• Before the unexpected turn of global events, customer behaviour was already constantly changing

• Now it is changing faster and becoming more demanding

There is a silver lining in the form of new opportunities for customer-focused brands to unlock. To truly understand new customer behavioural trends, we need to stop and listen. Surveys and VoC programmes are great but they tend to lack empathy and personal touch.

Though time-consuming, investing sufficient resources by contacting customers and having real conversations with them will show you where the next wave of CX opportunities are coming from. By assessing the feedback from both our survey respondents and the expert analysis of our interviewed business leaders, it’s possible to see a number of strategic priorities emerging for organisations looking to deliver next-gen CX effectively.

Let's review these:

1. Securing and applying customer knowledge consistently will be key

The CX Live State of the Market survey respondents’ 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 2020 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.

On the positive side, now there are better tools and platforms available to provide companies with this invaluable knowledge.

2. Middle East 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.

3. 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 a third of respondents 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.

The above analysis is a part of the CX Live State of the Market 2021 Report. To download a copy of the report click here