By Manesh Sadasivan

Customer experience is a bouquet term that has been used heavily in the last decade or so. Still, in the coming year, the term customer experience or CX will need a sharp and precise definition for enterprises to survive. Summing up this need, Forrester says, 2022’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index) results saw the first significant decline in CX quality since the inception of the report. This occurred partly because companies sat on their laurels after significant performance gains during the height of the pandemic. But customer expectations are constantly evolving; sitting still means falling behind.

What has changed

While enterprises may not be sitting still, there has been an overwhelming change in customer behavior and expectations.  In today’s hyper-competitive economy, the digitally empowered consumer is spoilt for choice across every industry. However, there are technological solutions that organizations can adopt to enhance customer experience.  Personalized experiences that are unique to individual customers are proven to work. Leveraging the power of data to cull out insights that help improve the experience has caught on. All this, when seamlessly integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (AR/VR), can provide integrated and unified experiences across multiple platforms/ touchpoints.  

Also read: 84% of marketers tap into AI for enhanced customer experience reveals Exotel survey

What should businesses do?

With emerging and fast-changing digital advancements, customer experience trends will morph continuously.  Here are directions businesses should take notice of in 2023:

Human Experience (HX) Approach

As the Wall Street Journal says, businesses that focus only on customer experience could lose out on the chance to connect with customers on a deeper level. Organisations now must find ways to connect with human beings and establish relationships of trust. To achieve this, brands need to become stories that resonate with customers. Apple does this well and continuously keeps in touch with its customers’ heartstrings, whether it talks about sustainability or accessibility. The good news is that once customers trust a brand, they remain loyal, and retention happens automatically. This requires a brand to be authentic, proactively satisfy customer needs and purposefully connect as humans do.  This translates to an approach that has humans at the center of design and development involving progressive, adaptive, and natural interfaces to technology systems.

Dynamic Customer Experience & Engagement Approach

Gartner states, “Dynamic customer engagement (DCE) is a strategy born out of customer service and support for using data and analytics to discover insights that drive highly personalized and contextual actions.” This implies that data should be analyzed to understand customers. This requires a cohesive strategy to use the power of data and insights (AI/ML) to result in a highly contextual and hyper-personalized set of seamless, consistent, and intelligent experiences – with proactive engagement (to preempt a customer journey), continuous conversations (throughout the customer life cycle) and hyper-personalized content such as personalized videos and so forth. 

Also importantly, customers expect more data transparency, and maintaining data transparency is a part of the critical digital customer experience trend to succeed in customer retention endeavors.

Immersive Experiences Approach

Humans are born with the power of imagination, and immersive experiences capitalize on this tremendous opportunity to tell stories. By leveraging the power of immersive experiences (AR/VR/XR/Metaverse), brands can grab attention and loyalty. For example, Samsung’s showroom in the US has massive screens displaying its product range.  Using touchscreen technology, customers can immerse themselves in products such as opening refrigerator doors, and even fitting appliances into kitchens.   

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) 

DEI is getting plenty of attention due to the increased recognition of inequality and social justice and its overall compliance effects on the brand.  For example, one in six people in the world suffer from some physical or cognitive impairment.  Brands focusing on accessibility are creating inclusive and cohesive experiences for all. 

Total Experience (TX) Approach 

This is an interesting development where organizations are focusing on integrated strategies that provide superior experiences to all players in the ecosystem that engage with their respective brands. This would include customers, employees, vendors, partners, and others.   The aspect of TX is true for both B2B and B2C customers as lines are blurring between the CX strategies they follow. Importantly, in B2B, customers are starting to prefer a rep-free experience. As a result of this, the importance of hyper-personalized, differentiated experience is becoming key across the board.  

The Way Forward for Enterprises

Delivering CX is not a one-time activity and needs continuous innovation and management to sustain the momentum. To succeed in providing a superior CX, most often companies also need to have a customer-centric behavior ingrained into their culture. This is the single defining factor that truly sets brands apart and helps them to create differentiated customer experiences through all points of the product/ service buying journey. Or, as Gartner says, “You must win at every interaction the customer has with your organization.”

(The author is AVP & Head of Digital Platforms and Architecture, Digital Experience, Infosys. Views are personal.)