5 Trends in Customer Experience Software for 2019

I asked marketers using customer experience (CX) software to share their thoughts on how the technology and its use, will evolve in 2019. Based on this research, I expect CX technologies will evolve in 2019 to support greater system and data connectivity, improve customer insights, and increase message relevance and process automation. Here are five trends to look for this year. Integration M&A activity reflects a trend toward unified customer data platforms and all-in-one solutions for marketing, sales, support, analytics and CX. That's great for businesses, because soon they won’t need to spend millions on integrations and IT for a single, holistic view of the customer. We’ll see the introduction of tools and improvement in design to help vertical markets perform integrations more easily, which can find ways to transfer customer information from one application to the other. Data Improved integration will help collate disparate customer data to provide a holistic view of customer activity across all departments — sales, marketing, customer support, etc. As CX software improves, organizations will start valuing CX data more than actual goods or services sold, because CX data will have a stronger correlation with long-term revenue generation and profitability. Customer experience software users say 2018 was the year of data for CX software — from GDPR-mandated data cleanups to a wave of new data from relational and transactional customer interactions, CX software companies focused on data collection. From real-time data collection facilitated by chatbots and AI, 2018 saw a new way for the CX world to gather, store and leverage customer data for more customized engagement. This focus on data will be the foundation for what’s to come in 2019 — a greater focus on data collection, data analysis, and acting on data to increase customer retention and better connect with customers. CX software will get a chance to show what it can do. We can expect the use of AI to grow and enable companies to sort and evaluate the data collected faster than in previous years. As CX software continues to gather more information, it will also continue to improve the software’s processes and provide better analysis. Understanding We see the embedding of more "marketing-like” approaches — more analytics of customer behavior and more automation of responses and customer outreach. CX pros are starting to do this as well, moving away from working only with survey responses from a small number of customers. This is parallel to the development that started some 20 years ago in marketing automation when businesses moved on from small-scale surveys in market research to using all their business data to better understand customers. CX solutions are looking at all data on customers, using it to understand their needs and wants, and building automatic processes to meet those needs. Businesses are realizing that customers today rate their experience based on the sum of all the interactions with business — not just on call wait time, or Internet ease of use. All of these things come together as customers move seamlessly from one channel to another — they see this as one overall experience. As such, successful CX solutions are embedding tools that can work with the entire customer journey — from its “discovery,” based on journey analytics, to the orchestration of a better overall CX through customer journey management. Relevance We’ll see organizations leveraging technology to make customer journeys frictionless, personalized — and ultimately, more profitable. Companies will be able to better target customers with more in-depth information, personalized messaging and tailored recommendations that better align with needs. At the end of the day, it will all come down to how well companies use CX software to learn about their customers and better serve them. Customers will become more skeptical of companies that fail to personalize emails and content. Consumers respond better when they feel like they’re people, not just another number on a list. The future of successful CX software implementations is those that take the time to focus on personalized, relevant information of value that helps makes customers’ lives simpler and easier. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning The shiny toys of Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data analytics only account for the aesthetic aspects of CX. Many companies are looking at the sexy components of a well-built website while overlooking why customers fell in love with brands like Netflix and Amazon. These top sites and companies gave the people exactly what they wanted from the onset. The next step for companies in 2019 is to find the right balance to effectively blend UX and CX to suit the customers’ needs like never before. With that being said, the automation side of CX is incredibly powerful. We’ve seen improvements in AI software within the past year and it will be fun to see how much it develops this year. The next couple years will revolutionize CX. Now that companies have built the technology, the only thing left is to fine-tune it. Build on the useful technology put in place. Machine learning (ML) and AI are already being used to identify data points with the most impact. We will see this translate into providing meaningful action points which leverage the data points. We will see CX software using AI to predict CX for new products, based on past data with greater accuracy. Lastly, we will see marketers leveraging AI to learn about their target customers and prompt them to take action to meet their needs.

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5 Trends in Customer Experience Software for 2019

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Tom Smith

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