Customer experience is more important than ever. 86% of consumers will pay for a better shopping experience and it’s becoming a key brand differentiator.
Personalized and sincere customer experience will increase conversions, brand loyalty, and recall. You’ll stand out. Be remembered. Customers will talk about you to their friends and be more likely to return in the future.
However, customer experience trends change fast.
Technology advances and gives marketers more tools. Behaviour, expectations and what consumers demand shifts.
Keeping up with these changes can help brands offer better shopping experiences and acquire more customers.
These are four of the most important customer experience trends to watch in 2020 and beyond.
1. Customers expect hyper-personalized experiences
Customers don’t want the same experience as everybody else. They demand ones that are tailored to their unique interests, values, and feelings.
60% of customers are comfortable having their interests and behaviour used to deliver relevant offerings.
People are irritated with the constant one to many messages they receive. These are often irrelevant to their wants or needs. This can decrease the conversion rate and performance of advertising.
Customizing experiences to be hyper-personalized from messaging to the offer increases conversions and brand loyalty. People will want to shop with you. This is most effective in direct one to one messaging. It feels like a friend speaking to a friend. An experience they will remember and enjoy sharing with others.
Messaging is the most popular form of communication. Your potential customers feel very comfortable interacting with your business via messaging.
The global e-commerce marketplace Groupon was looking for ways to give users the best gift finding experience. This was challenging because of Groupon’s wide range of offers.
Groupon used Spectrm’s conversational marketing platform to create a conversational display ad campaign inviting users in London and Los Angeles to discover local experiences. The “experiential gift finder” chatbot guided customers through Groupon’s relevant offers in real time, right within the display ad, based on their location and preferences.
In a single ad, the conversational display ad moved prospects from discovery to conversion. Groupon generates higher engagement at scale compared to its regular display campaigns. Over 200,00 total brand interactions were made with a significant ad recall in London (+20%) and Los Angeles (+24%).
Learn how Groupon achieved these results in their customer success story.
2. More brands will leverage conversational marketing chatbots for tailored experiences
Conversational marketing chatbots offer speedy responses, tailored product suggestions, and interactions based on an individual basis. Every engagement is completely unique. This helps take customers from discovery to action in one seamless interaction.
Most importantly, marketing chatbots reach customers where they already spend all their time. You don’t have to wait for someone to hit your website. Marketing bots integrate with channels like Facebook Messenger and Instagram to personalize experiences using chat directly on social media. This enables your brand to connect with customers personally, build value and recommend the most relevant products. In an environment that they already trust and feel comfortable in.
34% of online retail customers happily accept chatbots to be a part of their shopping experience.
They’re also easier to set up than ever with Spectrm. You don’t have to touch a single line of code. You don’t need a developer to maintain it.
Thanks to a form of machine learning called generative adversarial networks (GANS), Spectrm chatbots can even create variations of customer intent to match responses more accurately over time. Marketing teams can offer delightful customer experiences without needing large amounts of data to start with.
3. Omnichannel marketing and brand consistency is rising
Customers expect to have the same experience with your brand regardless of where they interact with it. Social media, email, and retail shops should all deliver similar interactions. This is what we call omnichannel marketing. It creates a seamless experience that builds loyalty and trust. It takes 5 to 7 brand impressions for customers to remember your business.
This is the homepage of the watch retailer Daniel Wellington for example.
Its Instagram account uses the same photos and colours to make it feel familiar to customers.
The same branding elements can be found on Daniel Wellington’s Twitter page.
To connect further with consumers on a personal level and increase transactions, Daniel Wellington created a guided shopping bot on Facebook Messenger using Spectrm’s conversational marketing platform. The chatbot recommended relevant products from their catalogue based on the customer’s responses.
Using a marketing bot, Daniel Wellington condensed 5-7 meaningful brand interactions into a single experience. The campaign lifted conversions, developed Daniel Wellington’s audience on social, and created a memorable shopping experience.
Watch exactly how Daniel Wellington did this in their ecommerce chatbot video.
4. Mobile responsiveness is a must
Smartphones are in everyone’s pocket. They are used for everything from checking emails, staying in touch with friends, and shopping with your favourite brands.
43.6% of customers shop from their mobile devices to buy gifts.
Brands must offer delightful mobile experiences to accommodate for this. Websites have to be fast. Advertisements and assets need to respond to smaller screens. Shopping experiences on mobile must be tailored to each user based on their input and behaviour.
Apps like Facebook Messenger and Instagram can also be combined with conversational marketing chatbots to further enhance these platforms’ return on investment for brands.
These one to one messaging experiences between brands and consumers are mobile-native and leverage the most common communication method globally: messaging. Nothing is more natural to people today than messaging.
Wrapping up 2020 customer experience trends
Optimizing the customer experience your brand offers can help drive conversion rates, brand recall, and loyalty. It’s more important than ever to keep up with the quickly evolving trends to reap these benefits and stand out among the rising competition.
The first notable customer experience trend is personalized experiences. Customers expect that each engagement will be tailored to their unique wants and needs. One of the best ways to accommodate for this is with conversational marketing chatbots built with Spectrm. You don’t need to touch a single line of code. You create personalized experiences at scale while collecting a treasure trove of data to improve other marketing campaigns.
Secondly your business needs to offer omnichannel experiences that create brand consistency. Every engagement with your brand should feel the same no matter if it’s via social, mobile, or physical retail. This increases brand recall, loyalty, and becomes more familiar to customers.
Lastly, mobile marketing is a must. Customers are shopping, browsing websites, and having conversations from their mobile phones on a daily basis. Offering delightful mobile experiences can increase conversions and customer experience as you are reaching them where they already are most active.
Want to see how conversational marketing chatbots can help personalize customer experiences at scale and achieve all of the trends in this article? Get in touch with one of our conversational marketing experts today.
