What’s ahead in 2024 for CX? Top trends and urgent priorities – part 1

On the verge of 2024, customer experience feels more than ever like it’s in a constant state of flux. But at its heart, the essential ingredients for quality customer service remain the same.

If anything, rapid innovation and new AI technology is strengthening those timeless core values of exceptional CX—working in the background to enhance the experience of consumers, agents and businesses.

CX is in a pivotal moment where AI is serving as a catalyst for exceptional customer experience—but only for those who have the right technology in place.

We asked NICE experts to weigh in on the leading trends in customer experience to help organizations prepare for the year ahead. Each of them brought insights on digital, AI, analytics, workforce engagement, and voice of the customer. This is the first part of a Q&A that encompasses key insights and priorities for businesses planning for success in 2024.

What is changing most rapidly in consumer behavior and expectations?

Andy Traba:The number of ways people can interact with brands is exploding across a rapidly growing number of touchpoints. Brands should ensure their CX is everywhere ready.

To establish a truly seamless customer journey, it is essential to integrate digital customer experience (CX) as a fundamental component of your comprehensive CX strategy, seamlessly woven into a unified platform. This ensures that all customer touchpoints, spanning from websites and mobile apps to contact centers, are harmonious, connected and free of disruptions.

Globally, organizations should put delivering the ultimate consumer experience at the top of their list. Doing so can strengthen brand value and boost efficiency. The top three ways to achieve these objectives involves three pivotal breakthroughs: a unified interaction-centric platform, convergence of rich CX capabilities and an AI purpose-built for CX.

Elizabeth Tobey: It is imperative that companies put significant effort and focus into creating ways to help consumers self-serve. This means chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants that understand what they are saying and what customers want to accomplish, and can respond in a personalized, natural way. This also means effective knowledge management that specifically answers questions the first time, every time—even if that search is on a mobile app or in a web browser.

Quality self-service means having personalized, guided interactions on a web or mobile app without annoying popovers that have generic messages. Targeted, tailored advice, offers, and guidance that is triggered by customer behavior can create a better, more efficient interaction that serves the customer when and where and how they need it. It also means putting effort into proactive communication—again, not just sending rote messages out into the void in a spam-like way but offering responsive, adaptive communications. A better approach analyzes individual behavior and predicts what they need or want to know before they have an issue, a question or a complaint. This is about serving all customers on their terms, making communication truly personalized.

The top actions to take include figuring out the best outcomes you want digital solutions and smart self-service to deliver for you, and then mapping that to solutions that have provable improvements in those areas. 

Tamsin Dollin: Tolerance for poor customer service is running thin—and if you don’t treat consumers right by meeting expectations, they will drop you like a hot potato for a competitor. In 2024, look to reduce customer effort everywhere you can! Start with the customer’s needs first (hint, hint: how about making answers easy for them to find on your website?). Then, look at ways to reduce effort for the agent too. Why? Because agents are key to making customer interactions feel connected and complete.

Here are two actions to take in 2024 to reduce effort and boost convenience:

1. Enable successful end-to-end self-service and digital journeys. Make answers easy for your customers to find from a search – whether they are looking on the web or within your customer portal. If you have an app, let them use it to do things—like, for example, chat with you to change their address or get the status of their shipment. Just remember: While it’s always good practice to support “transfer to an agent,” in 2024, it’s no good unless you offer intelligent elevation to an agent that informs them of the context and request before the customer even gets to them.
   
2. Help agents to be effective at their jobs—and let them shine for you! Agents are key to making customer interactions feel connected and complete. In 2024, make your customer support agents knowledgeable with AI-powered agent copilots who serve up accurate answers to customer questions and instantly summarize every agent interaction.

Jennifer Wilson: With consumers wanting quicker resolution that is convenient, AI strategies will be key in providing a more favorable customer experience.

With consumer uncertainty of what value artificial intelligence truly brings, however, companies must choose how to best leverage the technology in a manner that is acceptable and appealing to their customers. Creating a more personalized experience without introducing a journey that is “too” knowledgeable, or presents a “big brother” engagement for the customer will likely require companies to walk the fine line of blending the right level of automation and intelligence with the human element as the journey unfolds.

Companies should also leverage predictive insights to identify specific customers and use cases where automation and AI-driven interactions are most likely to be successful.

What should companies prioritize in 2024 to improve CX journeys to be much more personalized or proactive?

Michele Carlson: For customers today, personalized experiences are not only proactive but also connected throughout the entirety of their journey. Companies open infinite possibilities for customers to benefit from proactive, personalized touchpoints by beginning with data and AI purpose-built to understand, predict, and deliver exceptional experiences.

In 2024, companies should focus on three key priorities to create customer experiences that are proactive and personal:

1. The key to personalization is understanding customers’ unique needs and preferences. Business should take an interaction-centric approach to gain transactional, behavioral, and contextual data from across channels for a 360-degree view of each customer. This foundation enables you to predict needs and deliver hyper-personalized interactions—before, during, and after every conversation.
   
2. Whenever working with a large data set, AI is crucial to operationalize and act on data to personalize experiences. Businesses seeking to personalize experiences can leverage their own interactions with their customers, interactions are the most foundational data set to understanding customers’ needs for personalization. Without data, there isn’t personalization, and without personalization, companies cannot deliver exceptional CX. Purpose-built AI enables businesses to optimize every touchpoint to build personal connections.
   
3. Once businesses have a unified, cloud-native platform for their interactions, purpose-built AI can learn across every interaction on every channel. Then, the use cases to deliver personalization across journeys gain even more specificity for each customer – for example, before a live agent interaction, AI can predict the optimal agent for a customer using preferences and needs. Or, using customers’ past interactions, proactive messages can be shared with customers as appointment reminders, check-ins, or suggestions for an anticipated interaction. This can then extend into conversations with live agents to provide them with proactive suggestions on how to resolve a customer’s needs and give them best-practices to deliver the optimal experience.

What new opportunities should companies take advantage of in 2024 to gain competitive advantage or to improve business results?

Andy Traba: AI will become the first technology that truly fuses together people, processes, and technology to deliver better CX.

With AI being at the top of investment priorities, organizations should prioritize getting it right! Every customer interaction, spanning from your website to mobile app to contact center needs to be seamlessly integrated.

Take a fresh look at your digital strategy. Over the past decade, digital customer experience (CX) initiatives have often failed to meet anticipated outcomes. They've operated in isolated silos, lacked cohesion, and concentrated on individual touchpoints, neglecting the broader customer journey. Consequently, customers have encountered a fragmented and vexing journey.

AI has opened the door to pinpointing the most effective conversations from high-performing agents, leading to the creation of intelligent self-service solutions that customize communications, proactively anticipate customer needs, and swiftly and effectively address issues.

Identifying CXone as a complete cloud native CX platform with embedded AI is the first step to deploy quickly, scale securely and serve customers globally.

Advantages include:

• Trained on world’s largest labelled CX dataset offers precise results (instead of generic answers)
• Pre-built proven and works on Day 1 without the need for expensive data scientists or time-consuming development cycles
• Easy operationalized to deliver immediate impact
• Exponential impact for customers to shift from taking small, incremental improvement steps to taking a giant leap ahead and making CX a real competitive differentiator

For businesses looking for proven path to implement artificial intelligence, they should start with a “try AI before you buy” promotion.  

Tamsin Dollin: E-commerce and personalization are two key areas that companies should take action on in 2024.

• E-commerce is more dominant than ever. The adoption of online shopping continues to accelerate, driven by convenience, personalization and the growth of mobile shopping. In 2024, companies can enhance their online service offerings by improving the user experience, offering mobile-friendly options, and exploring new ways to reach and serve customers digitally.
• Personalization is hot. From ordering their preferred beverage at the counter to booking a trip, customers expect tailored experiences. They appreciate brands and organizations that use data to personalize recommendations, content, products and services based on their own preferences and behaviors.

Lauren Maschio: How customers feel about their service experience with a brand directly impacts whether they stay loyal to that brand. In today’s competitive economy, the ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience repeatedly can be the key competitive differentiator that propels a company ahead. 

Agents that exhibit strong soft-skill behaviors such as demonstrating ownership, acknowledging loyalty, and showing empathy– have a measurable impact on CX and customer satisfaction as well as overall business outcomes. In a recent survey commissioned by NICE, 94% of leaders recognized agent soft skills as being very important factors for overall CSAT. Yet only 41% (of the companies surveyed) were measuring those soft skills because they are very challenging to assess consistently and accurately.

The companies that lack the ability or choose to rely on manual analysis of agent soft skills are needlessly ceding competitive advantage to those who use AI-driven analysis tools. AI-driven models that have been purpose built for CX are able to measure sentiment on every interaction at scale. CSAT can then be improved via measuring and coaching to the specific agent soft-skills proven to influence customer sentiment. AI-driven measurement of agent performance also benefits the agents, who feel empowered because they know exactly what behavioral soft skills they need to be successful, which translates into better overall CX for the business. 

Jennifer Wilson: Don’t overlook the importance of personalized, proactive engagement. While traditional outbound dialers may not be the most popular or modern approach to proactive outreach, companies shouldn’t eliminate the concept as a whole.

By leveraging CX and customer data, predictive insights, and customer preferences, companies can more intelligently engage with customers before, during and after interactions in a manner that is relevant and personalized, increasing retention and uncovering potential upsell opportunities. Today’s digital landscape allows for this outreach to be initiated beyond traditional voice, SMS, and email, and extend to broader channels and search engines, increasing the effectiveness of the outreach.

Elizabeth Tobey: Consumers are going to speak and type in their natural language and cadence—and we need bots and IVAs to be able to understand that, comprehend it, and respond accordingly. And more than just better, personalized answers on channels of choice—you need to go above and beyond in exposing your answers beyond website FAQs and help docs.

Make them SEO enhanced. Put significant focus in surfacing that content to the world, rather than requiring the world to come to you and dig for the knowledge you have. Take a long, hard look at the KPIs you want to influence, and pay very close attention to your consumer behavior. You need to be where your consumers are looking for you, and you need to be able to adapt and evolve as those preferences change, so ensure whatever solution you pick, it can adapt with you, or even help you evolve faster.

Read more insights in the second part of our 2024 CX trends series.