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Who would have thought that the Coronavirus pandemic would last so long? Most of us believed that Corona would last at most until the end of 2021. But everything changed with the arrival of Omicron. Even now, we must be prepared for everything even worse than before.
The pandemic not only changed the way we live but also affected our work life. Many office workers quit because they had to go to their workplace during the pandemic. Instead, many job opportunities flourished, such as online fitness classes and fitness centers, restaurants with delivery and take-out, or online grocery shopping.
Moreover, eCommerce sales have increased and customer behavior has changed because many people have turned to online shopping more than ever before. So, it is natural that many companies compete on customer experience; they still try to create an effective customer experience to stay in the game. In this article, we will discuss five customer experience trends in 2022.
Note: In the marketing world, you’re not the only one trying to provide the best customer experience. For this reason, you need a companion to analyze what you don’t see. WatchThemLive is a behavior analytics tool that allows you to watch all your user’s activities on your website.
You definitely don’t have time to pay attention to all your customers, and some of them will face a series of challenges in their journeys. If you don’t identify their problems and meet their expectations, you lose all of them. WatchThemLive has eagle eyes that enable you to look at your customer’s journey map and recognize the pain points. Read on to figure out how.
What Is Customer Experience and Why Is It so Important?
Before we discuss digital customer experience trends, you need to become more familiar with customer experience. Customer experience includes your customers’ perceptions, experiences, and feelings that originate from their interactions with your products and services.
You may ask yourself, what is the difference between customer experience and customer service? We must say that customer service is just one part of your customer experience. In customer service, you try to provide assistance and advice to your customers, while in customer experience, you try to create a bond with your customers, so you can increase your sales and reduce customer attrition.
Investing in customer experience is key to long-term business success. Although still, some companies pay less attention to customer experience, its importance has been proven for others. Customer experience is an important factor that can attract new customers. Moreover, it can highly impact the number of your existing customers and repel them. What’s better than satisfying your customers?
WatchThemLive is one of the best and most cost-efficient customer experience software with many useful features. Let’s dive in to see how this tool helps you to make your customers happy.
- Session Replays: Session replay is one of their easy-to-use features that lets you record all your users’ activities on your website. If you want to become familiar with your customers’ behavior or understand how they are using your website, this feature is made for you.
- Heatmaps: If you are curious to see which parts of your website are interesting from your visitor’s viewpoint, you can use heatmaps. This feature highlights all parts of your website using cold and warm colors, so you can understand which areas get the most attention.
- Goal Tracking: This is one of their excellent features that allow you to set and track your conversion goals. So you can measure your website performance and improve it.
If you’re interested and want to know more, sign up and see with your own eyes.
What Are the Four Essential Pillars of the Customer Experience?
Now it’s time to discuss customer experience trends. Today, enterprises care more about the eCommerce customer experience than before. Just like how you’re trying to improve your customer experience, others are trying too. First, you need to find all the gaps in your customer experience strategy, and then you should start delivering the customer experience that your customers expect. Here are four pillars of a successful customer experience:
1. Empower Your Marketing Team
Information and user-friendly technology are indeed important for having a great customer experience, but if your employees don’t know how to use this information and tools, then what’s the point? You will definitely face many challenges. So try to give them the necessary instructions, tools, and guidance.
2. Put Your Customer Journey under Microscope
Besides keeping an eye on customer experience metrics, you need to understand their full journey to enhance your customer experience. The best thing you can do is to focus on your advocate customers and compare their journeys to those who leave their shopping card midway. So you can understand why they have changed their minds and dropped out of your website.
3. Use the Right Tools
Today you can do nothing without technology, no matter how strong your customer experience strategy is. There are many behavior analytics tools or communication channels like emails or social media that enable you to respond to your customers’ needs and meet their expectations.
4. Collect Your Customer Feedback
Many business leaders pay too much attention to the management side of business while losing sight of what their customers are experiencing. As Michael LeBoeuf says, “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” New customer experience stats show that the companies prioritizing customer satisfaction have happier and more loyal employees. To keep all of your customers satisfied, you need to look for the gaps in their journeys. There are some easy ways to collect your customers’ feedback in order to fill the gaps:
- Read their comments on social media
- Use website feedback widgets
- Ask for reviews and interview users
- Use the Instagram story poll
- Post a link to a survey on social media
- Use chatbots
- Create paper feedback
- Send transactional emails
- Use a pop-up survey
What Are CX Trends?
As previously mentioned, a lot can happen in a year. Sixteen years ago, customer experience was not so important. Even the first iPhone was launched on January 9, 2007. So you couldn’t expect anyone to spend their money on Facebook Ads when social media had not been rallied. The marketing world has changed since 2007 and definitely will change by the end of 2038. Customer experience trends allow you to predict your customer’s needs; so you can fulfill their expectations. Now let’s take a look at five customer engagement trends for 2022:
1. Plan for Future Social Media Channels
Today, eCommerce has grown significantly during the pandemic, and eCommerce business owners owe this growth to social media channels. It is not out of mind that it will increase by the end of 2025. So nowadays, digital shopping allows people to use social apps and make purchases online.
Previously, people used Instagram or Pinterest to share their photos, but these two applications have expanded their features and become two of the most powerful applications in the world of eCommerce, which let people buy their favorite items while looking at the images. Moreover, Instagram can make your purchasing process easier because you can keep in touch with brands and ask your questions before making a purchase.
2. Reduce Customer Services Responses Times
Waiting is one of life’s hardships. The definition of waiting can be different for people. Someone is waiting for an apple pie to bake, someone is waiting to find their true love, and someone is waiting for you to answer their emails or questions. Everything has to happen on time. You can lose your customers in the blink of an eye if they don’t receive quick responses.
According to Forrester, customers expect a response in five minutes or less. Speed is one of the competitive factors that many brands compete on but at the same time. However, pay attention to your quality. Don’t sacrifice your quality for the sake of a quick response.
3. Invest in What Has Worked During the Covid-19 Pandemic
You must remember that many of us preferred talking to the doctor online during the pandemic. Still, many people prefer an online appointment. So telehealth is one of those unpredictable services that still has fans.
Another successful service that boomed during the pandemic is Curbside Pickup. This service allows you to pick up your orders wherever you want. And 62% of Americans are still fans of this service. So you can look around more carefully to figure out what services flourished during the pandemic and get inspired by them for the future because Coronavirus is here to stay. So seize the opportunity to figure out what services can be helpful for the future.
4. Advance Personalization
Marketing personalization is an essential factor that the lack of it can push your customers toward your competitors. Imagine you want to buy a new sunscreen; you have two options to choose from. The first brand can store all the information about your skin, such as your skin type. Also, it regularly sends some emails to you and introduces its new products according to your skin type, but the other doesn’t truly provide personalized experiences and has poor customer service. Which one do you prefer? Definitely, the first one because people always choose a brand that remembers their preferences and their purchasing history. People are annoyed when a service lacks personalization, so they stop using a brand and turn to your competitors.
According to customer experience statistics, 85% of organizations think they deliver a superior personalized experience, but research shows that only 60% of their customers agree. So try to fill all your gaps in marketing personalization in 2022 and remain competitive.
5. Take Advantage of Robots
There is no doubt that robots will replace humans in the future and take over human tasks. You might have noticed some cute pink delivery robots in Toronto’s streets. These food delivery robots are named Geoffrey and were created by Tiny Miles during the pandemic.
Moreover, White Castle also uses a french fry robot named Flippy to work alongside its hamburger robot to provide better customer service.
The scary part of the story is that these robots do their work better than humans. According to CNN, White Castle thinks a robot can make better french fries. The use of robots can cause fundamental changes in customers’ demands and expectations, and the meaning of customer experience will change ten years from now. So you can easily increase your customer experience by the usage of robots. Just imagine there is a robot in your retail store who can guide your customers without any mistakes. I think you should know what to do now.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed important customer experience trends for 2022. Undoubtedly, we suffered a lot during the pandemic, but this pandemic has its advantages. The events that happened in these two years can’t be expressed in a line, but now we appreciate our lives more. A lot of unexpected things may happen, so try to keep up to date and improve every important aspect of the customer experience. Today, technology talks. Invest in the right technologies to improve your customer experience. Also, make sure about your customer experience design. We also promise to be there. Give WatchThemLive a try and sign up.
