The role of technology is crucial in the digital transformation of customer experience. Customer engagement has always been a focus point for businesses and customers across the globe. More than experience, it is a matter of emotion and trust for both customers and companies. At this point, brands should understand customer engagement trends in 2021, what it takes to make it more compelling, and why it is very important for business growth.

 

The role of technology is crucial in the digital transformation of customer experience. Customer engagement has always been a focus point for businesses and customers across the globe. More than experience, it is a matter of emotion and trust for both customers and companies. At this point, brands should understand customer engagement trends in 2021, what it takes to make it more compelling, and why it is very important for business growth.

For instance, let us consider that a customer who is happy with the engagement would prefer to buy more and promote the brand. In the digital era, marketing software, and the Chatbot powered by AI has been effectively used to enhance the customer experience as concerns and queries of consumers are efficiently answered within a few minutes.

As we approach the end of the year, experts anticipate the following tech trends will assist financial institutions and other sectors in boosting their customer engagement in 2021

 

New Customer Engagement Trends in 2021

Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things is quickly evolving across various sectors. It is predicted to have over a 26billion connected devices by 2020. However, when it comes to business opportunities, we are still at the basic level, where only 0.06% of all devices could leverage IoT. Furthermore, around 94% of the business that is utilizing IoT have seen a good return on investments.

If you wonder what this technology could mean for the banking or financial institutions, IoT makes the job easier for banks by easily connecting the consumers in a contextual, relevant, and informative way by linking the processes, people, and things. IoT technology instantly provides actionable and immediate insights so businesses can respond to consumer’s requirements. The technology also provides access to behavioral analytics so brands can utilize it to provide a superior user experience in the future.

For instance, the bank can implement digital sensors at their ATMs or bank branches to analyze user behavior and notify any unexpected service challenges or customer issues.

Reasons why IoT is the latest customers experience trends for businesses:

Access to real-time data: Organizations can capture the real-time insights that enable them to know what consumers think about their service or products. Furthermore, instant access lets us deliver better customer service.

Enhanced service: The behavioral analytics insights can be used to enhance existing or efficiently launch new services or products. The insights will efficiently let your map out your service areas or products that require any changes or modification. Based on the analytics report, you can plan your activities to enhance customer service.

Better customer service: IoT technology can boost the customer engagement level. It can control problems and detect issues in the early stage and send alerts to the organization or predict the issue before they can occur.

Behavioural Data Analysis

To succeed in the business, just knowing your customers is not sufficient, you should be able to understand their issues and provide solutions. But more than anything, you should be able to anticipate your customer’s next move. This is possible only if you have sufficient user data. Behavioral analytics means businesses can now support their marketing campaigns with analytics data and insights on the user behavior across all touchpoints.

Furthermore, behavioral analytics let you engage your users with opportunities, so your campaigns mainly rely on the analytics insights and automation to efficiently capture a user at the right instance when they are most receptive.

Customers are constantly evolving, so marketing approaches should also be evolving in parallel. In particular, real-time marketing and event-triggered capabilities are going to be the next impactful transformation. Hence, it has become vital for marketers to start implementing automation, predictive analytics, and Omni-channel engagement campaigns that enable tailored communications.

Marketers already have access to basic information such as gender, age, geography, important dates, etc. they need to implement automation, predictive analytics, and omnichannel engagement.

Omnichannel customer experience

In the recent era, users prefer to have multiple touchpoints to establish a connection between customers and businesses and expect a seamless customer experience. Hence transformation towards omnichannel customer experience is vital for any business to succeed in the digital world.

Methods of how omnichannel experience can be a part of customer experience trends in 2021:

Map your user journey: Understanding your customer journey can help you gain visibility on the user personas to develop end-to-end service journeys across digital channels. This ultimately means that customers can interact with brands at all levels and receive a cohesive experience.

Outline strategies to engage customers: Businesses should create a strategy for customer service to deliver a great experience. Those strategies should maintain a balance speed within each channel across all the touchpoints.

Identify appropriate channels: For better customer service, marketers should understand the most preferred channels by the customers to establish a connection with you. Be active on the channels where your customers are engaged more.

Consistent user experience: It is highly important that you should deliver a consistent experience throughout the user journey irrespective of the medium and channels. Your customer should feel a unified experience throughout the journey.

Chatbots automation for improved customer experience (CX)

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is transforming the method of how the business communicates with the consumer. Chatbots are expected to shift from simple user-based queries to advanced predictive analytics based real-time conversation.

With the boom of AI trends, more businesses will incorporate chatbots to boost customer engagement and strengthen loyalty. Over 68% of customers state that messaging is the most convenient method to stay connected with brands.

Methods of how AI chatbots can transform customer experience trends:

AI chatbots can be self-learning and have the ability to create contextual user engagement through message application.

AI will be able to enhance the user experience with your business and enhance customer loyalty.

Build customer experience by delivering personalized customer experience.

Augmented Reality

More brands are stepping into the AR trend can help both offline and online businesses to boost how they interact with users. Experts anticipate that the AR market may reach up to USD 61 billion by 2023. With Augmented Reality in trend, businesses can deliver training programs quickly and efficiently, because the AR can replicate a real product so this can be used to train your staff quickly.

Some of the beneficial ways of how Augmented Reality can be useful is through Virtual Product Training, Enable Decision Making, and much more.

Takeaway

With digital technology and various other advancements in customer engagement trends, customer experience has been shaped continuously. It encourages AI chatbot, video marketing, predictive analysis, consistent and personalized communication to help businesses find new ways to engage their customers.