The year 2024 and its customer forecasts! According to Forbes magazine (Adrian Swinscoe, 2023), here are some predictions for 2024 in terms of customer experience and satisfaction.

What can we expect in general?

• Economic conditions are still very tight for most customers, with price, value and budget savings being the three most important factors determining much of their behaviour. However, brands must not ignore sustainability, which is the growing factor in customers’ decision-making processes.
• The physical shop is set to play an increasingly important role, but will also be evolving.
• Despite all the enthusiasm and possibilities surrounding generative AI, the employee experience will remain the number one priority for managers.
• Meanwhile, the adoption of generative AI will continue apace.
• The knowledge gained from establishing use cases for generative AI in contact centres will help solve challenges in other areas of activity.
• Marketing teams need to become more efficient and productive.
• And on-site search should be overhauled (finally!).
• However, problems of security and trust will persist.
• Some of these concerns will be addressed through the development of commercial, industrial and function-specific models and approaches.
• Others will be addressed with a focus on governance and strengthening organizational skills.
• But many organizations will struggle to prove the return on their investment in generative AI.
• To really benefit from these developments, organizations will need to get their data house in order and focus on both the integration challenges and the reduction of their technological complexity.
• And the demand for talent is set to intensify.

Improving the customer experience

As Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder and CEO of PolyAI explains: “Companies will be investing more in improving the customer experience through automation, with advanced models of generative AI fuelling much of this effort to create more natural and expressive interactions via hyper-efficient chatbots. This will pose new risks associated with unregulated language models, requiring organizational efforts to develop AI competence centres within various business functions. ”

We’re talking about customer experience via AI on the consumer journey and the impact on satisfaction. AI provides a reliable, automated response for organizations entrusting it with low value-added tasks, but with high commercial stakes in terms of customer relations. Communication remains the foundation and is essential for all organizational actions to improve the customer experience. A good customer experience should be defined as “a reflection of the brand’s values in an omni-channel context”.

We therefore need to define a well-considered and assertive positioning. The customer experience begins with the first contact with the company and/or brand. The very first contact is said to be digital and should be the beginning of a series of positive experiences. In 2024, we need to uncover information supported by vast databases, increase the personalization and effectiveness of marketing efforts, streamline tasks (workflow), offer 24-hour customer support (online), offer targeted marketing, understand customer concerns, offer predictive information and, finally, increase customer loyalty.