This never goes out of fashion! The customer experience landscape is ever-evolving and businesses need to adapt themselves to the latest trends no matter what if they want to stay in the game and serve delight to their customers.
Well, it goes more than just serving delight. Any business today, irrespective of its nature, has a huge competition and customer service can just be the one thing holding your customers from switching to competitors.
For things to stay the same way, you need to ensure that the latest CX trends are watched and implemented in your customer support strategy.
Now that 2023 is around the corner, we thought why not come up with an article that tells you all the customer experience trends in 2023 you should be knowing about?
That said, let’s get started with the customer experience trends of 2023!
1. Automated Chat Support Will Become More Mainstream
Automation has been in place for a fairly long time now. Businesses and customers are slowly starting to embrace automation in customer support.
In fact, statistics said that 80% of businesses would have a chatbot by 2022. Now, deployment and usage are two different things and that’s exactly what this trend is about.
In 2023, you can expect more brands to function with automated chat as their mainstream customer support channel.
Automating support will not only improve service metrics but also makes customers happy with speedy resolutions and improves agent productivity to a great extent.
So, if you haven’t automated your support yet, it’s time you start exploring options now. We’ll let you know how by the end of this read.
2. Omnichannel Customer Service Couldn’t Be Anymore Important
Though omnichannel support is still at its nascent stage of adoption, we couldn’t stress enough its importance.
Today’s customers have access to all communication channels. And if you’re a business that has a presence on multiple platforms, you need to start looking to provide omnichannel support. This is simply connecting all your communication channels to a centralized platform and managing all your customer queries across channels from one place.
In 2023, customers would want their support agents to know what they have been dealing with, especially during follow-up conversations. Put from a customer’s point of view, they hate to repeat themselves over and again! That’s what Forrester has to say as well – 38% of customers want agents to know what they are going through right away!
Using an omnichannel support software can be the key here as agents can view customer conversation history across channels without having to switch tabs.
3. Proactive Customer Service Can Make a Difference
Customers reach out to a business when they need something to be taken care of. This has been the case so far.
But going forward, customers expect businesses to extend proactive customer service. They want the business to reach out and know if they are facing any problems and let them know about the latest offers and deals.
The reachout could be via an email, a short text message or in the form of automated chats. The best way to go about this (and the way businesses will stick to) is the usage of AI-powered chatbots that can predict customer behavior and offer solutions accordingly.
Proactive customer is so important that Salesforce stated that 50% of customers might switch brands if businesses don’t anticipate their needs in advance.
4. Automation Will No More Be An Option
With chatbots revolutionizing customer support and making a great impact, not switching to automation or failing to deploy chatbots will not go in your favor.
A statistic by SuperOffice stated that almost 90% of businesses would plan to deploy AI Chatbots by 2023 and make at least a massive 40% of all the interactions AI-enabled. The usage of chatbots became popular and turned out to be a huge success post the global pandemic. Customers love quick and appropriate resolutions and they do not want that to go away.
If you haven’t automated your support yet, you might want to take a look at this. Automating support not only saves huge time and manual effort (not to mention the cost) but also improves customer satisfaction to a great extent.
5. Personalization Matters More Than Ever
This is one of the most important customer experience trends in 2023.
Personalization has become the new normal now. As much as customers love to talk to chatbots for instant support, they would love a bit of personalization at the same level. From product recommendations to support responses, customers expect personalization.
With AI chatbots onboard, businesses can now deliver the kind of personalized support customers expect. AI-powered chatbots can understand human queries, analyze emotions and give more appropriate responses.
6. Customer Feedback and Product Design Go Hand in Hand
We are now looking at a landscape where businesses listen to the feedback of their customers and introduce new features/make changes accordingly.
In fact, Harvard Business Review stated that products that were ideated from the feedback of customers performed 20% better when compared to other products. This approach of including customer feedback and tailoring products accordingly will be more prominent in the future.
As a business, whether it is product-based or service-based, it’s important that you listen to customer feedback and make changes accordingly – helps your customers stay more loyal to your brand.
7. CX Can Make or Break Your Business
All it takes is one poor customer experience for a loyal customer to switch to your competitor. Yes. That’s right.
Today, the options are plenty and the awareness that businesses can always do much better has made customers expect the best, every single time. One poor or mediocre experience with your business will make customers think about switching over to your competitor.
So, in 2023 businesses will look forward and take efforts to streamline their support across all touchpoints and make sure they deliver consistently good customer experiences.
8. Efforts to Enable & Improve Self-Service
Customers love when they can resolve queries themselves, the self-service approach. A survey revealed that a massive 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options rather than speaking with agents.
Self-service enablement can start by automating support with AI chatbots, deploying FAQs & helpful articles and more.
Enabling self-service will improve customer satisfaction, increase agent efficiency and give better customer insights. Having understood the importance of self-service, an increased number of businesses will push self-service enablement.
P.S. You can know more about self-service enablement and the best practices here.
9. Empathy Will Build Deep Connections With Customers
Empathy in customer service was an important customer experience trend in 2022. And it continues to remain the same in 2023 as well.
Customers expect empathy from support representatives. It gives them the assurance that their issue is being dealt with by someone who understands the scenario. This helps in fostering great customer-brand relationships.
So, make sure that your support representatives include empathy statements during the conversation – doesn’t matter whether it is via chat or telephonic conversation.
10. Agents Will Feel More Empowered
Agent empowerment will be a result of all the above trends we saw. Automating support and enabling self-service options will save agents from monotonous tasks and improve their productivity.
Also, having a playbook for agents will help them offer great support during critical situations. Empowering agents will also directly lead to agent retention which is quite important for businesses today.
So, those are the ten important customer experience trends in 2023 that you should look out for.
The Bottomline
If there’s one thing that’s common and you should take from this customer experience trends 2023 article, it’s automation, AI chatbots and omnichannel support.
Start investing in omnichannel support software and connect all your support channels in one place. Deploy AI chatbots to automate support and deliver instant resolutions. With the ever-changing CX landscape, it’s important that you adapt to the latest trends to stay in the game and retain customers.
That said, buckle up for 2023! Deliver delight and customer satisfaction on the go!