In January 2023 Leigh Segall, Chief Strategy Officer at Smart Communications – a leading technology company focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations, shared her predictions on what businesses would be focusing on with customer experience in 2023.
We’ve kept these in our back pocket knowing that as we round out Q4, it would be useful to reflect and review where customer experience strategies are currently at in this climate.
1. Ever-changing customer behaviors will require enterprises to reimagine existing business models
The accelerated shift to digital that was originally driven by the global pandemic has consumers expecting total digital freedom, with the ability to choose when, where and how they interact with brands across many industries.
Even those who were slow to adopt digital are now on board — which means businesses must adapt, not just to meet today’s expectations but also to prepare for the changes tomorrow may bring. Analysts and experts agree that businesses must focus on customer-centricity — particularly industries that have lagged in moving to digital. And they can show that they care by focusing less on one-way transactions and more on two-way customer conversations that drive trust and loyalty, and provide value.
2. Conversational experiences will make or break brand loyalty and customer trust
Consumers and businesses alike are overwhelmed with choice, making competition for attention and loyalty fiercer than ever. Add ongoing instability to the equation, and cultivating trust becomes the key to fostering lasting customer relationships.
Earning customer trust is especially challenging for industries that deal with emotionally-charged matters — such as money, health, and property loss or damage. Businesses addressing these needs should cultivate a tech ecosystem that’s interconnected and interoperable, pulling together data and processes from multiple systems of record to create easy, efficient conversations that are both sophisticated and seamless.
3. Enterprises will automate and digitize key business processes to increase operational efficiency
The pandemic-accelerated pace of digital transformation has led to an IT skills shortage that’s being felt globally. And many businesses are looking to low-code solutions to reduce the burden on IT and increase operational efficiency by empowering non-technical business users.
Shifting the mindset away from maintenance paves the path for future success by freeing IT teams from routine and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. Cloud-based solutions also reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and technical debt while bringing much needed resilience. Cultivating a tech ecosystem that brings agility and flexibility at scale will be critical to increasing operational efficiency without impacting customer experience.
4. Enterprises will mitigate risks and protect brand reputation by increasing the focus on compliance and regulatory requirements
Continuing cyberthreats are creating an increased need for business leaders to focus on compliance and regulatory requirements, which are constantly evolving — particularly for highly-regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and insurance.
Adopting a cloud-first approach will enable highly-regulated organizations to greatly reduce risks and keep up with ever-changing regulatory requirements — which will continue to evolve in 2023 and beyond. Investing in the right tech partners enables deep visibility into the nuanced requirements of each industry, with the ability to easily make sweeping updates as the rules of engagement change. Layering on automated, digitized solutions helps to ensure communications are compliant across all customer touchpoints; legacy systems simply aren’t up to the task.
5. Technological innovation will remain a top priority as enterprises recognize the increased need for agility and scalability
Business leaders know that speed and scale are mission critical. As global markets become more interconnected and waves of change continue to rise, enterprises must be able to adapt on the fly — and at massive scale. This calls for replacing legacy systems and processes with sophisticated, cloud-first solutions that enable data interconnectivity, operational efficiency and enterprise-wide flexibility.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, businesses need to be able to access and act on customer data and deliver personalized, unique customer interactions at every touchpoint.
We’d love to hear your thoughts — so please send us an email!