Top 6 Customer Experience Trends for 2022

Customer experience has slowly and steadily made its way onto the top priority list of businesses in the past few years. Today, every business is talking about customer experience and the term has created a lot of buzz around it. Every brand is keen on understanding customer experience on a deeper level and wants to know the next big customer experience trends since it’s evolving at such a quick pace. If you feel the same way, you’ve come down to the right place. Follow through this blog to understand the customer experience in-depth and what are the big customer experience trends in 2022.

CX Trends for 2022 

Another year has passed by and customer experience has been evolving faster than ever. Since the past few years, CX has continued to keep pace with the advancement of technology and has kept on evolving rapidly. Every year, we can see something new in the CX industry. Especially, since the pandemic, the evolution of CX has been tremendous due to the tectonic shift in the global markets to the digital means and behavioral changes on part of the consumers.  

This year, there is a whole list of CX trends that are predicted to be ruling the CX industry. 

Here is a list of 6 CX trends for 2022- 

Personalization 

There is no doubt that personalization and customization are the way to go about CX in 2022. According to salesforce, about 52% of customers want personalized offers and services as compared to 49% of people in 2019. With the technology, customer expectations have also advanced and they have become smarter with time.  

In today’s world everyone likes personalized experiences and especially since the adamant of AI and technology, there’s no reason why you should be offering generic experiences to your customers anymore.  

 Experience management software allows you to capture feedback from your customers and strategize accordingly. You need to carefully collect and analyze the collected data to cater to every pain point of the customer. This data analysis would help you provide a better overall experience to your customers in a more personalized fashion.  

Such personalized strategies are the way to go this year. For eg: Personalized email headers have higher click-through rates. This might look like a really small thing but in the macro environment, these micro-steps will do wonders for your brand.  

 In 2022, personalization would be one of the biggest customer experience trends. It would allow you to reach the right set of customers at the right time and solve the exact problems that they might be facing, thus providing a great customer experience.  

Automation in CX 

The next big trend in CX that has already started rolling out is automation. As the size of your company starts to grow, so does the number of your clients. With so many customers to handle at one, you can’t rely on human intervention at every CX touchpoint.  

Technology has played a major role in the CX industry in the past few years and will continue to do so with more advancement.  

Don’t confuse automation with replacing humans. The purpose of automation in CX is to leverage the use of technology to your advantage and use that to provide a good customer experience.  

 According to a report, about 67% of customers prefer interacting with self-help tools over actual human interactions in the initial stage of customer service.  

Some automation applications that we might experience in 2022 are the rise of chatbots and voice assistants. These AI-powered assistants allow you to create a seamless experience for your customers and help in alleviating any issues that your customers might have.  

In order to roll out automation in an efficient manner, you need to understand your customer personas and their expectations from your brand. It is essential to your brand that you are well aware of the pain points of your customers and offer meaningful solutions accordingly.  

Digital Customer Experience 

It has been two years and all of us are still living in a pandemic. The pandemic has forced many businesses to change the way they function. One such substantial change due to the pandemic is the shift to digital customer experiences.

Since most of the customer interactions are happening online, it has become really necessary for brands like yours to provide a seamless digital customer experience to your customers.  

Digital Customer Experience is not a new thing but a rather old one. It’s one of the most simple concepts to understand and may get complicated for some people to understand at the same time.

In simple terms, digital customer experience refers to improving the experience your customers have when they interact with your brand online, i.e. visit your website, purchase something off of it, etc.  

The process of visiting a website, surfing around that website, and finally making the purchase decision, all comes under the digital customer experience journey.  

Some really important aspects of improving digital customer experience are- 

• User Interface/User Experience 

• Updated Tools and Technology 
• Omnichannel Support 
• Website Optimization 

Many such factors come together to form a good digital customer experience. In 2022, if you want your brand to reach new heights, you need to understand everything about your target audience and create a digital customer experience strategy accordingly. 

CX Overtaking Price and Product 

In 2018, PwC published a report stating that in the coming few years, CX will overtake price and product. It’s 2022 today and the prediction seems to be coming true today. 

But, one thing that most people are confused about is why has CX become such an important differentiator for the customers and why would they prefer a better experience when they can get a cheaper product. 

The reason for this is quite simple: A good CX provides value for money, as simple as that.  

In this competitive world, where customers have an abundance of options to choose from, no customer likes to buy from somewhere where they have a negative experience during their customer experience journey. 

In that same report, PwC also mentioned that almost 16% of customers were willing to pay more to get a better customer experience.  

This shows that the product and price are not the only things that matter anymore and it’s time for brands like yours to start investing in customer experience in 2022. 

Predictive Analytics 

In order to survive in this globally competitive market, you need to stay ahead of consumer trends and behavior. This is where predictive analytics comes into play. Predictive analytics leverages the use of AI and machine learning and combines this technology with different data sets, and algorithms to predict future behavior, risk and opportunities. 

Predictive analytics allow you to identify your potential customers and target the right set of customers at the right time. The most important thing in any business is understanding the perspective of your customers. Predictive analytics with the help of technology allows you to target the right product to the right set of customers based on their buying patterns.   

This would help you in understanding upcoming trends, and potential customer churn and allow you to provide more personalized experiences for your customers. Doing so would allow you to take the necessary actions today.  

Thus, predictive analytics is one of the next big customer experience trends in 2022.

Human-Centered Experiences 

This point may come as a surprise to many readers as everyone always talks about automating everything. In fact, this blog also talked about automation in CX in detail. However, one important thing to understand while learning about CX is that each part of the customer journey requires to be dealt with differently. While everything has shifted to digital means and automation in CX is the way to ease up and scale CX, a term called ‘digital saturation’ has also arisen.  

Digital saturation refers to the phenomenon where people are tired of having just digital interactions and want actual human touch in their conversations with empathy, sympathy, etc. 

To create an effective CX strategy for your brand in 2022, you need to create a mix of AI-powered automation and a human-centered customer experience.  

Technology can be really helpful in creating a seamless customer experience if the roles are clearly defined. Using technology to help humans in providing a good customer experience is the most effective way of creating an overall good CX for your brand.  

In 2022, it is essential that brands understand these customer experience trends carefully. As we walked through this blog, we understood how important it is to understand the customer experience in all its depth. Creating an effective CX strategy for your brand should be your topmost priority in the year 2022.  

You can only start by improving upon your CX by understanding what it is that you’re doing right and/or wrong. The process of managing customer experience is a continuous journey with real-time feedback collection and closing of the loop. You need a reliable and proper experience management platform to handle this process. 

This is where we come into play. Survey2Connect provides you with one-stop customer experience solutions. With S2C, you find the right answers to take timely actions. Get in touch with us for a demo.