Do you want to know w hat your customers want and expect from you in this fast-changing world? Well, we all do, and more so in today’s world – as a massive shift in consumer expectations across all industries has taken place globally. And to provide an excellent customer experience (CX), we need to know the answer to this question (what our customers want)—wondering how to do that? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball that can answer this question for us?

Well, we can’t give a crystal ball to you, but the good news is that we don’t need it to see the future. In fact, we can use the current CX trends to gain a lot of information about what our customers want. Also, to fulfill the changing customer expectations, we need to know the future trends that are likely to occur. So, we can work towards catering to them – with that in mind, given below are four customer experience trends that will shape customer experience in 2022.

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Here are the Top 4 customer experience trends that Leaders Can’t Ignore

1. Rise of Emotion AI Technology/ Emotion Insights Take Centre Stage

We all know that emotion s are often the driving force behind all buying decisions. When a business connects with its customers at an emotional level, the payoff can be huge. In fact, brand loyalty is driven by emotional connections too. But do you know understanding your customers’ emotions have the potential to transform your CX too?

How? By understanding and measuring you   r customers emotions, you can get insights that can help you improve your entire customer journey. That’s why CX’s future depends on the ability to capture, analyze, and understand customer emotions in real-time, which can be converted into meaningful insights into customers’ needs and expectations. Emotion AI will also lead the way in delivering more engaging and personalized CX, which will strengthen your brand loyalty and affinity.  

Emotion AI technology is now gaining hype among businesses as it can enhance CX and increase their bottom line. And if we look at the statistics, the global emotion AI market is forecasted to reach $174 billion by 2025. This makes it a lucrative customer experience trends worth keeping on the radar for every CX leader.

When it comes to harnessing emotions to improve CX, you may wonder, is the market prepared for the adaptation of Emotion AI? The answer is an absolute yes. There is an excellent opportunity for CX professionals to improve the customer journey by applying Emotion AI. For example, you can use Emotion AI to enhance your customer service. This technology can help you figure out how your customers feel while interacting with your sales representatives.

How? Emotion AI-powered tools will pick up emotional signals by analyzing the tone and pitch of your customer’s voice or by following their facial expressions and eye-gaze in a video-based interaction. This approach will help businesses understand how their customers feel – are they happy, sad, surprised, or confused. And they can use these insights to enhance processes and eventually improve customer service.

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2. Execution Focused Approach Will Gain Momentum

According to research conducted by Bain & Company,80% of companies believe they deliver a superior experience, but only 8% of customers agree. Wondering what the reason for this huge gap is? Firstly, providing a great CX is hard, and secondly, most companies just focus on creating a customer-focused strategy. But they don’t pay the same attention to the execution and measuring of the results process.  

No matter how customer-focused your strategy is, you won’t be able to fulfill your consumer’s rising expectations unless you measure and ask your customers about their experience. So, to ensure that strategy will translate into execution, you need to constantly revisit the key factors within the CX and optimize them.

In short, to deliver a flawless CX, it is not sufficient to create a customer-focused strategy and assume that it works. You need to continuously measure your results and make adjustments and prioritizations based on these results. And, yes, you need to measure and update it constantly.  

Remember, if you want to deliver a great customer experience, creating a customer-focused strategy is half the battle; the other half is executing it and continuously measuring it to see whether you are able to deliver on your consumer expectations.

Every company aspires to be customer-centric in a Customer First World, but you have to move a step forward and focus on execution to become truly customer-centric. And hence it makes execution one of the crucial trends to watch out for in 2022.

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3. Active Focus on Customer Retention

Like most things in today’s world, CX has changed, and CX leaders also need to change their approach in these changing times. When it comes to CX, most leaders focus on guiding customers through and around their business, but this model will change in 2022. The focus will move to customer retention, and most CX leaders will actively create models that will help retain customers.  

Why? Because we all know it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. If we look at statistics, 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition. And a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.  

Now, I know it’s a well-known fact that customer retention is crucial for every business’s survival. But, until a few months ago, most organizations weren’t paying customer retention the attention it deserves. But as the global pandemic crashed the world economy, customer retention became a top priority for every business, and it will soon become the top priority for CX leaders. And this makes it a lucrative customer experience trends worth keeping on the radar for CX leaders.

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4. Focus Will Move from Data to Insights  

When it comes to enhancing CX, we all know data plays a central role. That’s why every business is collecting data these days, but very few are converting it into actionable insights.

Did you know less than 1% of most organizations’ data is being used at all? Well, now you do, and it’s time to change that – every CX leader needs to remember collecting data cannot benefit the business unless they convert it into meaningful and actionable insights. Especially in this digital-first era where enterprises are collecting more and more data as the number of available data sources grows every day.

However, this might be a good thing for many CX leaders as it can help them gain a 360-degree view of their customers. But collecting data is one thing using it’s another. With increased data, it can be easy to lose focus from the main goal – unlocking insights from the data.

Customer data and intelligence are the new currency in the CX space. And transforming data into actionable insights in real-time is essential to gain a competitive advantage for businesses.

And, yes, we have not yet reached the point at which collecting data isn’t helpful or has diminished in its effectiveness. But only by measuring and analyzing this data can CX leaders take the customer experience to the next level; that’s why the focus will move from collecting data to deriving insights. Wondering how to do that? Well, you can use big data analytics to turn data into actionable insights. Also, to begin with, you need to integrate your data sources. Connecting the data sources will help businesses in mining the data, and it will help them get a better understanding of their customers and derive great insights from scattered data.

Wrapping Up

The customer expectations and the world of CX are constantly evolving, and the CX trends are evolving right along with it. To deliver an exceptional CX, you need to be quick to adapt to the newest changes and trends. The organizations that will do that will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers over – and that’s why every CX leader needs to implement and prioritize these customer experience trends in 2022.

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