cx planning 2021

Top CX Trends for 2022

Wondering where to focus your CX efforts this year? What are other companies doing? Read on for an insight into where to focus your efforts this year and reap the rewards.

Making your customer service metrics public

When you are shopping online do you first check out their ratings and reviews? You’re unlikely to buy from a company with poor reviews, right?

Utilising TrustPilot & Google ratings is a new way for companies to show you how much their customers love them. Even if an unhappy client post a detracting review, the company has an opportunity to respond and rectify the issue, and possibly turning them into a happy customer.

Publishing reviews via an external source also helps to build trust with your customers as well as driving performance internally. Knowing the reviews are public motivates staff as they want to be judged positively by the community.

Some service industries are also now showing their current wait times online e.g. NSW Health allows you to search your nearest hospital to assess the current waiting time to be seen.

Consumers are moving towards brands that have aligned values

There is a big consumer shift towards business that mirror our personal values. With climate change becoming a real issue facing our and future generations millennials and conscious shoppers are throwing their support behind B Corp-certified brands.

B Corps balance purpose and profit and are be certified through a stringent process to gain B Corp certification.

Not just a marketing gimmick, it makes business sense: B Corp-certified brands in the UK grew 28 times faster than the national economic growth rate of 0.5 per cent in 2018.

B Corp brands you may have heard of: Patagonia, Aesop, Bank Australia, T2 Tea, Ben & Jerry’s, Who Gives a Crap, Keep Cup, Kathmandu.

Using customer research and customer journey maps more effectively

Taking the time to properly research and understand customer gripes can pay back big time. It is not uncommon for us to see customers who have spend >$100,000 on customer journey maps just to fix a $10,000 process. We’ve also seen customers who have spent hundreds of thousands on technology upgrades that don’t deliver the benefits or desired customer experience.

So, do you need customer research or a service review/design?
Planning a large strategic transformation, introducing new services or rolling out a new communication service for your team – yes, it is better to do customer research before you embark on these.

If you want to improve service performance or to deliver on business objectives, then a service review is what you need before you get started.

Embracing Digital Workforce

As it stands, Australia is about 3 years behind the rest of the world adopting the use of digital workforce.

If you have been looking for a service solution that delivers the magic three: reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and increase employee engagement – here you have it.

Creating a platform and centre of excellence that uses tools such as Robotic Process Automation, Chatbots, Internet of Things, predictive analytics, AI and more. And the good news is the low barrier to entry, test the technology with a low-cost pilot and low disruption to see the benefits.

The privacy of data is still more important than ever

Unless you’ve been living under a rock and not leaving your home you will have noticed you are required to scan or sign in to all venues and stores you visit.

There is a lot of media hype around the security of this data with possible data security breaches as well as personal experiences of handing over your name/phone number/email only to be hounded by venues with marketing or sales calls.

The venues need to go back to the basics with policy and management of data. Government tools can help and annual health checks should be completed to ensure security protocols and policies are up to date.

Intelligent Call Routing

Can you imagine a world where you could route your customer to the perfect call centre agent to solve their enquiry, the most efficiently and to the highest satisfaction levels?

The technology that is now available makes this possible and even better this generates immediate efficiency and reducing the cost to serve. Recently embedded in a large government agency this provided a 20% decrease in cost to serve as well as an increase in customer satisfaction.

This also identifies exactly where staff training or support is needed which can be proactively provided. Developing your team in this way allows for scale or cost reduction while improving staff capabilities and increasing employee satisfaction. Win-win-win.

Digitisation of services

With the uncertainty regarding outbreaks and the yo-yoing of restrictions its no surprise that digitisation of services will still be a big focus in 2022.

Businesses are under pressure to digitise services to meet customer demand as well as ensure revenue streams continue whether face to face interaction is available or not.

Talk to an expert