10 CEXy Predictions For 2024 🔮

A quick read with your morning coffee ☕️, or evening wine 🍷

Author

Ben Carmichael
January 11, 2024

Hi Team,

Let me tell you - this week’s article is a cracker 🧨

I sifted through 10 different prediction articles, reading hundreds of different predictions and have now landed on the 10 that I think ya’ll should know about the most.

Without further ado, below are my 10 CEXy predictions for 2024!

CEXy Predictions For 2024 🔮

I recently read that we now have attention spans shorter than a gold fish 🐡. As such, I’ve tried to keep these predictions snappy! I’ll likely elaborate on a few over the coming weeks.

Prediction #1 - An AI Concierge Will Be Your First Point Of Contact Across Any Channel 🤖

The terms “omnichannel”, “channel-less” and “seamless” have been thrown around for a number of years however this is the first year where I truly believe customers will receive a consistent experience on any channel.

I suspect that an AI-Concierge will act as a bridge between employees and customers, no matter the channel.

As a customer, you can share some identifying information (email, customer ID etc) and the AI concierge will be able to pull-up your historic behaviours, contacts, browsing history and any other first party data you have provided.

As an employee (whether that be in-store, in the contact centre, or across another channel), the AI concierge will provide you with personalised guidance as to how to best manage this customer, based off their previous behaviours, lifetime value, and also according to behaviours of similar customers in this scenario.

Intrigued? I talk more about this concept here.

Prediction #2 - “Phygital” Journeys Will Be Managed More Effectively 🏪

A “phygital” journey is one where there is a blurred line between a physical & digital experience.

In 2024, it’s going to become unacceptable for physical stores to not know about your online behaviours.

For example, if you went onto an organisations website to browse for a new iPhone, the in-store colleague serving you should know about this behaviour, facilitating an upsell / cross-sell discussion where necessary.

Similarly, it will become commonplace for websites to offer video help sessions with in-store colleagues, ensuring customers can obtain the expertise of frontline employees without having to physically be with them.

This trend is already happening in leading retail organisations, including Apple.

Prediction #3 - Hold Music In Contact Centres Will Be Replaced By AI Receptionists 🎶

I recently found a stat which claims an average person spends 43 days of their lifetime on hold 😱😱.

Whilst I’m not sure that stat is true, there is no doubting that customers spend an unecessary amount of time listening to hold music and/or waiting for a chat agent to become available.

In 2024, I predict that this “dead air” will be replaced by an AI receptionist. This receptionist will do a similar job to the receptionist at your local GP - they will verify who you are, what you’re looking to achieve and will also ask you further questions about your diagnosis and/or previous history. They will even show empathy for your situation, and could potentially offer an initial resolution (e.g. refunding your delivery fee) so you don’t need to speak to an agent.

The benefit?

All of this information will be consolidated and passed onto the frontline agent who is dealing with your enquiry. If done correctly, I anticipate that this AI-receptionist could substantially reduce the average handle time of customer interactions, creating a significant impact on the cost to serve customers.

Prediction #4 - Website Home Pages Will Become Single Search Bars 🔎

In today’s world, it is up to the user to navigate a website and try to figure out what they need. The search bars are often neglected, as is the content available in chatbots.

In the future, I expect the user to tell the website searchbar what information they want it to produce.

Imagine a scenario where you land on a home page which asks you what you’re looking for. You type in your request and generative AI automatically produces the visual & written content you were looking for.

Kinda like “Ask Jeeves”, but specific to the organisation you want to interact with:

Prediction #4 - Every website will generate content according to individual requests

As time goes past, the website will begin to curate a completely personalised website in accordance with your behaviours, preferences & purchase intent. For example, if you use the website to regularly transfer money, the Home Page will be customised to help you facilitate this.

Prediction #5 - A New Frontline Job Title Will Emerge - Customer Service Engineers 👷🏽‍♀️

Due to the substantial immersion of AI in contact centres, it’s highly likely that frontline customer service representatives will become experts in AI before any other mainstream employee.

For those frontline employees who embrace AI, I suspect a new role will be created - the “Customer Service Engineer”.

This role will be responsible for critically applying AI to contact centre use cases, ensuring it leads to improved agent productivity & utilisation.

These CS engineers will be responsible for things such as:

  • Designing Gen-AI email templates

  • Improving conversation design - FAQs, Chatbots etc

  • Checking accuracy of Agent Assistance & NBA recommendations

This role title will act as a conduit between frontline customer service representatives & management teams, with a keen focus on continuous improvement.

Prediction #6 - The NPS survey will die a slow, painful death 💀

Let’s face it. Surveys are slowly dying. Organisations are starting to question whether NPS is a valuable OR vanity metric.

I anticipate 2024 to be the year of the survey audit. CX teams will begin to remove surveys where data is being collected for the sake of it, and begin to focus on leveraging surveys to validate certain hypothesis’ that they have.

This “agile” survey methodology will be used as a way to quantify design thinking methodologies, demonstrating whether certain experiments or prototypes are having the desired effects on pre-defined customer cohorts.

In short, the double diamond methodology will finally prevail over tick-box survey exercises:

Prediction #6 - Customer Design Thinking Will Trump Typical CX Programs

Prediction #7 - Past CX Performance Will Become An Indicator For Future Performance 📉

Unlike the stock market, past performance will become an indicator of future performance in CX.

What do I mean?

#PredictiveCX will focus on preventing customer issues before they actually become a problem. Using historical data, organisations will use a combination of operational & customer signals to pre-empt customer issues.

For example, if an organisation knows that:

a) The customer’s delivery is going to be late

b) This is the 3rd time this has happened

c) Customers who have >3 late deliveries have a higher propensity to churn

An organisation should PROACTIVELY intervene in that journey, notifying the customer of the late delivery, acknowledge that this is the 3rd time it has happened and automatically provide £XX compensation without the customer needing to speak to anyone.

These predictive CX models should strongly focus on figuring out drivers of churn, and putting in proactive measures to mitigate these problems without the need for the customer to speak to anybody.

Prediction #8 - Customer Acquisition Costs Will Become Too Expensive, Shifting The Focus To Retention 🍪

Third party cookies are due to become obsolete in 2024. According to this article, “Chrome will disable third-party cookies for 1% of users from Q1 2024 to facilitate testing, gradually ramping up to 100% of users from Q3 2024.”

Third-Party Cookies are critical for digital marketing teams, as it allows products you’ve shown interest in to “follow you around” the internet.

Without these third-party cookies, it is going to become significantly more expensive (and difficult) for digital marketers to sell products to consumers.

The expected impact?

CEOs / CFOs are going to realise that their strategy of filling up a leaky bucket is becoming too expensive. They will subsequently shift their focus to stopping the leaking bucket i.e. reducing the amount of customers who are leaving their organisation.

I expect to see an increased level of focus on obtaining zero & first-party data, as well as a substantial re-allocation of funding from acquisition budgets to customer retention budgets.

If you’re interested, I wrote about the demise of third party cookies in more detail here.

Prediction #9 - Hyper-Personalisation Will Become Mainstream

I’ve talked about journey orchestration & personalisation in a number of my previous articles so I’m not going to repeat myself again.

There is one new point I will make though.

Hyper personalisation is also going to apply to the way that content creators produce written & visual content. In the future, I would anticipate ads to be curated at a 1:1 level, ensuring the information within the ad directly aligns to my behavioural preferences.

For example, if I have previously shown interest in a particular hobby, celebrity or fitness fad, organisations will use this information to curate images and written content which leverages this intelligence.

The days of generic email blasts and facebook ads which target a large audience are slowly dying. In the future, I expect each ad and email to be personalised at a 1:1 level.

Prediction #10 - We Will Care More About The Journey, Not The Destination

Connecting the dots between customer touch-points is going to become more important than ever.

It will be entirely unacceptable for organisations to measure performance by solely using tNPS metrics (transactional NPS).

As most of us know, the sum of each interaction just not equal the experience of the total journey. Just because a customer had a great experience in the contact centre does not necessarily mean it was a smooth ride to get to that point.

With the emergence of Product & Journey Owners across many organisations, it is integral that organisations re-design the way they measure customer experience, focusing less on isolated interactions and figuring out ways to connect the dots across the entire experience.

OK - that is me done for another week.

As always, if you have read this far - I really appreciate it. It would mean the world to me if you responded to this email to tell me what resonated, and what didn’t.

Either way - you’ll hear from me again next week.

Peace ✌️,

Ben

Follow me on LinkedIn 👇

References For This Article