As consumers become more aware, they also become more empowered, meaning many businesses need to start becoming more customer centric, allowing customers to have more control during their shopping experience. By understanding what your customers are looking for and offering your customers a more tailored experience allows you to stay competitive and successful in the coming years.
It’s not only customer expectations changing, with rapid changes in technology happening every day, creating an enhanced customer experience has never been more important and it’s essential you understand the most important trends.
Here’s 5 of 2017s biggest trends for customer experience:
Personalisation Is Key
With advances in technology, personalisation is becoming more important than ever and has allowed businesses a number of opportunities to track and monitor customers preferences, including previously bought items, browsing history and abandoned cart history. This data can be used to give consumers a much more personal experience, showing them the items they want, need or might like, catering to their unique needs and increasing the chances of converting.
Chatbots Lead The Way
These days customers expect a services that work around the clock, at any hour of the day, in order to provide a great experience it’s important that your business can provide a consistent service and support 24/7. Chatbots can be an effective way to provide consistent, timely support, which can enhance the customer experience and improve your customer engagement strategy. With more focus on AI and voice recognition it’s likely that chatbots will become more widely used in coming years, improving customer experience for everyone.
Value & Experience Over Price
Although customers do want a good price, most consumers do actually value their experience over a low cost. There’s no point paying less for an item if you receive sub par service or delivery, instead consumers are now looking for businesses who offer a quality experience and keep the balance between a decent price and an enjoyable and reliable customer service experience. With more focus on the value of your customers experience rather than just seeming cheap, you can win over more customers.
Voice Search
With voice recognition devices like Siri, Alex and GoogleNow growing in popularity and virtual assistants continuing to evolve, it’s important that businesses start to consider utilising voice search within their customer experience strategy. By optimising your site for voice recognition and voice search tools and looking into the possibility of using voice searching within your own website search options, you could soon be incorporating one of the biggest tech trends into your business.
Convenience
Ultimately the biggest thing your customers want is a convenient experience that offers great service, fast delivery and amazing products, if you can’t offer this then your customers aren’t going to hesitate to look elsewhere for their products. By making sure your website works efficiently on mobile and desktop devices, providing enough information so that your customers won’t be left confused and also being sure to provide your customers with suitable shipping and delivery methods you can offer the convenient shopping experience that your customers really want.
In order to keep your customers happy you need to continually provide them with a enjoyable and reliable customer experience, failing to do so could be costly. By keeping up to date with current trends, as well as monitoring your current customer experience you can gain more of an understanding about what people really want from their shopping experience, giving you more opportunity to grow your business and keep your customers happy.
