2020 was a turning point for all of us. Things that we didn’t think could happen, happened. We all had to adapt to the new reality we are living and our behaviour was forced to change to the new reality..

Brands and businesses were had to adapt their processes and operations quickly in order to deliver a good customer experience. The ones that adapted quickly stood out from the crowd and the ones that didn't were left behind trying to survive the crisis.

But it shouldn't take a global pandemic for businesses to adapt and evolve.  What can often be seen as too big a challenge, it's important to realise that change can happen quickly and it not too late to start now.  Whether Customer Experience is a priority or not for your business, take a look at our Customer Experience predictions for 2021.

Brands are researching their customers more

That’s right, brands are investing significantly to learn more about their customers and buyer personas to see how 2020 has changed them. They are interested in learning what their needs are and what motivates their customers now and even if they will revert to how they were before the pandemic. Ultimately, brands want to stay relevant and continue to help to their customers achieve their goals.

Inbound will be more important than ever

Marketing, Sales and Service can no longer work separately. If 2020 taught us anything, it's that communication between a brand and a consumer has to be unified across all areas of the business so that your customer can get the best customer experience. Customer experience teams will need to map their customer journeys with staff from all areas of the business in order to influence change and improvement.

Chatbots and contact centers will become crucial

The first response a customer gets from your brand will be crucial for the development of your business. Chatbots and contact centres will be responsible for delivering basic level assistance before including human interaction. Customers want information and assistance quickly and easily and the businesses who use AI effectively will come out on top.

Social media will become the new storefront

During lockdown, social media usage and online purchases increased drastically, forcing businesses to undergo a digital transformation and build e-commerce capability to their online store to continue trading. They got creative and started talking a language their consumers could understand and that was digital. Sales through social media and apps will be the future from now on, and brands need to adapt to that.

Content creation will be key for businesses

Brands that deliver amazing content to their customers will always be more relevant. By developing content that is relevant to your audience, brands will deliver a better customer experience because they will be providing visitors rich content that they can rely on at the time to make a decision that involves a purchase or an action. This means that brands will start building trust and inspiring it through content creation.

Mobile will take over

Nowadays everyone has a mobile phone, and information can be accessed in an instant. The user experience you deliver on mobile will determine how good the customer experience will be as customers prefer buying on their phones over other devices.

Brands will prioritise private messaging

Not having private messaging tools for your customer experience strategy is out of the question> There’s been a major shift in how people want to communicate with brands. WhatsApp and other messaging tools demonstrated during the pandemic of 2020 that consumers will prioritise those channels over the conventional ones. Therefore brands should centralise communications in one place. There are amazing tools in the market like HubSpot CRM that allows consumers to interact with your brand through social media channels, Bots and even integrations with WhatsApp and other private messaging tools. To find out more about this click here.

Brand interactions should be proactive

You may be wondering: How can my brand interactions be proactive? Super easy! When you develop your customer journey map and gain a better understanding of your customers needs and goals, you will find opportunities for engagement through content and offers to meet their needs.  So don't wait for the customer to initiate contact when you can frontfoot their request and control the experience they have with you. There are tons of reasons a brand should reach out proactively to their customers.

Here are some reasons for your brand and customer experience team to reach out to your customers:

• Contact them to remind them of an upcoming renewal
• Send them a message regarding the status of an issue resolution
• Share with them some educational content
• Based on your website interaction, initiate a conversation through your messaging tool on site to ask your visitors if they need any assistance on your page, be helpful!

In our opinion, the best tool for your customer experience team to manage all these examples and improve your brand interaction is HubSpot CRM. It is an amazing tool to keep track of all your customers and a great way to maximise the efforts of your sales, marketing and service teams towards providing a better customer experience.

We are living in an era where the amount of information we have about our customers is unprecedented. As a brand, you must learn how to use it. The best way to use it is to create amazing relationships with your customers. Don’t see your customers as just data but see them for what they are: Human beings that have real problems and are coming to you for a solution.

We are not saying that all your communications with your customers have to be human to human but with the help of a bot you can create chat flows that seem human enough to gather some information before transferring the chat to one of your specialists when human empathy is required.

Don’t forget that more than half customers prefer automation to human interaction - but there are limits and your job is to know when a chat bot is appropriate or not.

Now that you have a better idea about where customer experience is headed in 2021, it’s your turn to do adapt your brand and be customer champions for your business.

If you need help to develop your Customer Experience Strategy and plan, we'd be happy to help. Leave your contact info in our form below and we will get in touch before the day the out to arrange a time to chat.