7 customer experience trends for 2024

Customer experience (CX) defines a customer’s journey with a company, including both direct and indirect touchpoints. Companies that put the emotional needs of their buyer personas at the forefront of their customer experience strategy foster great relationships. According to Forrester, customer experience is a top priority for approximately 75% of business and technology professionals and their organizations worldwide. But finding ways to increase customer engagement and brand loyalty can be difficult. Here are seven customer experience trends that can help business leaders move their companies forward and improve their CX strategies.

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Trend 1: Sustainability for Customer Satisfaction

A new generation of consumers requires a new approach to customer relationships. Sustainability is a value that has grown to be associated with business, but how companies approach customer-centric sustainability efforts must vary with young consumers.

Brands must make sustainability part of their identity to better connect with consumers in this new era. Gen Z and Millennial customers are 27% more likely than previous generations to buy from a company if they believe the brand cares about its impact on people and the planet. Even better, if sustainable contributions improve the quality of your company’s products or solutions, your brand can exceed customer expectations.

Reformation is a trendy clothing company that leverages its commitment to sustainability as part of its business strategy. Unlike most e-commerce sites, Reformation has a dedicated navigation feature that allows customers to explore sustainability efforts. A section of the site is headlined with the tagline ‘Naked is the #1 most sustainable option.’ We are #2.” Along with strong marketing, brands explain exactly how they provide sustainable products. They display production processes, material sourcing information, product management information, and even sustainability reports on their site. By providing transparency and communicating its mission, the Reformation became known among younger generations for its commitment to social good.

Trend 2: Omnichannel CX: Meet customers where they are

Customer interactions with a business often involve multiple touchpoints before the customer decides to engage with the brand. By implementing an omnichannel CX strategy, companies can accelerate this process by interacting with their customer base in a variety of places, including social media apps, streaming platforms, and e-commerce sites.

Understanding customer behavior across different channels is important. For example, brand awareness of a podcast episode can help drive awareness, but how many times do you click on a podcast to buy something? It may not be a channel that promotes digital customer experiences. However, this may only be one touchpoint in the customer journey. Build a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers by adapting your messaging and adapting your marketing strategy to best suit different platforms.

Disney is a company that has a consistent omni-channel strategy. With its memorable logo and slogan “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” Disney keeps its brand spirit alive across the various platforms it serves. Founder Walt Disney wanted to create a seamless experience for customers that emphasized themes of family, fun, and entertainment across all messages.

Today, this strategy can be seen in the My Disney Experience tool, which gives guests control to create the Disney vacation of their dreams. With a customer-centric omnichannel strategy in mind, Disney considers each interaction a child may have with the brand when positioning its message. This includes movies, TV commercials, in-store costumes, and first-hand character experiences.

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Trend 3: Invest in valuable loyalty programs

The name speaks for itself – loyalty programs reward customers for their continued business, but they’ve also been shown to increase customer retention rates. 79% of customers are more likely to do business with a company because of its loyalty program. Many companies are personalizing their programs by adding loyalty tiers to highlight their most loyal customers. Given the correlation between customer retention and customer loyalty, it is important for companies to take a proactive approach to improving loyalty program benefits.

Beauty retail giant Sephora is known for its Beauty Insider Program. The program, which is free to join, categorizes shoppers into Insider, VIB and Rouge tiers based on their annual in-store spending. Each tier rewards shoppers for their spending by equating a point amount to a specific dollar amount. For example, Insiders earn 1 point for every dollar spent. Along with a free birthday gift, all members get access to a trial-sized free product. The higher you level, the more rewards you get, from early access to new product launches, higher discounts, extra birthday perks, makeup training classes, and even free full-size products.

Trend 4: Prioritizing customer access to information

Customers want to control their interactions with your company. AI-powered chatbots give customers unlimited access to information through messaging. Additionally, optimizing webpage search makes digital customer experiences easier. Companies need to offer more self-service options for the customer experience, including appointment scheduling, order tracking, and customer support bots. Giving your customers access to this information gives you the ability to control their customer journey. Access to more information gives customers a sense of trust, which is what Airbnb builds its business on.

Airbnb has high customer loyalty for a number of reasons, including including customers in decision-making, building trust and fostering a culture of belonging. The company connects strangers who rent out their properties with people who want to stay in different locations around the world. This model sounds like it could spell disaster. However, Airbnb maintains its customer experience by providing a reliable 24/7 customer support program. The company leverages an omnichannel experience through bots, live agents, social media messaging, in-app messaging, and 24/7 phone and email support. The Airbnb Help Center also includes a variety of resources available to customers. Whether you’re a guest, host, experience host, or tour manager, you can choose a custom experience. Along with optimized search, the Help Center includes a blog, FAQs, contact information, and organization by topic.

Trend 5: Personalized experiences using data and generative AI

As mentioned earlier, emotional connection with customers is a fundamental element of customer experience. Using data, companies can build hyper-personalization into their CX strategies. By collecting predictive analytics from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, businesses can further personalize the experience. CRM systems can provide 360-degree customer data for sales, marketing, and other functions to inform things like product recommendations, virtual cart notifications, SMS inventory alerts, and even greeting customers by name when they shop online.

How can companies differentiate their personalization efforts to better connect with customers? 42% of AI decision-makers cited improving hyper-personalization of customer experiences as their top use case. Technologies like generative AI can help companies better identify trends in individual behavior and create personalized experiences. AI is not new territory for eBay. The company has been using this technology to provide a better experience for both sellers and buyers.

eBay announced the launch of a generative AI-powered listing tool for sellers with Shop Bot, a personalized shopping assistant. The new tool, which eBay has identified as a new “magic listing experience,” can extract photos of information provided by sellers to create descriptions and optimize the selling experience. Another example of how this tool works is that sellers can give their items a title and use generative AI to get recommended categories and other information that describes the item. Creates an overall more streamlined listing process for eBay sellers.

Trend 6: Understanding new technologies

Just as artificial intelligence helps with hyper-personalization, it can also help companies develop new experiential marketing strategies that better align with customer expectations. IBV reports that 78% of executives globally have an approach to extending generative AI into customer and employee experiences. By creating memorable experiences, businesses can build more emotional connections with their customers. Even exploring and understanding new technologies like virtual and augmented reality can help businesses create immersive experiences for their customers.

One example of this is IKEA collaborating with Apple’s iOS 11 and ARkit to launch IKEA Place to help customers become better interior designers. The app allows you to virtually place furniture into your residence using AR technology via your iPhone. According to IKEA, the accuracy rate is 98%. This allows customers to view photos of products in their personal space before purchasing, without having to visit a store.

Trend 7: Ensuring Customer Data Privacy

Customers are willing to share personal information, especially when they know it can provide real-time solutions and hyper-personalization. In fact, 50% of customers are willing to share personal information to help create personalized customer experiences. These metrics can improve your relationship with your business and your experience with its products and services. But customers want to know how their data is used and they want to trust that companies can protect their personal information from data breaches. It is important for companies to share their usage and privacy intentions through clear messaging so that users can better understand how their data can help them with their customer journey.

Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

Customer needs vary from person to person, and generative AI can help businesses satisfy as many customers as possible through hyper-personalization. Proactive companies implement modern CX strategies alongside new technologies. IBM has been helping companies apply trustworthy AI in this space for over a decade. Generative AI has the added potential to significantly transform customer and field service through its ability to generate more human-like conversational responses. IBM Consulting helps you put your customer experience strategy at the center of your business and deliver consistent, intelligent customer care through conversational AI.

IBM watsonx™ Assistant is a market-leading conversational artificial intelligence platform designed to help you overcome the pain points of traditional support and deliver exceptional experiences. IBM watsonx™ and IBM Consulting’s deep expertise in customer journey mapping, design, platform implementation, data and AI can help you leverage best-in-class technologies to drive innovation across the customer lifecycle.

Read: Key Components of a Successful Customer Experience Strategy Explore consulting services for customer experience (CX)