What are the hottest CX tech trends of 2024? We asked CX tech executives in a new 3-part series. Next up is Ginger Conlon. Conlon is the thought leadership director and customer experience advocate at Genesys. An award-winning editorial leader, she has covered CX for the majority of her career.
Read Part 1 with Charles Hicks from Zoom and download the free 2024 CX Tech Trends Report for the full rundown.
Q1: What will be the hottest CX tech trend of 2024 and why?
The hottest CX tech trend of 2024 will be using AI to surface unique insights that help organizations orchestrate and personalize the customer experience while also streamlining and improving the employee experience.
The reason this will be so hot: 86% of consumers globally say a brand is only as good as its service and 80% say they’ll buy more, more often from businesses that consistently personalize service interactions. And the form of personalization that consumers appreciate most is receiving the service they need, anytime, in their channel of choice. So, using AI to deliver uniquely relevant end-to-end customer journeys has become both a business imperative and strategic differentiator.
Additionally, CX leaders worldwide agree agents’ greatest frustration is not having the information they need on hand to resolve customers’ issues quickly and completely. These CX leaders also say their top CX strategic priority is improving the employee experience by implementing new technology or connecting existing technology.
Q2: How does this CX tech trend address a problem for CX leaders, and what are the symptoms of that problem?
The biggest problems that CX leaders face today include keeping pace with rising customer expectations, addressing low employee morale, and recruiting talent.
More than three-quarters of consumers globally say they’ll stop doing business with a brand after five or fewer poor interactions, and one-third switched vendors after a bad experience in the past year. These consumers are often frustrated by disjointed journeys, dead ends, and unresolved issues.
At the same time, contact center employees are looking for more support from their supervisors, and they’d like more consistent expectations and additional opportunities for advancement.
Q3: How will this dynamically change CX leader outcomes? What about organizational outcomes?
Organizations can use tools like conversational, generative, and predictive AI to better understand customer needs and preferences, uncover issues and opportunities, and support frontline staff. They can orchestrate customer journeys in real time, ensuring that the context of an interaction in one channel, like webchat with a bot, moves seamlessly to an interaction in another channel, like a phone call with an agent. This will lessen or eliminate customer frustration, increase engagement and loyalty, and improve business outcomes, such as reducing the cost to serve.
CX leaders and frontline supervisors will see their jobs and performance improve because they’ll have access to unprecedented, highly relevant insight in real time. This will allow them to optimize on the fly, enhance and streamline employee coaching and career development, and quickly act on issues and opportunities.
Q4: Will there be major barriers to implementation, and what will those be?
There are barriers to implementation for every technology. In the case of AI I the customer and employee experience, there are several. One barrier is if an organization hasn’t yet transitioned to a cloud-based CX platform that connects data and channels. Another is CX leaders not understanding the potential of AI and rushing to implement an AI-based technology or tool without first considering the best use cases for their organization. Closely tied to that are the issues of trust and security. When implementing AI, organizations must have plans to ensure data integrity and governance, privacy compliance, and AI ethics.
2024 CX Trends Series
Read Part 1: How AI will unburden call centers.
You’re reading Part 2: AI Unlocks Customer Personalization
Read Part 3: AI Brings Value to Owned Data
Ginger Conlon
Ginger Conlon is the thought leadership director and customer experience advocate at Genesys. An award-winning editorial leader, Ginger has covered CX for the majority of her career.
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