Consumers demanded brands to provide a better experience in 2022. Brands that listened to their customers and improved their experience succeeded. 2023 will be no different. Experience professionals who follow the trends will offer great experiences and win the hearts of their customers.
In this article, you will find 5 topics that will affect customer experience in 2023 and that experience professionals should pay attention to. Read on for our predictive insights and get ready to exceed customer expectations.
1- Phygital experience
As the digital transformation accelerated with the catalysing effect of the pandemic, we started to talk more about the concept of digital experience. Although there are those who think that we are moving step by step to a completely digital world like in science fiction movies, the fact that not everything can be moved to digital. Fijital, the concept that combines physical and digital experience, is now the concept that shapes the customer experience in many sectors.
The customer journey no longer has to be purely physical or digital. Physical or digital touchpoints can take place at every stage of the experience.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies offer great opportunities to combine digital and physical experiences. With virtual reality glasses, you can now tour the house you want to buy or ride a roller coaster in an amusement park on the other side of the world.
Cashierless payment systems in supermarkets, self-check-in kiosks at airports, biometric pass systems, applications that allow you to easily find your car in the parking lot in shopping malls, and cargo delivery cabinets of e-commerce sites are examples of digital experiences.
From a customer experience perspective, we now see that customer experience professionals need to have a digital awareness and think digitally at every stage of the experience.
2- Sustainable Experience
The way consumers think about brands and make purchasing decisions has changed dramatically in recent years, but one thing is certain: sustainability is more important than ever.
In 2022, a US study found that nearly 70% of consumers think it is important for brands to be sustainable.
Another study found that online searches for sustainable products have increased by 71% in the last five years.
As consumers’ awareness of sustainability increases, their perception of the customer experience is beginning to change. Sustainability is a new marketing argument for businesses and a very popular topic. But how sustainable are the customer experiences offered? Even if the result is a great customer experience, the compliance of all the processes that precede it with sustainability is a critical issue.
With 17 main goals and 169 sub-goals, the value of businesses that act in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals will increase in the eyes of consumers, while the reputation of businesses that act otherwise will decline rapidly. 2023 will be the right year to look at your customer experience from a sustainability perspective and focus on how you can deliver a 100% sustainable experience.
3- Artificial intelligence or human intelligence?
In recent years, we have been encountering ambitious artificial intelligence projects. Sophia, a humanoid robot that learns and improves itself with artificial intelligence, managed to surprise us all. The OpenAI project, supported by Elon Musk in recent years, develops artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. Scenarios that artificial intelligence will take over humanity have been on the agenda for years. Time will tell whether these claims will come true.
Nowadays, we often see services provided by algorithm-based decision trees being confused with artificial intelligence. Instead of a fixed algorithm, artificial intelligence services create their own algorithms in a dynamic structure as they learn and produce their outputs accordingly.
Today, there are AI services that can process text, voice, photos and images. In customer experience, AI is widely used for text and voice processing. AI services that offer sentiment analysis, trend analysis, topic detection, chatbots and insights through text analytics are very popular. While the accuracy rate of the results offered by these services is over 90% for uncomplicated texts, it is below 70% for complex texts. It turns out that these services need to be trained specifically for companies in order to produce results that will add value in the field of customer experience. For high accuracy, you will need a million data sets. OpenAI chatbot project ChatGPT was trained with 45 TB of data.
If a business processes data on a scale that is too large to be managed by human resources, a business-specific artificial intelligence service can be trained and used. If the experience data is at a level that can be managed with human resources, it would not make much sense to use an AI service.
Although it may seem cool to use artificial intelligence, the money you spend on standard artificial intelligence services that will not really add value to your customer experience processes will go to waste. Apart from data analysis, an AI chatbot software that returns Sorry I didn’t recognize you to your customers will harm rather than benefit your customer experience.
Remember that there is no AI service that can understand your customers better than you.
4- Accessible Experience
If there are still walls of accessibility between you and your customers, how would you like to tear them down in 2023? If yes, the first question you need to answer is: How accessible is your customer experience design?
You should consider your customers with special needs at every stage. You need to offer them more than just a ramp at the store entrance. Check accessibility on your website and mobile app and include accessibility options that the web browser and operating system cannot offer.
Gain an overview by adding accessible journey maps to customer journey maps as you complete accessibility across physical and digital experience points. Always seek support from accessibility consultants and experts to design an accessible experience.
A survey of online shoppers with special needs found that 86% would pay more for the same product if the site was more accessible.
Around 15-20% of US website users have a special need, including blindness and colour blindness, dyslexia and learning disabilities, autism, deafness and physical disabilities. Digital accessibility for these people is crucial, so an inaccessible experience means failing to meet the needs of 20% of your target audience.
In 2023, be sure to look at your experience designs from an accessibility perspective.
5- The threat of quiet quitting in customer experience
With the official end of the pandemic in 2022, the return of employees to the office came to the agenda. Mass resignations occurred in companies that decided not to continue the remote or hybrid working model.
Among the employees who did not or could not resign, there is a period known as Quiet Quitting, in which employees do not go beyond what their job descriptions require and continue their jobs without trying to make any difference. The Quiet Quitting trend, which started with the hashtag #QuietQuitting on TikTok by Generation Z, has spread rapidly all over the world. We often see that this trend is given different alternative names such as DYJ (Doing Your Job), Work-life integration.
Gallup announced that at least 50% of the US workforce consists of quiet quitters.
While the employee engagement rate in the US was 36% before the pandemic, this rate has decreased to 32% in recent surveys.
The rate of those who do not feel loyalty to the organisation they work for seems to have increased from 14% to 18% in the same period.
While productivity decreases in businesses where silent quitting occurs, it is seen that customer-facing units are far from meeting increasing customer expectations.
The way to stop silent quitting is for organisations to have people-oriented and transparent processes and manage the employee experience. Instead of clichéd employee satisfaction surveys, businesses should now prefer studies aimed at understanding employees. Businesses that constantly listen to their employees and try to understand them will also make an important investment in a great customer experience. A business whose employees are not happy cannot be expected to have happy customers.
Meet Wiseback
Wiseback has been providing experience measurement management, consultancy and training solutions to businesses from many different sectors since 2017. Contact us to get information about our solutions that advance the experience measurement and management processes of businesses that want to grow customer-oriented.
