For B2B brands, an acute focus on customer experience is going to be the most crucial aspect of 2019. In this article, we’ll tell you the three customer experience trends you need to watch out for in 2019.
While B2C brands have always known of the connection between customer experience (CX) and sales, B2B brands have lately begun exploring the benefits of providing quality, personalized customer experiences. If you haven’t radically changed your outlook towards CX as a B2B brand, then 2019 is the perfect time for you to do so.
Here are three customer experience trends you should watch out for in 2019, because they are going to transform the way you create a connection between your customer and your brand.
1. Personalization Will Proliferate
In order for brands to create that connection with customers, they must be able to deeply relate to the challenges faced by customers and understand their needs and desires across all stages of the customer journey. This means closing the empathy gap and building in the engagement strategies that delight and convert customers into loyal advocates.
Drawing on her extensive research in the field, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes states that brands must look at personalization as a means to bridge the emotion gap, and help increase positive experiences. Speaking exclusively to MTA, she says:
- “Companies that prioritize ‘experiences’ both offline and online will continue to differentiate through exceptional CX, whereas some companies will make the decision to pull back on their investment due to lack of time, resources, and a delayed ROI. As a result, those companies who are “all-in” on CX can jump in and create experiences that drive acquisition and loyalty.
- More companies will seek to bridge the ‘emotional gap’ in their experiences as heightened awareness for making the right emotional connection and its impact on customer loyalty grows. In order for companies to make that interpersonal connection, they must deeply understand and empathize with their customers by truly understanding their motivations, needs, desires, behaviors, and intent. After this deep understanding, they can then create and pivot offerings that tap into the needs of their customers.
- Best-in-class brands will provide hyper-personalized experiences to meet the ever-evolving customer expectations associated with the feeling of a brand ‘truly knowing them’ – which translates to perceived value for the customer and loyalty to the brand. We can expect to see companies investing in people, processes, and technologies that drive hyper-personalized experiences as a differentiation strategy.”
2. Metric-Driven Approach Will Dominate
How your customer perceives your brand and her interaction with you, is an important metric you must consider as a brand, especially in the context of the customer’s current and future intentions. Measuring CX might seem a little overwhelming if you are new to this, but as a brand you must put in place mechanisms to collect information about a customer’s overall satisfaction with your brand, their intent as a visitor, as well as the completion of the task (in terms of cart abandonment, and completion of purchase).
Zoomin CEO, Gal Oron predicts to MTA that apart from the basic CX metrics stated above, newer metrics will begin to emerge in 2019. “Among large enterprises, CX transformations cost millions of dollars, but the current metrics for measuring ROI are centered around numerical scores and qualitative feedback. Business cases based on long-term results, like NPS metrics, won’t cut it for c-level executives building this year’s budget. Look for new metrics to emerge that directly apply dollar amounts to improvements in CX.”
Adding to the point made by Oron, Claire Sporton, SVP of Customer Experience Innovation at Confirmit, stated to MTA that, “There’ll be a shift from measuring metrics to monitoring action, at least I hope so! CX has been buried in chasing metrics for far too long now. Increasingly, though, CX teams are under pressure to demonstrate results, and while that’s scary, it’s a good thing. Smart CX teams will start working with stakeholders to initiative change programs and monitoring their impact. Ideas like nudge theory will help, as will improvements in technology that help define the best action to take.”
Sporton believes that CX is not – despite the name – just about customers. “To understand customer experience fully, companies need to really focus on other data sources – from partners, suppliers, employees and more. And they will get better at mapping data to create that ever-elusive 360-degree view. Only the leaders in the field will get there any time soon, but silos will be – one day – a thing of the past.”
Also Read: How Better Customer Service Leads to Better Sales
3. Artificial Intelligence Will Augment Human Actions
AI has been long been feared in the popular and media imagination. The nightmare scenario that has often been projected has been of AI replacing humans in the future – affecting job prospects and leaving scores unemployed. Sporton feels that technology cannot not replace human decision-making when it comes to CX. “AI and other forms of automation offer huge opportunity, but the hype that our jobs are all under threat is nonsense. In 2019, technology will augment human decision making, not replace it. There’s a mind-boggling amount of data out there now, but data is stupid – it only knows what it knows. People are vital when it comes to understanding and prioritizing CX improvement.”
Also Read: Reshaping the Customer Experience in 2019
Conclusion
In 2019, CX will continue to be a competitive battlefield. Oron believes that brands will opt for self-service to improve CX. “Helping your customers help themselves will continue to be a priority in the coming year,” says Oron. Adding, “Enabling self-service by providing access to content via chatbots or Google will become an industry best practice. More and more companies will recognize the ROI value of case deflection, and more budget will be allocated toward making documentation portals easy to use.”
Brands that are serious about the ‘experiences’ they provide, will stand out from the competition. Personalizing experiences for the customer, measuring those experiences with newer metrics, and using AI to provide experiences that create the connection between the customer and the brand, should be your aim in 2019 as a Marketer.
Let us know your thought about how customer experience will evolve in 2019, in the comments below.
Also, share this article on social media to let others know what customer experience trends might emerge in 2019.
