Today’s rapid pace of disruptive change is shaping customer expectations and, accordingly, customer experience (CX) in ways that threaten to leave less agile brands behind.
Offering the right products in the right place at the right time is a given for success today -- and it’s not enough. Instead, it’s about what your customer expects from your brand as their individual experience, at any time, from anywhere and via any device. The value of your customer relationships is expressed through personalized one-on-one experiences, responsive customer service and connected experiences across channels.
What's more, customers are judging brands against their most recent stellar customer experience; that means industry disrupters like Amazon, Airbnb and Uber are the standards against which your brand is measured. Your CX must be on par or your business future could be in question. With this in mind, here are the seven key disruptions shaping CX and CX strategies today:
1. The Increased Pace Of Change
Technological advances are unfolding at a vastly accelerated pace; yesterday’s groundbreaking news is old news today. From a Customer Experience perspective, the challenge is to identify what is useful, meaningful and desirable. The big wins happen when new technologies are humanized and made relevant to people’s needs and wants.
2. An Abundance Of Customer Data
Brands are collecting vast amounts of customer data, including their interactions, buying preferences, behaviors and more via direct ask (profiles, preferences), indirect tracking (interaction analytics) or connecting other third-party data sources to organizational systems.
Data collection and manipulation on this scale represents a significant opportunity for savvy disruptors to gain competitive advantage and secure big wins over their competition. Doing so requires “translating” the information into actionable insights. If the translation is complicated or doesn’t demonstrate value, that data could be ignored.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Machine Learning (ML)
Most applications of AI for business lie in ML. Clever algorithms “learn” from previous results and shape outputs based on that accumulated knowledge. These capabilities can detect patterns in customer behavior and needs which, in turn, enable hyper-personalization and responsive customer service.
Spotify predicts your music choices, the Facebook messenger chatbot can order Domino’s pizza and, soon, your facial expression can order Kentucky Fried Chicken due to a partnership with Chinese search engine, Baidu, that uses face recognition technology.
Massive disruption in AI is still emerging. When you consider ML as functioning on a single layer between input and output, deep learning (the future) will function across complicated cross-functional networks, multiplying its output capabilities exponentially.
4. Voice Recognition And Intelligent Bots
Advances in ML are behind performance improvements in virtual reality (VR) systems, such as Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. Research has found that Siri has an IQ of 23.94, well below that of an average 6-year-old; essentially, Siri is a “programmed robot,” instead of having true AI and problem-solving capability.
From a CX perspective, using intelligent bots to interact with users can create big wins. For example, when calling customer service, no more waiting on hold, being transferred, and (re)validating identity before getting help; instead, a bot can validate identity with voice recognition, access all relevant data, engage in a focused conversation to ascertain need and then refer the call to the most experienced agent for help.
5. Customer Data Protection And The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Along with the ability to compile, slice, dice and exploit vast amounts of data comes certain responsibilities; with the rapid pace of change, legislation is chasing the curve.
For example, Equifax’s September 2017 data breach was significant: 143 million users were compromised. The cause? Equifax failed to apply a simple software patch to their Apache Struts web application. (The aftermath? Brutal.) As much of Equifax’s data is not from direct customer transactions but is used to perform credit checks, legislation is racing to keep up to protect consumers in this scenario.
The European Union’s answer is the GDPR, a legislative initiative that protects personal data privacy of European citizens. Since user data is stored globally on many devices as well as in the cloud, the GDPR has implications worldwide for companies that store personal information. The GDPR is also a good indicator of trending future legislation.
6. Video
While video may seem like yesterday’s disruptor, it has transformed how we consume information; brands cannot ignore video for consumer engagement. Video enhances customer experience with basic branding and how-to videos; however, new possibilities for video keep emerging, such as a virtual reality video that allows test-driving a car without going to a dealership.
One metric that Google uses to determine the relevance of a site (and, therefore, whether to direct organic search traffic or not), is “dwell time,” or the length of time a visitor spends on a webpage. Video increases dwell time and, therefore, affects organic traffic.
7. The Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Your customers expect a seamless and unified experience that doesn’t require them to hop across systems and applications to do what they want to do. This holds true no matter how your customers choose to interact with your brand -- by web, mobile device, social media, call center, chat or any other channel. This means your front- and back-end enterprise systems must be integrated.
Seamless CX Spells Opportunity For Your Business
Intelligent use of customer data and integrated digital experience platforms represent a serious opportunity for savvy businesses to outperform their competitors. A seamless omnichannel experience, with a strong and relevant brand presence at each stage of your customer’s journey, with the right message and functionality, delivers a superior and compelling CX that builds trust and relationships.
The mantra of modern enterprise is "disrupt to deliver more value" -- use it to your advantage for CX.
