What’s Shaping the Customer Experience in 2020?

We live in a world where the vast majority of us can check prices, order products and share our thoughts with the tap of a button.

Delivering a high-quality customer experience is increasingly becoming the difference between success and failure. We live in a world where the vast majority of us can check prices, order products and share our thoughts with the tap of a button, wherever we are. That means that whatever happens to us, both good and bad, can be publicly disseminated almost instantly.

It doesn’t even really matter what we’re buying, either. Whether as consumers or as part of a decision-making process for a business, how we are treated as prospects and customers can very often sway our decisions.

According to one study, we are rapidly reaching the point where customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

2020 promises to be a watershed year for customer experience – from onslaught of artificial intelligence, to the continued upheaval of managing multiple channels across different demographics, anyone that seeks to offer the sort of service their customers seek needs to be aware of all the challenges they face.

While every industry has its own specific obstacles, those challenges can be distilled into three core areas:

• The Amazon Effect – what will the likes of Amazon and Uber introduce in 2020 that will upend what good customer service looks like? These digital leaders have consistently revolutionised what we’ve all come to expect, and as they continue to innovate, so do businesses in all industries need to revise how they deliver their own customer experience.
• The Generation Game – the perceived wisdom is that certain generations prefer certain channels. In 2020, that way of thinking needs to be discarded, and organisations need to understand that channels are less likely to define the sort of customers as they are to be used for certain types of queries and activities. Holding on to the concepts of Generation Mute shunning the telephone, or 60 year olds steering clear of social media, is only going to impact how effectively businesses can deliver a quality experience.
• AI, Customer – AI is coming, but it’s not taking your jobs. In 2020, the idea of the augmented agent, of human workforces being assisted by AI, is going to gain more ground. So it’s not just about deploying the technology solely in chatbots, but about feeding it across the organisation to give agents instant access to the right accounts, to grade sentiment and emotion in a call and flag potential issues – to make agents more effective and deliver a greater experience all round.