8 Customer Experience Trends You Don’t Want to Miss Out on in 2023

Customer experience is an ongoing and the most important aspect of any business for customer journey mapping and also irrespective of industry and size.

Developing a product/service, analyzing/creating strategies to market it, and selling it. All these processes have an ending point.

But the loop of customer experience goes on ♾

It is no longer a luxury but a necessity to keep your customer experience game up ⬆️ because one bad experience and boom! It takes a jiffy for anyone to lose interest in a brand.

In extreme cases, it might also repel away the customers forever.

Surprisingly today, businesses still find it difficult to offer the best customer experience management to their customers. As per this report, 86% of consumers will leave a brand they trusted after just two poor customer experiences.

So, here we are! Helping you stay on top of your customer experience game with these 8 customer experience trends of 2023 that will matter the most and see how they can help you elevate your customer experience.

8 HOT Customer Experience Trends in 2023

Offer Self-Service for Customers Willing to Solve Their Own Issues

Self-service is the most tailored option out there for customers, where they do not have to depend on customer service experience reps to solve their own problems.

Customers can take the help of self-service options like a knowledge base, community forum, frequently asked questions (FAQs), etc., to get the answers to the issue that they are facing.

For example, if your customers are having trouble finding out how to return a product that they purchased, the knowledge base articles or even FAQs on your site can help them find out the answer.

Self-service – one of the most allows the customer to take the charge and solve their own issues quickly. It also neglects the possibility of error that might occur if the customer agent is providing a solution. All these factors combinedly enhance the customer experience.

92% of customers say they would use a knowledge base and 83% say they would use a community forum for self-service support if it is available. Hence, it is very important to have self-service options available for your customers.

How Self-service Options Have Become Customer Experience Trends?

• Build an FAQ page – To get a better understanding of the most asked FAQs you can analyze your live chat, customer service calls, contact forms, etc., and find out the frequently asked questions. Another way to do that is by doing competitor analysis, you can visit their website and check out which are the most asked questions. So, once you know what questions are asked the most by the customers, you can create an FAQ page to make your customers’ life easy, as they will get all the answers to their questions in one place.
• Create a knowledge base – A knowledge base is the most effective way to help customers to solve their queries on their own. For example, if you are having trouble operating a Smart TV, you can visit the brand’s knowledge base, and learn everything from how to connect your TV to Wifi or how to watch YouTube, etc. Hence, having a knowledge base helps your customers get quick solutions to their problems.
• Publish pre-recorded tutorials – Pre-recorded tutorials or do-it-yourself videos can offer great support to the customers. Many of us have visited YouTube in the past to seek some help related to the issues. The main aim of these videos is to show how to solve the problem that the customer has step-by-step. Sometimes what happens is just by reading a knowledge base article, the problem does not get solved, but once you see how it is done live via a video, then it becomes a much easier task. Creating engaging YouTube video ideas can greatly enhance customer support through pre-recorded tutorials or do-it-yourself videos.
• Build a public forum – You as a business can create a community for your product by offering your customers public forums where they can share their own ideas or ask questions for which they need an answer for. With the help of this forum, you can increase your customer engagement and allow your customers to get a better understanding of your products.

Chatbots: A Solution for Modern Customers

A chatbot is an AI-enabled computer program that helps to converse with customers and solve their issues quickly and efficiently.

Almost 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they provide instant responses and from a business perspective, it can also cut operational costs by up to 30%. Thus, chatbots are cost-effective alternatives for businesses to improve customer experience.

To be honest, I am very fascinated by chatbots. They are one of the best ways to avoid human errors, improve work efficiency, reduce operational costs, improve customer engagement, etc. These are just a few of the many benefits of chatbots.

How Chatbots Have Become the Latest Customer Experience Trends?

Let me ask you one question, have you ever found it difficult to connect with a customer service agent? The reason for not connecting with them might be anything from their unavailability to the completion of their working hours.

This is where a chatbot can be the most effective alternative for businesses because it is the software that can remain available 24/7 for customers and can solve problems quickly.

So, by offering 24/7 service to your customer, what happens is their trust in your brand increases, which might not have happened otherwise.

It also helps businesses to convert 4x more leads when compared to the traditional way, as in the end what matters is “conversions”.

Deploy Helpdesk Software to Improve Customer Experience

Helpdesk management software is an ever-evolving trend that has been helping businesses all over the world to improve their customer service efforts.

So, what exactly is help desk software? To put it in simple words, helpdesk software is a tool that can help customer service teams to ease their workload and streamline the customer service process for their customers.

It can also be used by customers to raise tickets for queries or issues they are facing. This kind of software can offer solutions at lightning speed to customers.

Let us see an example to understand better what helpdesk software is. Assume that the delivery of the product that you ordered online has been delayed and you want to know when it is going to arrive.

This is where the helpdesk software will help you to generate a ticket for your query. It will also allow the customer service team to offer you the solutions as quickly as they can.

Around 86% of service teams say having a helpdesk system improves their productivity levels. 51% of high-growth service teams are reliable on helpdesk systems.

Apart from allowing businesses to solve the queries of the customers, helpdesk software also offers many other features, such as:

Why Help Desk is Always Going to be the Most Important Customer Experience Trend?

• Omnichannel support – It gathers queries from multiple platforms and compiles them in one place so that you get all the queries.
• Automation – It automates repetitive tasks so that the customer service teams can focus on critical queries that need their immediate attention.
• Analytics – Allows you to track the previous performance of your customer agents or teams so that they can improve their strategies or efforts.
• Task Management – Allows you to assign each ticket to the relevant agents based on set parameters and lets you measure your real-time performance.
• Canned Responses – This can help you send instant responses without wasting too much time. It also allows you to personalize your responses as you want.

Streamline Communication Process to Keep Customers Happy

Transparent communication with service agents can create a sense of satisfaction in the mind of your customers.

If your business has created some kind of strategies to communicate with the customers, you must check them out, to analyze whether they have been working properly or not.

In case, they are not due to any reason, you must focus on solving them as quickly as you can and make the communication process easier.

Good communication also helps you to retain your customers because satisfied customers would not have any reason to leave your brand.

Things to keep in mind when communicating with customers:

• Stay patient and be a good listener
• Empathize with the customers
• Have a polite tone when replying to the customer
• Guide them through the whole process
• Offer them the best possible solution

All these factors will definitely help you streamline your communication process with your customers and offer them a great experience.

Always remember one thing, the customer is the king and good communication is the key to keeping the king happy and satisfied.

Data Security is a Crucial Customer Experience Trend

We all use social media platforms, and we all have heard about cyber-attacks that steal critical information. It could be anything from names, residential/office addresses, bank details, crucial files, etc.

According to statistics, more than 77% of organizations do not have an incident response plan.

This is where businesses are falling behind; they must have a plan in place so that when there is a cyber-attack, they can give their business a chance to fight.

How can businesses stay one step ahead and can keep the customer’s information safe?

Encrypt crucial data – Crucial data of the business/customer, such as passwords, names, addresses, bank credentials, etc., should be encrypted so that cyber-attacks cannot steal it. SSL certificate, in this case, should be installed on the 10gbps server, and SSL certificate can be either single domain or a lowest or cheap wildcard SSL, multi-domain SSL certificate.

Take backups on a regular basis – Documents, media files, configuration files, etc., should be backed up regularly by your business so that the important data does not get lost due to cyber-attacks.

Set up firewalls – Firewalls can protect your business from cyber-attacks without compromising its performance.

Manage passwords – Businesses can use password manager tools. Also, they can set up two-factor authentication and change their passwords regular intervals to keep their passwords safe.

So, all these things can ensure your customers safety of their data can, increase their trust in your brand, and can also have a positive impact on their experience as well.

Make Use of Automation to Make Tasks Easier

Automation has become an integral part of our lives. Humans have been depending on automation a lot nowadays, as it has the capability to carry out certain tasks that humans cannot.

For example, automated machinery is used to prepare snacks by many businesses in the food and beverage industry. These machines make the process of preparing snacks a lot quicker and easier.

Similarly, businesses can also use automation to enhance their customer service experience efforts. They can automate repetitive tasks and make it easy for their customer agents to focus on other crucial tasks.

This way, businesses can not only solve the issues of their customers quickly but can also offer them good solutions on time, which can improve their customer experience.

Automation can also play an important role in setting the priorities for tickets by analyzing phrases/words such as extreme, crucial, critical, urgent, etc. There are many other tasks in customer service that can become easy with the use of automation.

You can judge the importance of automation, as nearly 70% of customer service decision-makers plan to invest in automation.

Analyze the Previous Data to Enhance the Customer Experience

Data plays a crucial role in getting insights into the strategies that a business has created. It gives you a clearer picture of whether the strategy needs a change or if they are working as you expected them to.

The customer service field is no different; data plays a huge role in this field as well. You must check the data on a regular basis to improve your strategies and offer your customer the greatest of experiences.

There are a number of benefits that you can have if you use analytics properly. Benefits such as solving similar queries of the customers by looking into the previous data.

So, what you have to do is, find a similar query and understand how it was solved so that you can offer a similar solution to the customers, which can result in saving a lot of time and improving the customer’s experience.

Another aspect that helps you improve the customer experience is keeping track of the performance of your agents so that you can understand how efficiently your customer service teams have been working.

Because the efficiency of customer service teams is directly related to the customer experience, if they are not working properly, they will not be able to offer good service to their customers.

You can also use the previous data to send personalized emails and messages to your customers so that they can get updates related to your brand. Many business giants have used this strategy to retarget their customers and improve their experience.

Employee Experience is Equally Important as Customer Experience

Employee experience is the journey of an employee in your company. You as a business must always look out for your employees and try to give them a suitable working environment. So, that they can give their 100% commitment to the work that they are given to do.

But, you must be thinking, how can employee experience affect customer experience? Let me try to make it clearer.

So, first of all, you must figure out what kind of experience your employees are having while working in your company. Is it bad or good, or great?

Because your employee’s experience is unknowingly affecting your customer’s experience. It is a simple formula,

Employee experience = Customer experience

Your employees are the ones who work for your business; they sell your products, offer your services, and look after your customers whenever they need any help or support. So, if you do not keep your employees happy or you do not treat them with respect, they might not work to their full potential.

And in the end, who is going to get hurt? Your business. Right? So, remember to be nice to your employees.

You can do a few things to keep your employees motivated and loyal such as appreciating them for their efforts, not interfering in their work every now and then as they are also professionals, empathizing with them, etc.

This way, you can give your employee a healthy work environment, which can in turn, reflect in their performance and will eventually enhance the customer experience.

Conclusion

To put it all together, the customer experience does not depend on any single individual. It is going to require a collective effort. Only then can any business offer the greatest customer experience. Above mentioned trends in customer experience will allow you to get a better understanding and will get you started. As you know how important it is to keep your customer’s experience pleasant, start implementing these trends today.