Customer service is almost expected to be instantaneous in 2016. Should we expect anything different from 2017? Absolutely not! In his recent article, Richard Shapiro discusses how responding to customers in real time over every communication channel will be essential as the foundation for your customer experience going into the new year. The article offers the following thirteen customer experience trends for 2017.
1) Companies Deep-Dive into Customer Feedback: Companies often take the scores from customer satisfaction and other surveys in order to gain an understanding of customer opinion and how well their teams are performing. However, these scores don’t give the full story when it comes to your customer experience and customer opinion, so it will be important to do deep-dive analysis to find information that may not be obvious.
2) Collecting Personal Data for the Customer’s Benefit: Shapiro’s article states that over 70% of customers like working with retail companies that use their personal information to make a better, more relevant shopping experience. That being said, companies need to be trustworthy and clear about what information they’ll use and that they’ll use the information in order to create a better customer experience.
3) Chatbots Provide New Opportunities for Self-Service: We live in an age of self-service as a preferred method of customer experience. If there’s a way customers can help themselves without needing to be assisted, many of them will seek that option. Chatbots fill this need by assisting customers based on their previous experiences with your website to predict what they may need in the future. Chatbots will enable self-service by giving customers the ability to access needed information on their own terms.
4) Consumers Outsource Problem Resolution: Many customers want to avoid contacting companies because they fear getting terrible customer service. This has given birth to companies that will actually contact a company on behalf of the customer in order to help resolve their issues. With this in mind, companies will have to re-evaluate their customer experience to make sure they are providing great service that doesn’t require a customer outsourcing their complaints and inquiries.
5) Virtual Reality and Holograms Reinvent the Customer Experience: Companies now have the technology to start utilizing virtual reality and holograms to enhance the customer experience. Examples of this technology would be companies showing holographic displays in stores where there is minimal space or the hospitality industry using virtual reality to provide tours of hotels and vacation locations.
6) Talk to Search Will be the New Norm: People utilize their talk to text feature on their phones all the time to keep themselves free for multitasking. Shapiro says that talk to search will be a growing customer experience need and companies should watch for new applications going into next year.
7) Companies Fine-Tune Customer Service to Drive Positive Posts: Customers can provide positive and negative feedback online for everyone to see. As great as free advertising of positive customer reviews can be for companies, negative opinion posts about your company can be damaging when they compound. Expect to see companies put emphasis on improving their customer service based upon reviews in an effort to win over more customers.
Shapiro goes on to describe the remaining trends below in detail. To read the rest of the following thirteen trends, click here.
8) Ad Blocking Drives a More Selective Marketing Approach
9) Millennials Choose Experiences Over “Stuff” … and Expect Great Service
10) The Customer Experience Embraces Five Senses
11) Customers Demand Realistic Versus Fuzzy Delivery Times
12) The Packaging (R)Evolution Extends the Customer Experience
13) Companies Track and Coordinate Customer Feedback Across Multiple Platforms
This blog post was based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
2017 Customer Experience Trends – Richard Shapiro
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