CX Trends 2023

The Top 5 emerging CX trends in 2023

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The Top 5 emerging CX trends in 2023

As a CX professional, it is always interesting to keep our finger on the pulse in terms of new trends in Customer Experience. 

Thanks to conversations with our customers, we can better assess what a 'pleasant experience' might mean anno 2023. Is it faster delivery, are customers willing to pay more if you can deliver on that promise? Or is it perhaps better personalisation in offerings aligned with your previous buying behaviour? 'A pleasant experience' is different for every customer.

Thanks to annual reports from international study agencies and companies or via blogs from leading experts, we can also spot new CX trends. As a CX service provider, we detected 5 trends that we think are really worth sharing with you.

 

#1 - CX without design only gets you halfway

This clenched statement comes from McKinsey & Company and specifically, it boils down to the following: when you want to develop new customer journeys, you will get furthest if you combine 'classic CX methods' with design processes focused on the customer-user.

You have a CX team on the one hand, responsible for data capture and defining customer needs, and a Design team on the other hand, responsible for designing solutions and redesigning journeys. Every company strives to get the customer journey as 'delightful' as possible but make the mistake of having these two teams, working separately without consultation and alignment.

A combined CX-design approach to discovering customer needs, designing solutions and journeys, and delivering customer impact will help companies create a seamless end-to-end experience that truly meets customers’ ever-evolving needs.

 

#2 - Does everything remain measurable in CX? Including emotion?

As customer journeys are increasingly made online, this has the great advantage that data capturing allows us to start capturing, measuring and analysing every interaction.

However, there are two clear challenges that companies need to start solving:

Challenge 1: cookieless future – Because of limitations in data capture due to increasingly strict data legislation, companies will be able to collect less and less user data on, for instance, online customer journeys (with the exception of first-party data). Today, we can still measure a fair amount, but in the cookie-free future this will become a lot less. As an organisation, have you thought about this yourself? You might find a solution in our new branch of services: excap digital.

Challenge 2: emotion – even if we can measure almost everything today, there are few opportunities to start measuring emotion. Emotion is all determining whether a customer journey is experienced as pleasant and successful or not. Excap has a unique method to 'capture' emotion when researching customer journeys, namely the award-winning method ExperienceCapture.

 

#3 - Positivity with impact

This trend was spotted by Steven Van Belleghem and is actually a bit of an extension of the previous topic, namely: CX that can provide real emotional impact.

As long as the economic recovery is lacking and this might still remain a difficult period for your company, don't forget that it's not obvious for your customers either. Nevertheless, if you do manage as a company to make people feel better through an excellent customer experience, you will make the difference toz of companies that will not.

Steven talks about the 'Top Gun' effect creating no nonsense, simply enjoyable and pure feel-good experiences for your customers. Sometimes this is all it needs to be

#4 – Creating competitive advantage in CX thanks to measuring employee happiness.

Indeed.com, one of the world's largest jobseekers has managed to develop a tool in collaboration with the University of Oxford to calculate a 'Work Happiness Score'. 

The initial figures speak volumes: 36% in the UK labour market are unhappy in the job and in Canada, only 48% agree with the statement 'I feel happy at work most of the time'.

Thanks to studying this new data, companies are finding out how to get the balance between motivation and productivity more sustainable. Ultimately, it will help them win over the best talent. According to Indeed.com, 87% of business leaders surveyed agree that putting employee satisfaction first is the key to creating a competitive advantage in Customer Experience.

More satisfied employees is a journey of change in the organisation. It is a roadmap by which you demonstrably create impact on better perception of your brand, reputation and ultimately greater sales.

So start an employee survey in happiness or more generally, in employee experience.

#5 - The remainers in 2023

First Contact Resolution: the percentage of customers satisfied with the outcome of the first effective contact on an item

Sentiment score or Analyse: a tool that captures what the customer's emotion is during a particular snapshot during the customer journey. Consider our own method Experiencecapture.

Customer Effort Score: a score reflecting how easy and quick it is for the customer to retrieve the information

NPS driver analysis: a tool that helps provide insight into the main key drivers of an NPS score.

Customer Lifetime Value: this may be the most all-encompassing metric. It calculates your customers' loyalty, usually in sales value. A weaker CLV may be due to a disappointing CX.

Tom Sweetlove

Marketing Consultant - DE&I expert

FAQ

  • What types of Mystery Guest Researches are there?

    There is a very wide range of researches. We can best classify them into three broad categories: for customers, for employees and for others. The latter is more about quality audits, candidate experience and discrimination surveys. > All surveys > Read more

  • Is Mystery Guest Research also used for online journeys?

    Absolutely. An online customer shops differently compared to a customer in a physical shop. Online Mystery Shopping exposes the bottlenecks in your webshop, so that you can improve the online experience. The entire buyer journey is measured, up to and including the return of the purchase.

  • How do Customer Journeys and Mystery Guest Research go together?

    In a Mystery Guest Research, we go through all the steps of the Customer Journey. At each step we measure how this step contributes to an excellent Customer Experience. Unique to our method is the ExperienceCapture in which conscious and subconscious emotions are recorded for each step.

  • What criteria determine the cost of a good Mystery Guest Research?

    Each research consists of Project Management, Briefing, Execution & Reporting. The cost for execution is the biggest part. This cost is influenced by the number of measurements to be performed, the complexity and length of the assignment and the profile of the Mystery Shopper. > More information

  • What is the impact of Mystery Guest Research on CX and EX?

    Thanks to the innovative reporting tools and the frequency of the measurements, you gain insight into the results in order to subsequently formulate action-oriented conclusions. Your impact will be: higher customer and employee satisfaction and higher turnover.

  • Can I monitor the results during the Mystery Guest Research?

    The results are brought together in a visual and user-friendly dashboard. The results and progress can therefore be followed live. You can consult the dashboard on desktop, tablet or mobile and that you can export the reports. Read more >

  • How do I get the right insights from the many data and data sources?

    Many companies collect more and more data from their customers. This concerns data from their own systems as well as data from external (research) partners. Excap can help to connect these different data sources so that overarching insights arise to realise a final impact.

  • What practical examples are there?

    Every week we publish new insights on Customer Experience and Employee Experience. We find it important to share our own expertise with our network. Or we let excap's ambassadors have their say: satisfied customers with whom we made a real impact.

  • Does excap Mystery Guest Research also take place outside the Benelux?

    Definitely! Thanks to our extensive network of partners and years of experience with international projects, we carry out Mystery Guest Research all over Europe (and beyond) and also Audits, Customer Journey Research, Consultancy and Qualitative Research. > To find out more

  • How can I research the Employee Experience?

    Employee Experience is measured within different groups of employees, investigating different departments. Such a survey > research usually takes place once per quarter, but ideally every fortnight. In this way, progress and policy can be monitored and adjusted immediately.

  • Why is the feedback from mystery shoppers reliable?

    Our mystery shoppers receive an extensive briefing before the start of their assignment so that they are always well prepared. The number of assignments per mystery shopper is limited in order to guarantee quality. On top, there's an internal control before the delivery of the final results.

  • Who are the mystery shoppers from excap and how big is our database?

    Our database of over 5000 mystery shoppers consists of very different people. From young to old, from make-up lovers and handymen to teachers and engineers. Our mystery shoppers are carefully selected by our recruitment team. Read more >

  • Can I ask an additional question?

    Of course. Ask your question by using the contact form and you will receive an answer as soon as possible. > Contact us