it to continuously improve its services and products.
Organizations will centralize their logic in their pursuit of success.
Large companies will begin to centralize their logic. If they don’t, they will collapse under the weight of their bunkers and be doomed to failure. Nearly all organizations with more than 500 employees are trying to rationalize the number of apps they integrate into their ecosystem, but keep adding new ones. These companies struggle with the complexity of the many applications they deploy and are looking for ways to simplify processes. In many organizations, different teams are responsible for online customer interactions and contact centers, but do not collaborate with each other. It becomes important to have a holistic view of the customer in order to be able to deliver superior customer service by integrating these two aspects of the organization into a single system.
Smart Business Messages on TikTok
If business messengers become available on Facebook and Instagram, the next big trend could be the feature on TikTok. This social network, which affects mainly Generation Z (people born between 1997 and 2010), is increasingly being used by brands as a marketing channel.
These messages can be used by brands to offer answers to frequently asked questions such as store hours or return policies. Historically, these services have been unreliable because they were run by humans. On the other hand, leaving a hand to the robot, they can win in reliability and speed.
“Client-machine” is multiplying
A “client-machine” is a machine that replaces a real human client to complete a task. According to Gartner research, by 2025, 37% of customers will attempt to use a digital assistant to interact with a help desk on their behalf. Therefore, organizations must develop strategies now to prepare for the increase in the number and capabilities of “client machines”.
When someone asks Siri to set an alarm or Alexa to turn off the lights, this digital assistant does something without the user’s input. Imagine going further with an assistant who can interact with customer support on our behalf. Indeed, digital assistants known to us can update banking information or change payment terms without real human intervention. This is the advent of the “client-machine”.
In the future, there will be four main types of interaction between customers and businesses. Personal communication (P2P), the norm: I call and talk to another person to get something. Human to Machine (P2M), we often do this: I interact with a robot to get something. My machine-to-person (M2P) digital assistant will call and talk to the person to get something, and the customer’s machine-to-machine (M2M) digital assistant interacts with their systems and gets things autonomously.
Therefore, companies will need a completely new strategy for managing M2P and M2M interactions. There are more units on Earth capable of being client machines than humans, so when this phenomenon spreads, it will spread FAST!
According to a Gartner study, CEOs and CIOs estimate that by 2025, 1/5 of revenue will come from machine clients.
This will fundamentally change all the standards of what is perceived as the quality of customer service. There will be a new standard for simplicity, speed and convenience.