Here at PostFunnel, we’re all about making data-driven decisions — and helping you do the same for your business.
(It just makes sense to do so: With the right data in hand, you’ll always know the best direction to take your marketing campaigns and initiatives.)
While you certainly want to pay attention to the data your team collects (and your audience provides), it’s also important to keep up with the more overarching trends weaving themselves through the eCommerce realm.
To that end, we’re going to take a look at four key eCommerce statistics that paint a clear picture of the state of customer experience management — in 2020 and beyond.
Let’s dive in.
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CX Leaders are Three Times More Likely to Exceed Their Marketing Goals
According to the 2020 Digital Trends Report from Adobe, companies that prioritize customer experience management are 300% more likely to reach and exceed their goals than their competition.
What’s more, CXM leaders also see three times the returns from their efforts, too.
Simply put:
Optimizing your overall CX will lead to more revenues and larger profits for your business.
To be sure, we’ve known this would eventually be the case for a while now.
(Remember back in 2013 when Walker predicted that CX would overtake price and product as the key factor for consumers’ purchasing decisions? Well…here we are.)
Of course, this isn’t to say that the quality and price of your product don’t matter.
The point of that prediction is that those things are table stakes by today’s standards. To truly set your brand apart from your competition, you need to jampack your entire CX with value at every point along the customer’s journey with your brand.
The key to optimizing the customer experience in 2020: Contextual personalization.
By now, it’s not enough for brands to offer surface-level personalization. Yes, it’s still crucial to provide personalized product recommendations and the like — but this is really the bare minimum you can do for your customers at this point.
You need to take your personalization efforts to the next level.
This means transitioning to a more customer-centric mode of operations, and gaining a more holistic understanding of your audience — both as consumers and as people. This enables your marketing team to more effectively map your customer journey, and better anticipate your customers’ needs and expectations along this journey.
Once you have a clearer idea of your overall customer journey, you can then work on injecting contextual personalization throughout your entire customer experience.
Again, the goal isn’t to just slap basic personalization tactics on top of a generic customer experience. Contextual personalization is about being able to deliver exactly what your individual customers need at any given moment to help them move forward in their journey.
The lesson to take from all this is simple:
If you’re not laser-focused on providing a hyper-personalized experience to your customers, you’re leaving a ton of opportunities on the table — and are likely falling well behind your competition.
Spending on CXM Technology Will Reach $641B by 2022
Of course, providing such an enhanced customer experience requires strategic and liberal use of technology across the board.
It’s no surprise, then, that global spending on CX-related technology is expected to exceed $641 billion by 2022.
Overall, brands continue to invest more and more into technology related to three key areas:
First and foremost, we’re seeing brands adopt AI-driven software and tools to supercharge their customer experience. With artificial intelligence and machine learning in the driver’s seat, your team can easily deliver on your hyper-personalization promises in a variety of ways, such as:
- Behaviorally triggered outreach and engagement
- Conversational marketing tactics, such as chatbots and conversational landing pages
- Delivering dynamically generated content and offers
Another key area where tech comes into play is in delivering an omnichannel experience to the consumer. Here, the goal is to immerse your customers in your brand’s experience by interconnecting your channels (and the experiences you provide on them). In turn, your brand will become almost ubiquitous in your customers’ lives.
Making the shift to omnichannel is also about making the purchasing process more streamlined and convenient for your customers. To this end, we’re seeing brands continue to invest in technology to improve their checkout processes via social commerce, additional payment options, and more.
Companies are also looking to use technology to get better control of their company data, organizational knowledge, and digital assets. By centralizing this data — and making it easily accessible for your team — you’ll ensure your team members always have the information they need to deliver top-notch value to your customers.
There’s no doubt about it: Your tech-related expenses are going to continue to increase as time goes on.
It’s vital, then, that you take a strategic approach when adopting new tools into your tech stack to ensure the returns you experience are worth the investment.
82% of Consumers Expect Immediacy from Their Favorite Brands
According to Hubspot, 82% of consumers expect an immediate response from the brands they do business with after reaching out for support.
On the surface, the message here is pretty obvious:
You need to have structures in place that enable your team to provide immediate assistance to your customers whenever they’re in need.
(A quick note: “Immediate” in this context means ten or fewer minutes.)
This is a huge reason live chat and chatbots have become so en vogue in recent years. By optimizing and/or automating your service and support efforts, you’ll always be able to respond quickly and efficiently to your customers’ requests.
Providing self-service options — such as FAQs, knowledge bases, and other informational content — can also help deliver immediate solutions to your customers. Here, you’re cutting out the middleman (your support team) and allowing your audience to take matters into their own hands.
(Needless to say, you need to optimize these resources in order to deliver value to your audience.)
Again, we’re talking here about immediacy with regard to individual interactions with your customers.
On a deeper level, though, this expectation of immediacy applies to your approach to customer experience management, overall. In order to continually provide for your customers, you need to stay on top of the shifts, changes, and evolutions occurring throughout your industry.
Again, becoming data-driven is essential here.
More than just being able to react to changes in your industry, being data-driven puts you in position to proactively lead your industry in the right direction with regard to customer experience management.
By becoming data-driven, your marketing team will inherently become more focused on growth (as opposed to maintaining the status quo).
When growth becomes your team’s main goal, you’ll always be looking for the “next big thing” you can do to enhance your customer experience — and will consistently be able to cater to your audience’s evolving expectations.
One-Third of Consumers Will Defect from Brands They Don’t Trust
A recent study by IBM found that an astounding 33% of customers will stop buying from a preferred brand if they lose trust in the company.
(In fact, the report shows that one-third of consumers have actually defected to a competing brand due to a decrease in trustability.)
So, to be clear:
If you aren’t instilling trust in your customers throughout their experiences with your brand, you’re going to lose them.
Building trust within your target audience is done both on an individual and “big picture” basis.
In terms of the individual customer, it’s vital that they’re able to trust your brand to provide for them as expected. This means:
- Following through on the claims and promises your brand makes
- Taking the time to acknowledge and consider the individual customers’ needs and expectations
- Providing a consistent — and consistently valuable — experience to your customers whenever they engage with your brand
For the most part, building trust within your individual customers will take time; that’s just how trust works.
Still, you can increase their likelihood of trusting you by becoming more open and transparent across the board.
For one thing, the modern consumer needs to know they can trust your brand with their personal information. Yes, the GDPR and similar legislation have made it mandatory for brands to be transparent with how they use their customer data…but your customers will expect this transparency regardless of what the law says.
It’s also essential that your organization be transparent in terms of how your business operates, providing good reason for the modern, socially-conscious consumer to trust you from the get-go.
Some key facts to consider:
- 73% of consumers trust businesses that can maximize profits while also improving the conditions of the communities they operate in
- 67% of younger consumers want brands to keep them informed as to how they support and empower their team members
- 72% of US consumers feel it is more important than ever for brands to reflect their personal values
Most importantly, the report from Edelman shows that 81% of brands say they need to trust that a brand will always “do the right thing” before they decide to buy from them.
Now, we hope this goes without saying, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t make clear:
Do. Not. Fake. It.
Whether we’re talking about the claims you make about the value of your product or your public commitments to various social causes, they need to be legitimate.
First of all, it’s the right thing to do.
(See the stat we just mentioned for a reminder of why that’s important.)
Moreover, your customers aren’t just more conscious of these aspects of your business; they’re also more knowledgeable about them, as well. The modern customer does their research — and will ultimately dig up the truth about your brand, whatever it may be.
Again, this isn’t to say you should do a better job of hiding the less-than-responsible things your company does. It’s to say you shouldn’t be doing these things in the first place.
Along that same wavelength, you shouldn’t be looking to build trust as a means to generating more business. Rather, you want to see the strong relationships you build with your customers as ends unto themselves — knowing that this will lead to better things for your business moving forward.