June 28, 2023
What does good customer experience look like for brands in 2023? As enabling technologies and consumer expectations continue to evolve at pace, investing in sustainable, inclusive innovation is table stakes.
While exciting technologies like generative AI, intelligent automation and decentralisation offer tons of opportunity for innovation, it's just as important for brands to consider inclusive, human-centric design and circularity in their digital experiences too.
With that in mind, here's our rundown:
As the lines continue to blur between digital and in store, a consistent brand and customer experience across all touchpoints is crucial. Customers expect joined up shopper journeys where data and content move with them as they switch between channels.
Brands should consider how they can facilitate connected jounreys that make switching between channels as seamless as possible, whether that's a customer buying online for store pick up, trying something out in store then ordering for home delivery, or augmenting thein-store browsing experience with connected online reviews and demos.
Getting intelligent automation right can allow brands to go beyond simple personalisation, to deliver highly nuanced, contextual and predictive experiences to customers across all touchpoints.
Using behavioural data to preempt what the user is going to want to do or fill in the gaps for them, can help provide a high degree of convenience and relevance, for example to content or product recommendations, that can lead to results in increased engagement, loyalty and retention.
Every customer touchpoint should be viewed as an opportunity to collect data and insights, whether that’s tracking changing room rejects to inform ranging or using aggregate themes from chat bot conversations to tailor content heirarchy.
An effective data and technology strategy can enable brands to collect and join up data across all channels, and to feed insights back into decision making, experience design and marketing.
Customers are becoming increasingly selective over the data they share with brands, and we can expect conversations (and regulations) around first party and distributed data usage to continue to evolve at pace.
Brands should prioritise transparency and progressive capture in order to build trust, and consumers will expect a clear value exchange, such as better personalised offers and more relevant recommendations, and robust handling of their data in return.
Data security and privacy considerations should be built into technology stacks and customer data platforms from the start to ensure they can keep pace with evolving compliance regulations.
Inclusive experiences start with inclusive design practices. Brands have a duty to ensure diverse perspectives are embedded as part of balanced teams, and to remove bias from customer journeys by encouraging careful assessment of language, visuals, and hierarchies.
Accessibility has evolved far beyond the humble screen reader, and technologies such as speech recognition, gesture control and haptics have opened up a wider range of interface options and consumption models to support varying accessibility needs.
As resources become scarcer and supply chains more volatile, brands will need to find ways of embracing new commercial and ownership models that monetise care and reuse over throwaway consumption. Making it easy for customers to get the most out of what they have, and to return and recycle what they no longer want, not only helps keep raw materials in circulation and out of landfill, but can provide commercial benefits for brands too.
