CX Trends That Consumers Love

It almost isn’t fair to call personalization a “trend”, it really is what will define brand relationships in 2020 and beyond. In fact, 76% of consumers want companies to understand their needs and 63% expect personalized experiences to be crafted around this information. And, it’s a constant feedback loop — the more personalization businesses provide, the more personal data customers are willing to disclose. Having customers willingly disclose first-party data to your businesses is like striking gold, but there’s often a disconnect from more traditional data storage methods, like CRMs and CDPs, and the personalized experiences customers have come to love and expect.

To make the most of your customer data to deliver personalization at scale marketers need to have data activation in their tool belt. What is data activation you ask? Essentially, data activation is the process by which customer experiences are shaped by the entirety of your data. Each and every digital interaction a customer can have with your brand is guided by a unified, live understanding of customers — including transactions, on-site and offline behaviors, campaign engagement, product interactions, real-time actions, and other customer attributes gathered across channels and devices.

These powerful single profiles will be the driving forces of every single form of personalization your marketing team executes. When this data is activated in tandem with AI and Machine Learning processing, businesses of every size can pull of Amazon and Netflix levels of personalization — at scale.

As the customer journey gets more compressed and decision making becomes more impulsive than ever before, it’s important to maintain a strong brand image across every channel. 83% of consumers want the ability to seamlessly channel hop during their journey and data activation is key to making that experience happen. Single views of the customer are triggered by navigation to new channels, and relevant communications, offers, and recommendations can then be pushed in real-time.

This means customers can start their journey browsing your site on desktop, be retargeted on on social media, and finally convert on mobile while still receiving consistent, personalized messaging that nudges them closer to a purchase. Consistent cross-channel imagery, tone, and voice are essential as well — but real-time multi-channel personalization is what will set apart an OK brand from an exceptional one.

Customer service that works alongside great marketing is extremely powerful — 90% claim customer experience affects whether or not they’ll do business with an organization. And increasingly (thanks to service powerhouses like Amazon) customers also expect nearly round the clock customer service availability. It’s impossible for most businesses to offer 24/7 live service, but a strong data foundation can cover off hours with the intelligence of human-like support.

When marketers and customer service programs are armed with real-time single views of the customers, it’s possible to provide personalization and chatbot customer service regardless of the time of day. Employees aren’t needed to call data from multiple sources to troubleshoot for customers, rather systems like chatbots can access this unified readily to help customers.