2023 CEXy Predictions: 10 Demands Your Customers & Employees Will Have 🔮

What's CEXy in 2023? 💃

We've trawled the internet and have summarised a number of valuable resources which relate to #CX & #EX trends for 2023. All content & statistics presented below stem from the following articles (and our own thoughts):

• Forrester 2023 Predictions

• ttec CX Trends 2023

• customer THINK contact centre trends 2023

If you're interested in chatting about the Medallia solutions that we mention throughout this article, feel free to drop me an email: [email protected]

Customer Experience (CX) Predictions 🧌

#1 - Conversational Customer Service Will Become Mandatory 📱

72% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop from a company that communicates with them about their products in real-time, with a real employee, via messaging (SMS, WhatsApp).

Messaging delivers speed, efficiency and results other channels just can’t match when it comes to handling customer inquiries. Messaging enables quicker and better customer experiences, allowing agents to service multiple customers concurrently, reduces wait times, and drives more conversions – all while reducing costs.

How Medallia can help: Medallia Conversations allows your business to solicit feedback from customers in the moment, on the channel that they prefer.

#2 - Companies Will Differentiate Themselves By Providing "Individualisation At Scale" 🧜‍♀️

McKinsey predicts that "individualisation at scale" will drive 5-15% additional revenue growth for brands in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom & financial services industries.

When customers log-in to their self-service portal, or make contact with your brand, they expect you to know specific details about their individual history: how long they've been customers, their purchase history, any past issues they've had and their behavioural preferences.

The fact is; no two customers are exactly the same. That's why it is critical to understand every customers unique journey, using this data to personalise future interactions that they have with your business. Being able to produce "individualised" experiences will ensure your company maintains a competitive advantage in the industry. For some ideas on how to surprise & delight individual customers, check out this article.

How Medallia can help: Thunderhead allows your business to stitch customer data together, allowing you to orchestrate individualised journeys across every channel.

#3 - The Silent Majority Will Finally Be Heard 📣

It's no secret that Digital interactions are now critical for all businesses. In fact, companies with digital-first strategies are 64% more likely than their competitors to achieve their business goals.

Companies who haven’t mastered digital will be left behind by the competition. Striking the right balance of automation and people to deliver frictionless digital experiences will be critical to brands’ success.

But how do you know whether you're delivering a frictionless experience? 

By measuring every interaction that occurs on your digital properties i.e. by listening to the silent majority.

There are an array of digital experience analytics tools in the market which will allows your business to understand the "why" behind the website traffic, producing heatmaps, session replays & automatic prioritisation techniques to allow you to optimise content & conversion rates on your digital properties.

How Medallia can help: Medallia Digital Suite combines digital feedback with digital experience analytics to produce an end-to-end understanding of your digital channels, in real time.

#4 - Customer Trust In Consumer Tech Companies Will Begin To Shrink 🚩

87% of consumers say they won’t do business with a company if they are worried about it’s security policies.

Due to increasing data breaches & lack of effective ethical data management practices, Forrester predicts that consumers’ trust in tech companies will shrink by 15% (from 50% to 35%) by the end of 2023.

Reduced trust has a negative impact for the surrounding ecosystem, so organisations that partner with consumer tech firms will benefit from proactively identifying data breaches and/or customer security concerns.

How Medallia can help: Medallia Experience Cloud (MEC) has the ability to ingest a large variety of signals, analyse these signals and democratise the insights across your organisation. Real-time alerts & workflows will ensure that teams are proactively identifying and mitigating risks which relate to data privacy & security.

#5 - The Recession Will Shift Focus From Automation To Operational Efficiency 🦾

Forrester predicts that the economy will shift 10% of automation budgets from transformation to resilience in 2023.

Despite the proven benefits of automation over the past several years, 2023 will see a slight dampening of automation velocity.

A more rational approach will be taken whereby companies will look to optimise processes & procedures in whichever way they can. Whilst automation can produce significant benefits for a business, it is also extremely costly & time-consuming to set up.

In a period of economic uncertainty, the focus will become slightly more risk-averse, whereby companies will focus on ensuring systems, processes & procedures are fully optimised, even if this requires manual intervention.

How Medallia can help: Medallia Experience Cloud can highlight & quantify the impact that certain pain points are having on business performance. Their world-class text analytics platforms has the capability to analyse & produce insights from various types of unstructured data (voice, chat, email, social, surveys).

#6 - CX Teams Who Fail To Demonstrate ROI Will Become Extinct 👋

Forrester predicts that 4 in 5 CX teams lack crucial skills including design thinking, inclusive experience design, survey design, journey mapping, and data literacy and storytelling.

CX teams without these skills will remain stuck on basic "find and fix" work, unable to help their organisations innovate to thrive in a challenging business environment.

If C-Suite leaders cannot see ROI in the investment of a dedicated CX team, it is highly likely that they will trim back or completely eliminate CX functions in an economic downturn. Whilst this may be short-sighted, it reinforces the need for CX teams to become better at demonstrating ROI on CX.

How Medallia can help: CX Advisory teams can work with your business to create a linkage between CX & financial performance. Check out some ROI calculators here.

Employee Experience (EX) Predictions 👩‍🔬

#7 - Frontline Employees Will Demand Better Training & Development 😤

80% of US workers say an employer’s professional development offerings are an important consideration when accepting a new job.

Let's face it. Being a frontline agent is tough which is evidenced through average churn rates of >50% for contact centres at the moment. Investing in upskilling and training is more important than ever when it comes to keeping employees engaged in their work.

Also, it's critical that you recognise top performers to prevent complacency and make employees feel wanted.

How Medallia can help: A study by Forrester found that Medallia Agent Connect produced a 325% ROI for contact centres. This platform creates a one-stop-shop for agents, allowing them to see customer feedback, QA results & coaching discussions within the one platform. It's a game-changer for frontline engagement & retention.

#8 - "Next Best Action" Technology Will Make Agents More Productive ⚠️

38% of customers expect associates to immediately know who they are and the context of their inquiry. Yet the proportion of agents who have this 360 degree lens of the customer is very limited.

Speed is essential when it comes to delivering seamless experiences, so associates need all the necessary tools at their fingertips to get information quickly and work effectively. Whilst CRMs have definitely enhanced the ability for agents to look at previous interactions, CRMs rarely provide a cross-channel view i.e. digital & in-store behaviours.

We anticipate that journey orchestration technology will become more widespread in 2023, surfacing agents with recommended next steps according to previous cross-channel interactions that a customer has had.

How Medallia can help: Thunderhead is able to understand a customer's journey across multiple channels, surfacing recommendations or "next best actions" to the agents in real-time.

#9 - Employee Surveillance Techniques Will Erode Trust ❌

With remote work becoming increasingly popular, some employers have turned to electronic monitoring to track employee productivity.

Methods range from keystroke recording and desktop snapshots to more invasive surveillance via webcam.

In 2023, Forrester expects more lawmaker attention on workplace surveillance as well as increased employee backlash in response to surveillance.

Smart security and risk teams will prioritise privacy rights and employee experience if implementing any monitoring technology, whether it’s for productivity, return-to-office strategies, or insider risk management.

How Medallia can help: Medallia Employee Experience is able to deploy transparent listening techniques; capturing feedback at the right moments of time & distributing insights to relevant teams to drive meaningful change. 

#10 - Intelligent Automation Will Improve The Level Of Customer Service 📞

88% of customer service associates believe that AI will improve their work, rather than replace associates themselves.

The contact centre industry is a mess right now. Call wait times are through the roof for a myriad of reasons; labour shortages, unexpected call spikes & overall inability to stick on top of workload.

The industry is always looking for ways to automate certain types of interactions however there is a big difference between forced automation & intelligent automation. Intelligent automation doesn’t take the place of employees, it empowers them.

For example, the ability to intelligently remove calls from the queue and arrange these calls to be made at a more appropriate time is a way that AI can intelligently smooth call volumes throughout the operating hours of a contact centre. This intelligent automation is vastly different to promising a call back and never completing it and if done correctly, can augment the experience that both employees and customers have.

How Medallia can help: Mindful is an intelligence callback solution which has recently been acquired by Medallia. It integrates with telephony systems to facilitate omnichannel call scheduling, seamless channel transitions & automated SMS notifications. 

Graph Of The Week 📊

According to McKinsey, these are the critical enablers to embed a personalisation operating model into your marketing functions. We'd argue that these enablers could be used to embed any type of operating model into your business: