Staying Ahead of the Curve: 2023 Customer Experience Trends to Explore

With all the reflective lists, charts and collections popping up to show us what we did (or missed) in 2022, we wanted to look forward and jot down what we think will be most important for CX professionals in B2B for 2023.

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The Customer Experience (CX) landscape is rapidly changing, and it's important for companies to spot the latest trends to ensure they remain competitive and continue to strive towards customer delight.

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As Customer Experience continues to gain more attention, and retention and churn continue to be the top priorities of board meetings all over there are increasing expectations from CX related roles and departments such as Customer Success to “prove” their worth and existence.

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Many of our predictions involve Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its increasing role in CX. This is a great time to draw attention to AI as OpenAI that has become the “tool of the week” with its ChatGPT feature. Although we have been working on this list before OpenAI posts hit our news feeds, we predict that the use of AI in CX will be intertwined with the tools of the trade. The aim is not to replace human intelligence, but to allow CX professionals to do a more focused and personalized job and overall to get more done in the limited time we all have.

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One thing is certain, that 2023 promises to be an especially exciting year for CX, as new technologies, data-driven insights, and customer expectations continue to evolve.

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Here are five CX trends in B2B to watch for in 2023:

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1. AI-Assisted Personalized Attention:

As digital technology advances, customers are expecting companies to provide more personalized and humanized experiences. In 2023, companies should be focusing on providing a Customer Experience that is tailored to each individual client.  A hyper-personalized service for each of our customers is not realistic with manual labor so we will see CX tools using Artificial Intelligence that help the CX professional interact and assist more clients in a shorter time than before without the user being aware that the personalized content is created in a scalable manor.

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2. AI-driven Insights:

AI-driven analytics and insights can provide companies with deeper insights into customer experience, behavior and sentiment, allowing them to identify and respond to customer pain points in a timely fashion. AI-driven automation can also help companies collect more detailed customer feedback from a wider and larger part of their client-base, providing more input into data models and to understand the perceived experience gaps customers are experiencing. Finally, AI-driven predictive analytics can help companies anticipate customer needs and provide more timely, relevant experiences. Overall, by leveraging AI-driven insights, companies can anticipate customer needs and frustrations to prevent dissatisfaction, leading to an overall better customer experience and satisfaction.

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3. Prove Importance and Return-On-Investment for CX:

CX functions such as Customer Success (CS) need to show accountability and ROI in order to demonstrate the value of their services to top stakeholders of the company. Although CS is a fairly new discipline with loosely defined roles and responsibilities that vary largely between companies this function is seen as a cost center by most CEOs, CFOs and board members. By providing evidence of the return on investment (ROI) of their services, CS can prove that their efforts are not only worthwhile for the company, but that they are making a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line. This needs to be in the form of hard metrics such as increased revenue, upsells and/or loyalty as measured in dollars.

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This will ensure that CS roles are seen as an integral part of the organization and that its services are valued. Additionally, showing accountability and ROI helps to ensure that CS is allocated the necessary resources to continue.

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Luckily churn will continue to be the focus for most companies and CS needs to own this responsibility and quantify the impact it has on churn prevention.

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4. Proactive Outreach and Feedback:

Businesses need to be proactive in their customer attention and solve issues before they come up. Finding the time for all this outreach however is the number one obstacle we hear from our clients and prospects, so they let do with what they can which is usually based on gut feelings on who needs the most attention.

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With the right tools you can automate this process so you seem proactive in touching base with your clients and collect their feedback and experience that allows you to identify any experience gaps and react by responding quickly to them in a personalized manner (see item number 1 on this list).

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Proactive customer attention is a major factor in increasing customer loyalty and driving down churn. Clients expect prompt and efficient service, and companies that don’t deliver can find themselves losing out to the competition.

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To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must think proactively and take advantage of the latest customer experience technologies and strategies to really understand how your clients are experiencing all touchpoints of your company relationship.

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5. Predictive Problem Solving:

Predictive models can help businesses identify problems before they hit your client’s radar and help you develop strategies to address them. By studying past data and trends, predictive models can provide insights into future outcomes and alert companies to potential risks. By analyzing other client groups and understanding their pains predictive models can identify other clients that are likely to encounter the same issues and prevent them from ever becoming a problem.

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Bonus: There is no use for NPS in B2B:

The limitations of NPS will become more evident as technology advances. The limited benefits of using NPS (Net Promoter Score) will become even more obvious as we use better and more advanced technology to understand our customers wants, needs and experience. To successfully use any sort of predictive modeling or other AI technology you need good input into the models. NPS provides very low response rates with even less insights into the cause of any dissatisfaction. NPS was conceptualized before the world wide web and modern technology and was a good tool at its time, but that time has passed. Gartner even predicts that more than 75% of all companies will stop using NPS in the coming years.

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Companies need to gather meaningful feedback from its customer base in order to keep up and to exceed their expectations.

As the customer experience landscape continues to evolve, it's important for companies to stay ahead of the trends in order to remain competitive. By leveraging the latest CX trends and technologies, companies can ensure they're providing the best possible customer experience in 2023.

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#B2B #CX #CS #CustomerExperience #CustomerSuccess #AccountManagement #Churn #Retention

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