Michael Epps Utley 
In the digital age, it’s easy for buyers to consider many businesses before purchasing. The experience they can expect as a customer is often a key deciding factor in where they spend their money.
This guide explains some of the top digital customer experiences people expect these days and how you can provide your customers with experiences that elevate your brand above the competition.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the buyer’s entire journey or series of interactions with a business.
It starts when a consumer first hears about a brand, moves on to when they purchase a product or service, further when they become repeat customers, all the way to when they turn into advocates for the business. A company must consider the customer's perspective every step of the way if it wants to create a satisfying CX.
Customer Experience Trends
Here are some of today’s emerging digital customer service trends. How many of these experiences are you offering to buyers?
AI-Powered Customer Experiences
The artificial intelligence (AI) adoption boom doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. By the end of this year, it is expected that most customer support representatives will use AI-backed tools or software in their roles.
AI provides many different applications and benefits when it comes to customer support. Here are two critical ones:
1. 24/7 Customer Support
For most businesses, especially smaller ones, it’s impossible to offer live customer support 24 hours a day, every day of the year. It’s too expensive and impractical to find staff in today’s tight job market and outsourcing isn’t always an option.
That’s where AI-powered chatbots come in. They can be trained to answer customer questions and guide them to information any time of the day. While not exactly the same as human interaction, it’s enough to keep most people happy during off hours.
2. Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics uses AI to help you anticipate customer needs so you can preemptively offer up new products and services to them. Artificial intelligence analyzes the past activity of your customers, such as purchase history and the content they’ve interacted with. It identifies patterns and makes predictions so you can deliver a shopping journey that meets their needs.
Personalized Experiences
Consumers expect personalization today. Generic is not acceptable. Personalization is a critical building block of delivering a superior CX. Every interaction must be personalized, especially during the later parts of the sales journey, when it can make all the difference in closing a deal.
Enhanced Data Security
Most people today are concerned about data security. Too many people have experienced the frustration when their data is compromised by bad actors or misused by marketers. They want control over how their information is used.
Prioritizing data security must be a central component of customer service today. Some steps you can take include:
Allow customers to opt-in to sharing their data
Post your data practices prominently on your website and make them easy to understandable
Explain how you store data
Be open and honest about data breaches or security issues your business experiences
Tip: If your business leverages artificial intelligence, be especially careful because it depends heavily on customer data. Check the privacy policies of the tools you use. Then, develop guidelines for how your business takes advantage of the customer data you collect and analyze.
Customer Experience: The Final Word
Over the past decade, customer experience has evolved significantly thanks to digital advances. It will only continue to grow — likely even more quickly — in the years to come. Brands must keep up with the pace of change if they want to attract and retain clients. The strongest businesses are those that not only keep up with changes in customer expectations but anticipate them.
