In the future, customer experience (CX) will matter even more than it does today. As customers enjoy a growing abundance of similar products to choose from, they will increasingly select for the best customer experience.
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The Future of Customer Experience
New technologies, personalization, and other forces are changing customer expectations. To keep pace, businesses can’t keep resorting to traditional CX models.
Instead, they should:
- Understand where things are heading. Brands should track major trends shaping customer needs—artificial intelligence (AI), mobile apps, voice search, etc. Brands also need to adapt to an increased customer desire for convenience, control, and community.
- Build flexibility into the customer experience. Leading brands create CX that can easily change across different devices and platforms. More importantly, their processes, data, and teams can respond quickly to feedback and insights.
- Continuously improve and test. Brands should anticipate CX needs and commit to idea testing, feedback, and iterative improvement.
The goal is to evolve along with changing customer expectations. Brands that focus on this will earn customer loyalty as the market keeps shifting.
Fortunately, you don’t need to feel around in the dark for answers. There are specific steps any organization can take to future-proof their CX and take their customer service to the next level.
Step 1: Build a Flexible CX Foundation
To keep pace with rapidly evolving customer expectations, brands must build adaptable CX foundations. Rather than monolithic, siloed systems built for a single channel or need, leading companies should implement fluid CX technology stacks.
The core elements of a flexible CX foundation include:
- Omnichannel platforms. Unified commerce systems connect experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. This infrastructure readily supports new innovations like VR shopping or automated pickup stations.
- Modular architecture. Component-based tech stacks with reusable libraries, APIs, and microservices make iterating easier. Backends integrate with any front-end channel.
- Configurable databases. Flexible data models gathered from all channels fuel real-time CX personalization and optimization.
- Automation tools. Chatbots, AI recommendations, and robots handle repetitive tasks and scale capacity to meet rising customer demands.
- Agile teams. Cross-functional squads allow businesses to quickly shift personnel to tackle new challenges.
Together, these elements contribute to a next-generation CX foundation able to seamlessly adapt to shifting consumer behaviors, expectations, and innovations.
Step 2: Adapt Your CX Strategy
Customer expectations never stop evolving. With this continuous change, brands must adapt their CX strategy to grow and shift along with customer expectations. Brands need to utilize data-driven, real-time insights to craft a CX strategy that places customers first.
Brands can design and test new experience concepts or service ideas with target users in tight feedback loops. Rather than big bang launches, leading brands now roll out incremental experience upgrades via continuous delivery pipelines. Their cross-functional teams regularly map updated customer journeys and pain points, factoring in the latest tech capabilities from automated self-service to hyper-personalization.
In such models, even job roles and structures evolve into more fluid, T-shaped configurations as opposed to fixed departments. A culture of fearless experimentation complements the speed of technical and processing capabilities. This combination empowers teams to continually adapt based on ever-evolving consumer expectations rather than playing catch up after it’s too late.
Step 3: Activate Your Organization
To make your CX future-proof, you need to activate your organization to embrace customer-centricity. This goes beyond having good tools or processes—it requires a cultural shift at all levels.
Here’s how to activate your organization for adaptable CX:
- Rally around purpose. Clearly communicate your brand purpose and position the customer experience at the center.
- Lead from the top. Executives must model customer obsession in their decisions and actions.
- Train for empathy. Build employee empathy and understanding of customer needs through immersive training. This could include role-playing exercises or having staff interact directly with customers.
- Incentivize CX metrics. Connect bonuses and promotions to customer experience KPIs like a net promoter score (NPS) alongside other business metrics.
- Give employees a voice. Solicit input from frontline staff who interact with customers daily. They often spot emerging needs or pain points first.
- Share insights openly. Ensure all employees have access to real-time customer feedback, data, and insights to guide better decisions.
Step 4: Track Changing CX Trends
Customer needs shift faster today thanks to tech disruption and social changes. What delights consumers right now might be outdated in months. To future-proof user experiences, brands must actively track evolving CX trends and innovations.
Brands should monitor key signals to spot emerging experience opportunities such as:
- CX technology trends. Stay updated on innovations in areas such as conversational interfaces, VR, smart devices, and autonomous retail.
- Changing customer expectations. Survey your customers regularly. Collect continuous customer feedback through mechanisms such as embedded ratings, pulse surveys, beta testing groups, etc. This provides an internal feedback loop to complement external trend monitoring.
- Competitor CX innovations. Closely follow rival brands who pioneer new customer experiences in your industry.
- Broader societal shifts. Pay attention to macro trends around values, priorities, and demographics that transform consumer behavior and psychology.
Step 5: Invest in Experience Intelligence
To keep up with rapidly evolving customer expectations, brands need real-time visibility into the quality of cross-channel customer interactions. This requires investing in experience intelligence—consolidating data and insights to guide better decisions.
The core elements of robust experience intelligence include:
- Customer data platforms: structure fragmented data from customer relationship management (CRM) software, digital sources, and offline touchpoints into a unified customer experience—creating that all-important single source of truth for the customer.
- Voice of the customer programs: continuously collect feedback and perceptions from a representative sample of target personas through mechanisms like surveys, interviews, and embedded ratings.
- Journey mapping: models end-to-end, cross-channel customer journeys to uncover pain points and moments of delight. Quantifies key metrics like drop-off rates associated with gaps in experience.
- Text analytics: AI tools mine unstructured feedback like call transcripts, chat logs, and social customer conversations to detect emerging topics and sentiment shifts around aspects of customer service.
Step 6: Implement Continuous Optimization
To stay competitive, industry leaders build capabilities for continuous optimization using customer insights. They implement mechanisms to continually collect detailed customer feedback across touchpoints—from pulse surveys to post-interaction ratings to embedded questions. Advanced analysis translates signals into actionable insights around evolving preferences.
Armed with rich analytics on gaps as well as future trends, cross-functional teams rigorously identify areas to optimize for greater relevance. Rather than periodic initiatives, they pursue ongoing rapid testing and iterations—swift A/B testing, workflow adjustments, and prototype validations that move analytics capabilities forward incrementally.
Customer advisory panels guide these optimization cycles, which provide qualitative human perspectives on innovation opportunities. This outside-in view combines with disciplined data analysis to inform ongoing experience adaptation.
Step 7: Adopt an Agile Mindset
The traditional linear, process-driven models were effective in more stable environments but can now encumber progress.
Leading companies embrace agile ways of working through all levels to enable the right blend of responsiveness and control. This shift in mindset facilitates nimble value iteration within an empowering culture.
Key Tenets
At its core, the agile mindset is about feedback and learning cycles focused on customers. It rejects rigid delivery structures, instead favoring iterative experimentation and growth.
The agile mindset involves:
- Cross-functional team autonomy
- Continual priority reevaluation
- Early and ongoing test releases
- Focus on frequent working deliverables
- Continuous adaptation in response to change
When organizationally internalized, these principles allow for accelerated innovation tailored to evolving contexts.
Enable Cultural Attributes
Effective agile adoption goes beyond processes and toward cultural transformation. Cultural agility within organizations requires:
- Leaders as enablers. Executives support self-organizing teams with mentoring and resources. They lead through influence rather than top-down control.
- Transparency. Problems are openly discussed without blame to unlock solutions. All project elements remain visible to all participants.
- Customer obsession. Constant engagement with end-users shapes iterations to fulfill their needs.
- Growth mindset. Failure allows learning to build resilience and a feedback culture focused on improvement.
When these underpin operations, product teams can leverage agility to progress in pace with customer demands.
Sustain Strategic Alignment
To balance agility with coherence, firms implement various mechanisms including:
- Light governance touchpoints to ensure alignment to vision while giving teams implementation latitude
- Standard metrics quantify progress toward key objectives
- Retrospective reviews feed back into planning cycles
- Minimum viable experience guidelines maintain integrity
Combined with the continual priority reevaluation and rapid iteration already intrinsic to the agility mindset, these bridges provide the right dose of top-down direction without constricting bottom-up innovation.
Future-Proofing as an Ongoing Process
Rather than a one-time initiative, future-proofing your customer experience is an ongoing commitment. Customer expectations will keep evolving. New innovations will keep emerging. Competitors will keep pushing boundaries.
To sustain amazing CX over time, leading brands embed processes to continually:
- Sense shifts in consumer behavior, technology, market dynamics
- Adapt experiential innovations to meet changing needs
- Optimize customer experience improvements based on feedback and data
This cycle becomes core to the organizational culture. Teams are empowered to incrementally iterate rather than work through a rigid, long-term CX roadmap.
While foundational elements like platform infrastructure and data should provide stability, treat the customer experience itself as fluid.
The future is uncertain, but brands disciplined to continually align CX to consumers’ unfolding reality will sustain relevance, trust, and loyalty over time.
We’ll Help You Be Ready for the Future
We’re here to help you meet the future head on.
- Identify CX shortfalls and opportunities
- Map the journey and pain points of your customers
- Implement automation, business intelligence, and contact center (CCaaS) solutions that supercharge your CX
- Audit and streamline your spending on technology
- Ensure you’re getting the best solutions for the best price
We understand that every organization has unique priorities and challenges, which is why we offer a customized approach to match you with the perfect solution. We connect you with the best CX solutions by thoroughly evaluating providers based on their expertise, track record, and ability to meet your specific requirements.
With our expertise, guidance, and ongoing support, we ensure your CX implementation is seamless and efficient and provides peace of mind that your devices and data are secure.
We can also help you with your managed IT, business intelligence, SIP trunking, business automation, disaster recovery, and mobile device management needs. See our solutions page for the full range of professional services we offer.
The Future and CX FAQ
What is the future of CX?
The future of customer experience is all about hyper-personalization, automation, and meeting customers wherever they are. Brands will leverage data and AI to deliver tailored interactions across channels while chatbots and messaging handle simpler queries.
The focus shifts from transactions to building trusted relationships through valued experiences. Expect seamless omnichannel journeys where the human touch enhances the digital experience.
What is the future of customer success?
The future of customer success lies in predictive analytics to identify challenges proactively combined with custom onboarding and education for each client. Success teams will become trusted advisors who guide customers to achieve their goals with the product through contextual interactions. There will also be a shift to measuring value delivery over satisfaction.
Automation handles basic issues while complex situations involve human-led service augmented by AI for better outcomes.
What are CX trends in 2023?
Top CX trends for 2023 include a shift towards:
- Proactive support fueled by AI
- Scaling empathy through automation
- Integrating CX across organizational silos
- Journey orchestration powered by customer data platforms
- Hyper-personalization enabled by real-time analytics
- Focus on driving loyalty and retention over initial purchases
Why invest in CX?
Investing in CX generates substantial returns across customer experience metrics like revenue, loyalty, retention, and customer lifetime value—often over 20%–30%. Positive experiences drive referrals and brand affinity while eliminating pain points improves conversions across the funnel.
On the other hand, according to research, 75% of consumers say they’re willing to spend extra to buy from companies that give good CX—and 50% say they’ll switch to your competition after only one bad experience.
How big is the CX market?
The global CX market is massive and growing rapidly. Recent projections have it reaching $641 billion by 2028 for an impressive CAGR of 22% over 2022–2028. North America commands the highest market share—over 30% currently.
Key drivers include digital transformation, demand for personalized service, oligopolistic markets, and technological innovations in CX. It remains a strategic priority for most organizations.
References
Digital Transformation Market [2022-2028] Size to Hit USD. (2022, April 6). GlobeNewswire. Retrieved November 27, 2023, from https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/04/06/2417481/0/en/Digital-Transformation-Market-2022-2028-size-to-Hit-USD-3-546-80-billion-Exhibiting-a-Stellar-CAGR-of-22-1.html
Bishop, C. (2023, September 15). 51 customer service statistics you need to know. Zendesk. Retrieved November 27, 2023, from https://www.zendesk.co.uk/blog/customer-service-statistics/
