It has become a tradition for us to map out the coming year from the perspective of customer experience trends. In 2020, we will see current trends grow with a few extra little surprises. There are dozens of huge trends/ideas/technologies/concepts that will change the state of experience in 2020; here are 5 big things that will change the customer experience as we know it in 2020. Let’s have a look.
1. AI Sentiment Analysis
You have CX data; whether it’s customer feedback, customer’s social media posts, emails, chat messages, phone calls, etc. Now that large companies are starting to embrace CX as a core building block of their company culture, we’re seeing situations where a MASSIVE amount of data is collected – sometimes millions of data points in the form of simple text as well as text which has been dictated from speech using natural language processing.
[pullquote]The problem of data overload is very real and contributes to inaction and lack of decision-making. Sentiment analysis offers a real solution to this problem.[/pullquote] The problem of data overload is very real and contributes to inaction and lack of decision-making. Sentiment analysis offers a real solution to this problem. If it were possible to automate the categorization of these data points into easy-to-understand pieces, it would make the decision making process much easier.
Say you have 10,000 responses to a question on one of your website customer surveys. “Can you suggest possible improvements to our checkout process?”. It would be incredibly time consuming to look through each response manually to check for real suggestions. Using sentiment analysis, you could categorize the responses as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, or ‘mixed’. Then, a good starting place would be to focus on the negative responses and derive ideas from there.
Another valuable tool is a word cloud. This enables you to see repeated keywords in a visual format so that you can identify problems much easier without having to sift through data.
As our AI gets better, it will be possible to perform more complex operations to get even more valuable insight. Read more about how AI is and will continue to revolutionize customer experience.
2. Augmented Analytics
Augmented Analytics is another example of AI making it easier for humans to navigate through the problem of data overload. More specifically, augmented analytics helps us to easily and quickly understand complex analytics software by translating functionalities into something that humans know best – language.
Say you have a form on multiple pages on your website and want to see what the best performing page is in terms of form submissions or ‘conversion goals’. Well, a software that offers augmented analytics may offer a search bar where you can type in something like “Best performing web pages this month by conversion goals”. Then the software will process this request into a function, add the correct filters, and display the data.
We are still in the early days of augmented analytics, with only a select few software companies actually having acceptably functioning augmented analytics in production. The first that comes to mind is Google Analytics.
As AI gets smarter (as companies like Google collect more data and make better use of it), we will start to see augmented analytics really taking off and providing us with critical, time-saving information.
3. Customer Journey Will Rule
We have discussed the concept of customer journey and its importance in previous posts. This idea is re-emerging based on thousands of customer interactions. In 2020, companies will utilize KPIs and metrics to measure the customer journey as well as for innovations, general well-being, and service improvement of the brand.
The lifetime value of a customer as they use products/services is a new realm on its own. The focus on customer journey defines the experience of customers and the usage of the data to improve customer services for them. It’s high time companies stopped using separate systems to collect data and break their data storage. The emergence of customer data platforms presents fantastic opportunities to go beyond just getting to know your customers, but to be able to cross-sell better.
4. Connecting CX To Sales, ROI And Profit
This might sound a bit obvious, but we’ve seen countless companies and leaders who do CX “just because you need to” or “because it’s trendy right now.” From our perspective, we see that this fad is finally declining, and companies are trying to understand how to connect CX with their other business objectives. It might be as simple as bringing together simple sales data to see some correlation or something a bit more complicated, depending on the industry.
One of the best ways to harness CX data is to link it to increased sales (NPS trend x sales trend), exposure (How many reviews are we creating?), and loyalty as a predictor of future consumer behavior. This becomes increasingly important because promoters are extremely likely to recommend the company to others. In contrast, detractors are extremely unlikely to make recommendations and are responsible for 80% to 90% of a company’s negative word of mouth. I can also add that about 73% of the promoters spread positive word of mouth! So, in the end, the most important thing is that you ask yourself, “How does this support my business goals?” and act accordingly.
5. Customer Experience Heros
It is becoming sporadic these days to see a company has her own Chief Customer Experience Officer. I firmly believe this is because few people understand the concept of customer experience and barely know how it leads to overall company growth. They are stuck on strategies and beliefs that have gone into extinction!
Of course, this is controversial because companies are racing to make CX their main strategy for competitiveness. There will be more incompetent CX managers on the market, and it will still take more time for them to gain experience. But also it warms our hearts to say that more high-level professionals are moving to senior positions faster than ever!
2020 Will Be A Turning Point
For many technologies and trends, not just CX, 2020 will be a year where many companies, researchers, and in turn, customers will find their stride. Were seeing many of the tech promises of yesteryear finally coming to fruition and at Feedbackly, we’re incredibly excited to show you how these technologies are going to be integrated into our products to make your life easier. Stay tuned.
