Zendesk, Inc released the latest Global Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report, which reveals that immersive experiences are fast becoming a key differentiator for brands to stay competitive and help ensure customers remain loyal.
According to the Zendesk report, 61% of customers are enthusiastic about these immersive experiences, so Immersive CX is evolving into the new standar, redefining how businesses interact with their customers.
The shift is a response to consumers being more demanding of brands: they demand to meet them at all times, on their terms and offer them seamless and engaging interactions.
Customer Experience Immersive, the new way to win and keep customers
In recent years, business leaders have recognise how this transformation has required a greater role for the Customer Experience, prompting them to make significant investments to remain competitive and meet customers’ high expectations.
“Customers have high expectations, little patience and lots of choice when it comes to who they do business with,” said Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk. “This year, our CX Trends show that this behavioural shift has led leaders to invest in technology that creates immersive and seamless experiences. These new standards of customer service are critical to driving customer acquisition and loyalty, as well as profitability.”
Customer Experience Immersive, the new way to win and keep customers
The increased investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not gone unnoticed and customers are becoming more comfortable with its presence. Of those who interact with customer service bots on a regular basis, 72% have experienced quality improvements and say that bots work well at answering simple queries, respond faster than human agents and are reliable at displaying accurate and useful information.
As customers enjoy fuller experiences with bots, their expectations have also increased: 75% of customers expect AI interactions to become more natural and human-like over time, and the ideal evolution of AI will allow customers to ask increasingly complex questions.
Conversational experiences empower customers
Customers are driving the rise of conversational experiences. They want smooth, friendly, natural interactions that put them in control and don’t interrupt current tasks. For example, if a customer stops an interaction, they expect a new support representative to easily pick up where the last conversation ended. In fact, 70% of customers spend more with brands that provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints. Similarly, 64% will spend more if their issues are resolve where they are.
While customer expectations couldn’t be clearer, companies are still trying to catch up. 71% of leaders are committed to reinventing customer service and 60% want to (or are actively planning to) implement conversational customer service experiences.