Everyone has an idea on what “good CX” means. But how will you impress customers when almost anyone can access greater innovation than ever before?

In our concluding piece to kickoff Trends 2024, we’re going to talk about the singular theme this publication aims to crystallize – CX through tech. So far, we’ve talked about sustainability with pragmatism, co-thriving with AI, and the security and reckoning of usability. Through conversations with industry leaders, CX enthusiasts, and customers, sentiments around CX have been largely positive, and optimistic. Hence, what Forrester shared in their latest B2C CX predictions did not come as a surprise, rather the key trends validated narratives from our surveyed experts about how CX should look like in the age of self-serve, and “owned expertise”. 

Tom Mouhsian, Principal Analyst, Forrester, predicted* that CX will improve for the first time in three years, with most improvements across Europe and APAC. According to Tom, while CX scores were driven to improve during the pandemic through rapid digitalization, customer experience and satisfaction had largely remained undifferentiated. Gen AI, however, will be the force to lift CX by fixing the most common of its problems, through both augmenting customer service and CSRs’ capabilities.

Since last year, more brands have announced gen AI capabilities specifically for customer contact centers, but as Tom highlights, to successfully uplift customer experience scores, all efforts must work in harmony around the customer.

Customers Want More, But Not Necessarily From You

Just how important is using the right channel to engage, and providing the right messages to your customers? Erwann Thomassain, Vice President of Marketing Asia-Pacific & Japan (APJ), Genesys shared that 86% of customers say that a company is only as good as its service, and almost a third (31%) have reported that they stopped using a company after a negative interaction during the past year.

“Our studies also show that consumers’ expectations for personalized service are increasing, they seek connection, empathy and shared values when they interact with brands.”

Customers are online almost half their waking hours, and they want to be able to engage with a brand at their own pace and time.Great CX isn’t simply anticipating issue resolutions, but to proactively design ways of engagement that is unforced, and gives customers what they want before they know it. As the Gen Z and Millennial spenders continue to dominate both B2C and B2C spending, these digital natives know how to search for information first, and can do so easily. More options are available to them, and greater expectations on what a brand must bring besides good service and product. 

Brand monogamy is a thing of the past – customers now want to be able to choose, and brands must accept that they are going to be compared and benchmarked against direct and indirect competition (e.g. alternatives to a product or solution), so how do you ensure that you’re going to be in the space when they make the decision?

Mao Gen Foo, Head of Southeast Asia, Qualtrics, suggests to look beyond direct marketing, spend time to understand what creates “extra magic” to make a customer feel like they are part of the community.

“The key to improving experiences for customers and employees is prioritizing human connection. Research from the Qualtrics XM Institute shows consumers prefer to interact with brands via human channels, and that their biggest concerns around using AI are focused around it creating a lack of human connection, misusing data, and the belief it will take people’s jobs.”

To meaningfully build and foster the connections people are looking for, organizations need to continually understand how customers and employees are thinking and feeling and taking action accordingly. When organizations do this they are well placed to drive meaningful outcomes for the business and the customers and employees they serve.

Gen-AI Fundamentally Changes Customer Experience

One of my favorite quotes from Forrester’s recent sharing was from Dane Anderson, Senior VP, International Research & Product, Forrester, who said that Gen AI fundamentally changes the way humans interact with technology. Like the first PC, our introduction to the Internet, mobile devices, app stores, VR – whenever there is a significant change in the way humans interact (user experience) with technology, the impact will be great and it will be lasting. But must all customer-facing teams become experts in the tech?

Erwann seconds Dane’s observation that while professionals at most levels will have to adapt to a world where tech and gen AI are more prevalent, the expertise should be geared towards human-AI collaboration with data analytics. “One of the great benefits of Ai is that you can interact with the technology in a very human and non-technical way,” he added.

Qualtrics XM Institute recommends that experience management professionals focus on four disruptive attributes of generative AI in their work improving human experiences:

• Data summarization (to summarize insights from across a variety of data sets),
• Pattern recognition (to spot emerging topics and sentiment),
• Conversational interface (to use in digital channel interactions – e.g., to provide chatbots that provide access to self-service portals),
• and content personalization

“For some workers, these will be new skills, tools, and capabilities they need to learn. By taking action now organizations will be well placed to unlock the full value of AI as it becomes apparent in the months and years ahead,” Mao Gen said.

How to Know if Your Customer Experience Works

When asked if CX should be part of an organization’s financial statement, Mao Gen explained, “the most forward-thinking CX leaders are linking their programs to meaningful business outcomes – and doing so is key to ensure future investment and growth in CX. It’s an exciting shift because CX programs are tied to tangible outcomes senior directors and executives can easily understand, which allows the business to make confident decisions about where to invest and what to prioritize to drive growth, increase market share, and improve customer loyalty.”

Traditionally, CX scores are skewed towards qualitative feedback, instead of a synthesized outcome of both quantitative and qualitative metrics such as revenue contribution, customer lifetime value, feedback collection, issue resolutions, to name a few.

When the engagement goes online, gathering active feedback and putting that into learning models, is a win-win for customers and brands. It’s not a new concept, but gen AI, and variants of AI-enabled automation and learning models just make it easier. But to synthesize what “works” for the customer, requires a down-to–earth and authentic approach to listen to what customers want, and then deciding whether your brand delivers.

Measuring the hard numbers and putting the qual-quant-profit mix to decide what’s best for the business and company makes for an optimistic framework of how C-suites can set out their CX strategy and deliver brand promise.

“At a time when customer expectations are higher than ever before, one of the most important aspects of a successful experience program are the outcomes and objectives it is focused on achieving. One way we see organizations do this particularly well is when they look at the program through the lens of their brand promise by answering and responding to the question: is our brand delivering to customers in the ways we promise? For example, if a brand fails to regularly live up to a promise of fast reliable service, that would be a strong indicator it is not meeting expectations.”

The Happy Trifecta, and a Plus One

Some solution providers, such as Salesforce and Zoom, are leading the charge in developing their own guardrails on how gen AI and data management can be secured, while brands continue to rationalize their MarTech stack in hopes to deliver their brand promises and quality customer experiences. Insofar, CEO, CMO, and CTO work together for policies and governance around new customer-facing tech, writing and rewriting internal governance policies to ensure sound usage of customer data, without hindering efficiency. Brands will do well to bring a +1 to the table as the business builds on its innovation-led Customer Strategy – the CISO.

Despite best efforts of solution vendors providing AI guardrails, brands will benefit greatly with a CISO into the mix to ensure people (i.e.. customers, employees) and AI interaction stay well within state, enterprise and info security fences, and also designed for the future. Internal usage policies must accept some levels of elasticity or buffer, to tweak and grow as gen AI adoption for the masses continue, and to do so responsibly with customer data, C-suite discussions must include insights from CISOs to deliver CX success through a better tech stack.

With Gen AI adoption showing no signs of slowing down, brands hoping to be part of the “most improved” must get the right teams on board, take a bottom-up, outside-in approach to enable employees and customers alike with the right mix of tech and human-connection, and stay accountable to CX metrics that can ultimately impact financial performance.

*Forrester Predictions 2024 For B2C Leaders, 16 January 2024