For businesses, 2020 has been a challenging year that has had a monumental impact on bottom lines and created a surge towards digital channels. Rapidly altering the customer journey, the year 2020 and the onslaught of COVID-19 forced many businesses into new ways of operating and interacting with customers.
However, our takeaways from 2020 don’t have to be all bad. With 2021 on the horizon, an opportunity emerges for growth and a newfound level of persistence.
Today, in order to prepare you for the new year, we’re taking a look at customer experience trends that emerged in 2020, that you can leverage for a prosperous new year.
1) Real-Time Customer Feedback
At a time where customers are surrounded by technology that provides real-time capabilities such as social media and direct messaging, being able to collect insight and connect with customers in-the-moment is vital.
For 2021 we’ll see more businesses adopt real-time feedback to enhance relationships with customers and deter negative experiences in-the-moment. With real-time feedback, businesses can recover at-risk customers and ensure any questions are answered in a timely fashion.
As an example, with the Loop Experience Platform, customers can share their feedback on their experience on the channel of their choice in real time. Those conversations automatically get forwarded to the appropriate staff member, and if it’s urgent, conversations get auto-tagged and sent to management. This real-time dialogue creates an open conversation while also deterring customers from sharing negative experiences online.
It can be said then that in 2021 the experience will be about having a consistent flow of conversation in real-time.
2) Greater Assistance With AI
Over the past several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has grown substantially in a number of business verticals. In fact, Microsoft predicts that by 2025 as many as 95% of customer interactions will be through AI, in addition, Gartner predicts 80 percent of all customer contacts will take place via artificial intelligence by 2030.
Much like 2020, in 2021 AI will continue to dominate various verticals including both B2B and B2C sectors. Helping streamline the buying process, providing fast and effective communication, and offering more tailored products/services to customers, automation will become the key tool in driving efficiency.
For business, AI can be adopted by leveraging a chatbot for customers visiting your website, as an internal communication tool that auto-routes messages to specific departments, or an insightful surveying tool.
3) Omni-Channel With A Focus On Contactless
Did you know that companies with extremely strong omni-channel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers? This is in comparison to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel customer engagement.
For 2021, enhancing the customer experience will be all about offering multiple channels in line with customer preferences. Whether they are traditional channels like email and SMS, or social channels like Twitter direct messages and Facebook Messenger, offering more than one channel has proven to both enhance loyalty and provide over a 9% year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
In addition to offering multiple channels, is managing every channel with ease. With the Loop Experience Platform, you can access a range of channels that meet your customer’s unique needs from one single inbox. This means, rather than toggling through multiple native sites, businesses can converse with multiple customers on a variety of channels from one shared inbox. What’s more, Loop offers a range of contactless channels, a trend that has skyrocketed since the advent of COVID-19.
4) Value-Added Experiences
Today’s customers expect more value from a single experience than ever before. Rather than a business simply delivering a service or product, customers want an entire experience tailored to their unique needs. That means offering personal touches throughout the experience, evolving the product or service to continuously meet their needs, and finding ways to make the customer feel special during each interaction.
For businesses in 2021, leverage value-added experiences by going the extra mile and tailoring experiences based on past purchases, where they live, how they interact with you, and so on. Whether you navigate preferences through surveying customers and monitoring trends or have in-person conversations, the new year is a great time to invest in customer listening tools that deliver reliable insight.
5) Technology That Can DO more.
When it comes to delivering on the promise of exceptional customer experience, technology can help in more ways than one. Whether it be by automating surveys and capturing feedback or offering a platform to instantly message customers, 2021 will be the year of businesses investing in a holistic platform that offers more for the investment. A technology platform that can do more and offers a complete view of the customer journey.
For 2021, it’s important to understand the various customer experience platforms out there and which ones can fit your business’s unique needs.
The Loop Experience Platform, for instance, is a unified customer experience platform that enables businesses to capture feedback in real-time while simultaneously allowing businesses to converse with customers on a range of channels. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email, the Loop platform can allow you to seamlessly communicate on a number of channels from one central inbox. What’s more, the Loop platform collects valuable data and can gather sentiment from the feedback gathered and conversations had with customers – so you’re always on top of business operations and understanding constantly fluctuating customer preferences.
How The Loop Experience Platform Can Help You Get There
For years, the Loop Experience Platform has helped businesses around the globe deliver an unparalleled customer experience through its innovative capabilities and features. Leveraging the Loop Experience Platform, some of the most consumer-centric brands have been able to both measure the experience at various touchpoints and message customers in real-time – all from a single unified platform.
With the new year approaching, looking into ways to enhance the customer experience becomes critical. With the onslaught of new safety measures, customer standards, a constantly evolving digital landscape, and standards to maintain with preferences of contactless communication, the Loop Experience Platform remains a robust platform to leverage.
Discover why The Loop Platform is the customer experience management platform trusted by the most customer-centric brands, by clicking here and reading our case-study with A&W.
