• With declarations of significant CX investments on the rise, there’s a definite sense that brands and businesses of all sizes are coming around to the idea that leveraging the right technologies solutions will yield tangible ROI.

• If the business can respond to a customer’s needs with agility, it improves the customers' experience and it is more likely that they will return later on.

By analysing the strategic priorities of businesses, we can spot a number of overarching trends and interesting correlations for CX in:

1. Companies know that they need to invest to achieve viable CX: With declarations of significant CX investments on the rise, there’s a definite sense that brands and businesses of all sizes are coming around to the idea that leveraging the right technologies solutions will yield tangible ROI. Even though brands remained unsure about their investment strategy, that uncertainty will likely be focused on how much they should spend, rather than if they should shell out at all.

2. Securing and applying customer knowledge consistently will be key: The leading CX concerns revolve around discovering what the customer wants and delivering it to them in a reliably accurate manner. As such, companies need to be entering 2021 confident in their ability to leverage their customer data to get those all-important insights and craft competitively personalised CX that can be rolled out across all channels.

While this isn’t exactly a new trend, it’s as vital as ever – and on the positive side, now there are better tools and platforms available to provide companies with this invaluable knowledge.

3. Companies have an eye on the tech horizon: The start of the new decade is a critical time for both governments and commercial enterprises to position themselves to take advantage of world-changing emerging technologies. AI, cloud, chatbots/NLPs, speech analytics – they are all entering extremely exciting new phases of their existence, moving beyond proof of concept and towards truly revolutionary applications to connect companies with customers, and governments with their citizens, in entirely new and meaningful ways.

How data can fast-track advanced CX delivery

Delivering an exemplary customer experience is a huge benefit for all businesses. The better experiences customers obtain, the more positive the reviews and thus revenue growth, it also simultaneously reduces complaints and other frictional issues.

Data-driven analytics nurtures deep connections between the business and its customer, allowing them to create more dynamic, responsive, and personalized services and customer journeys.

1. Personalization: The company can craft an entire customer touchpoint based on personalization and deliver relevant content at an apparent time. The data set shared with marketers can be used to reliably and accurately assess customer needs, better identify consumer profiles and enhance programmatic advertising that will expose them to the products or services that will interest them most. That includes call-to-action, content offers, and e-mails.

2. Countless variables: An endless stream of data presents infinite opportunities to select the best way to refine marketing efforts. Data can uncover patterns and trends used to research interpretation, design surveys and studies, boost ROI, and reduce the cost of acquisition per customer.

3. Create frictionless experiences: Customers' bargaining power is usually high after comparing the features and benefits with their needs. There is potential for the customer to switch to the competition when they want to spend less time shopping on websites that poorly recognize their previous information.

If the business can respond to a customer’s needs with agility, it improves the customers' experience and it is more likely that they will return later on.

How can customer data and insights lead organisations towards customer-centricity? Read on.