The impact of customer experience on business results cannot be overstated. PwC’s report shows that 73% of customers consider an excellent experience the primary factor in their purchasing decision, 65% believe that a positive experience with a brand works better than any advertising, and 43% are willing to pay more to brands that provide that experience.
However, the digital customer experience is evolving rapidly, and your job is to keep up and adapt your business to all the changes in a timely manner. In this article, we want to give you a head start and talk about the expected customer experience trends for 2024, so you can prepare ahead of time.
9 CX Trends in 2024
Improving customer experience is a never-ending strategy that requires oman whatsapp number data 5 million constant updates, changes, and revisions. And foresight plays a big role here. Understanding CX trends for the coming year will help you adopt them into your strategy before your competitors and thus gain an edge in the fight for consumers.
1. First Party Data Collection
In 2024, the cookieless future will be much closer. In the second half of the year, Google plans to completely ban third-party cookies for Chrome users. While purchased audience data will remain the primary source of information for 81% of businesses in 2023, they will no longer be able to rely on it next year. This is good news for customers who are eagerly anticipating a cookieless future to control their data and its use. This is why first-party data collection is a central trend in customer experience and the key to brand loyalty and trust.
First-party data is data that you collect exclusively from your customers, prospects and visitors and with their consent in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation. The source of such data can be your website or your social media profile. Adding tracking pixels there will allow you to monitor customer actions and behaviors and then transfer this data to your CRM or CDP. Additionally, your support team can always gain valuable insights about your customers by interacting with them directly.
Finally, you can ask customers to share their preferences, opinions and expectations when they sign up for your newsletter or through surveys. Claspo allows you to add custom input fields to your opt-in pop-up to get more information about your audience. Additionally, you can easily create a survey pop-up by dragging checkboxes, a drop-down list or radio buttons into your layout. Most importantly, having an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate, Claspo ensures that your audience’s data is reliably protected and that your pop-ups are GDPR compliant.
First-party data is of higher quality, accurate, and relevant because you collect it yourself and do not simply rely on external sources. Therefore, collecting it in 2024 will allow you to improve the customer experience and take your online strategy to the next level.
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2. Omnichannel approach
Customers interact with a brand through 9 touchpoints on average, and more than half of those interactions happen online. Therefore, multiple digital communication channels have become the norm for many companies. An omnichannel approach, as one of the digital customer experience trends, means not only being present across multiple channels, but providing a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint.
The simplest example: If a customer interacts with ads for specific products on social media, keep that in mind when they visit your website - you can provide relevant recommendations or display a pop-up that quickly redirects them to the product page they are interested in. With Claspo, you can show personalized pop-ups to those visitors who have arrived at your site from a specific channel or campaign. This way, you keep your online strategy consistent and effective.
Medium reports that an omnichannel strategy improves customer loyalty by 91% and increases lifetime values by 3.4%. More importantly, tracking and processing customer behavior information across multiple communication channels provides you with the valuable first-party data mentioned above. That is, each communication channel is a personal source of information that can replace third-party data in 2024.
3. Hyper-Personalization
A consistent customer experience across all your communication channels means, first of all, personalization - that is, taking into account previous interactions with your brand to develop relevant future messages (recommendations, offers, etc.). Such triggered cross-channel communication increases the efficiency of marketing expenditures by 10-30% and, along with them, revenues by 5-15% . It sounds great, but customers have long been accustomed to personalization and are demanding new solutions from companies to meet their unique interests and needs. And this is where hyper-personalization comes in as a customer experience trend of 2024.
Hyper-personalization involves studying the behavior and preferences of each individual customer based on real-time data to deliver what they want right at that moment. On the one hand, you no longer need to segment your audience as the “for the group” message gives way to a “for each rep” message. On the other hand, a deep dive into each customer’s data can drive you crazy. Therefore, hyper-personalization is only possible with the automation of data collection and analysis processes.
4. Using AI for CX
The use of artificial intelligence in itself is not an innovation. However, according to Medium's prediction
Artificial intelligence will become an indispensable assistant for business owners in optimizing customer experience in 2024. This is due to the urgent need for hyper-personalization and the associated work with large amounts of data. Consequently, these two CX trends go hand in hand.
AI can revolutionize your personalization strategy and overall marketing efforts:
AI processes data in real time and allows you to quickly respond to each customer's changing preferences.
AI identifies patterns and trends in your data and allows you to predict your customers’ needs before they know it.
AI can free you from many routine tasks, such as A/B testing, creating space for creativity and strategic planning.
Given these and other opportunities, it’s no surprise that retailers have high hopes for AI. In particular, a recent survey of retail executives found that 48% expect AI to revolutionize the industry in the next 3-5 years. At the same time, 35% are already using it at scale, and 59% are even ready to report an improvement in customer experience with the introduction of AI. Therefore, using AI in 2024 is crucial if you want to keep up with growing customer demands and outperform your competitors.
5. Voice Assistants
AI can work not only with customer data but also directly with customers. Voice assistants are a success story. Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa - the number of intelligent voice assistants is growing every year and could reach 8.4 billion by 2024 (in short, every inhabitant of the Earth could have a personal assistant).
Their main goal in e-commerce is to simplify and accelerate product research at the customer's request. It is expected that by 2025, the value of purchases made with the help of voice assistants will reach 164 billion dollars . Therefore, the introduction of a voice assistant is a trend in customer experience for the coming years.
A 2023 study revealed exactly how this tool improves the customer experience. Some respondents say that voice assistants have increased the effectiveness of their purchases. Others note that their time to purchase has been significantly reduced because virtual assistants perfectly understand their needs. Therefore, simplifying the search for the right products will make a difference in your sales and customer loyalty to your brand.
6. Conversational AI Chatbots
The chatbot market is projected to grow at an impressive CAGR of 23.9% by 2030. However, traditional chatbots will give way to innovative conversational AI chatbots.
Traditional chatbots have predefined conversation flows based only on FAQs and common questions. In contrast, AI chatbots identify customer intent and offer the most relevant solution in real time without any pre-written script. In addition, AI chatbots have advanced omnichannel capabilities and can be integrated across multiple platforms, not just the chat interface. Finally, future chatbots will mimic natural language and completely replace customer service representatives, surpassing them in speed and quality of responses.
Thus, conversational AI chatbots are expected to increase the productivity and quality of customer service by 30% to 50% . In this regard, 95% of companies want to at least partially delegate customer service to chatbots in the next 3 years. According to The Guardian , this customer experience trend will mainly affect e-commerce in 2024, as the high growth rates of this sector require a quick response to customer inquiries. In the meantime, the usual human-to-human contact is insufficient to meet the needs of today's shoppers.
7. Augmented Reality (AR)
According to Shopify , the average return rate for online stores is 20% to 30%, compared to 8% for offline stores. At the same time, shoppers mostly return products because they don’t fit or don’t match the description. In fact, one of the problems with e-commerce is the lack of opportunity to try a product. Therefore, customers essentially buy blind. Retailers, in turn, lose about $10 for every $100 of returned merchandise.
AR serves as a virtual try-on of a product, allowing the shopper to evaluate the product before purchasing it directly in the app without leaving their home. The result? 80% of shoppers feel safer and more secure using AR during the shopping process, and 66% are less likely to return products. This is why the augmented reality market is gaining momentum and is expected to increase with a compound annual growth rate of 39.8% from 2023 to 2030. So, this is one of those digital customer experience trends that is here to stay.
Meanwhile, AR could benefit more than just online clothing stores. For example, Sephora uses AR to help customers try on makeup with their products. Ikea lets shoppers virtually place furniture in their homes to see if it fits.
