What trends are shaping customer experiences in 2024?

Transcript

Robert Zirk: If there's one constant about customer experience, it's that it's ever changing.

The channels customers choose to interact through continue to shift. 26% of CX leaders surveyed for the 2024 CX Leaders Trends and Insights report by Execs In The Know, in partnership with TELUS International, indicated online chat saw the largest increase in volume over the past 12 months, while 41% reported phone calls as having the largest decrease in volume.

And brands are harnessing innovation to gain an edge over their competition. In the same survey, 73% of CX leaders say their company is making investments in artificial intelligence, up from only 48% the previous year.

As technology evolves and customer expectations change, brands need to ensure they're staying one step ahead when it comes to providing an effortless customer experience.

Today's expert guests will highlight trends in CX involving customer centricity, the collection and application of data, advancements in technology, and the evolution of outsourcing partnerships.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: What trends are shaping customer experiences in 2024?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

So what's the current buzz among customer experience leaders?

The first trending topic is that brands are prioritizing customer centricity, according to Annette Franz. She's the founder and CEO of CX Journey, Inc., a strategy consulting firm that works with clients around the world, helping them create and deliver customer centric experiences. Annette is also a keynote speaker, coach and CX thought leader, having published two important books on the topic, most recently Built to Win: Make the Customer Experience Part of Your Company's DNA.

She highlighted a greater interest in customer centricity, that is, viewing business decisions through the lens of your customer and prioritizing the customer as the focal point of your company culture.

Annette Franz: Somebody asked me the other day, "Is this customer centricity thing going away? Do people even care about that anymore?" And I'm seeing more and more research from organizations that are saying, "Hey, you know what? Customers are a top priority for CEOs," so I think that, to me, speaks volumes in terms of - it's not going away, it's only going to become more and more prevalent.

Robert Zirk: But despite the wider trend toward customer centricity, some CX leaders still experience challenges getting buy-in from their CEOs. Annette cited a Gartner report of CEO priorities, in which only 6% of CEOs identified customers as a priority for their organization, placing customers near the bottom.

Annette Franz: And yet, the number one priority for the CEOs was growth. And I thought, "Wow, how do you get growth without customers?" And I think the bigger problem is there are still too many people who don't make that connection. I think this needs to be a focus, and I think the language that gets used around it is sometimes fuzzy, but in the end it all equates to the same thing: that the customer needs to be at the heart of the business.

Robert Zirk: It starts by recognizing that every level of the organization plays a role in delivering a high quality customer experience.

Annette Franz: When I talk about the definition of customer experience, what it is and what it isn't, I always say it's not just what's happening at the frontline. Every employee impacts the customer experience, whether they see it or not. If you're not talking to a customer directly, you're working with somebody or supporting somebody who is, right? And so I think that's an important clarification or distinction to make for folks.

Robert Zirk: To foster a more customer centric organization, Annette says that CX leaders need to build bridges with leaders throughout the organization. For example, collaborating with marketing leaders can result in more specific, targeted messaging and campaigns for your target audience. And conversations with engineering teams can inform fixes, roadmaps and enhancements based on customer feedback.

Annette shared some best practices for CX leaders as they look to find common ground with leaders in other departments.

Annette Franz: Understand their pain points and the problems that they're trying to solve, speak their language, right? And translate the work that you're doing into what it means for them and their objectives. But you also have to have the right culture in order for that to happen. Like I said, a customer centric culture is one where it's data driven, it's collaborative, where we're all working together with the customer at the heart of everything that we do. It has to be the foundation of everything that we're trying to do here. And I think that prioritization really is a matter of knowing about everything else that's going on in the organization and recognizing that it's all about the customer. I constantly hear about "There are competing priorities," and I say, "What can possibly compete with the customer?" If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. If you're creating a product, who are you creating it for? So, absolutely, you've got to bring the customer into that product design and into those discussions, right? If you're making decisions about processes and about where to take the business, you've absolutely got to bring the customer into that and consider how it's going to impact the customer as you're doing that work..

Robert Zirk: In addition to the relationships you build with leaders across departments, Annette highlighted cross-functional committees as a way to ensure that prioritizing the customer experience becomes part of your company culture.

Annette Franz: One of them is customer experience champions. The other one is a culture committee that customer experience champions that makes sure that we have a good understanding of what customers' problems are. They have insights about the customer, there's this conduit between the core customer experience team and their organizations, right? And making sure that information is flowing freely between those two and then around, with all the other departments in that cross-functional committee.

So basically everybody knows what everybody else is doing, what's going on. They can understand if there's an issue over in customer service, product needs to know about it. And those conversations are happening. It just facilitates teamwork across the organization, that sharing, that collaboration.

Same thing with the culture committee, right? They are charged with being the conduit between the head of culture and the head of CX and their cross-functional departments and really facilitating that grassroots groundswell of "We put the customer at the heart of everything that we do. Here's how we do it. Here are some other activities that we're going to do to ensure that we live and breathe this every day."

Robert Zirk: Another way to increase customer centricity is to prioritize personalization. And Annette notes that before you can effectively personalize the customer experience, you have to start with voice of the customer research.

Annette Franz: I think the big thing around personalization from the customer perspective is that it's not just about "Dear Annette" or "Hello Annette" and it's not just about product recommendations. It goes deeper and it goes to being where I am and knowing where I am in the journey and getting the right content or the right message or the right information to me at the right time.

Robert Zirk: As you streamline the overall customer experience, the data you collect can help you better understand how customers feel about your brand and the root causes for why they feel that way. And that leads us to the next trend: brands are turning to data-driven CX to adapt to evolving customer expectations.

Kory Laszewski is a vice-president of global sales at TELUS International. He regularly has conversations with the leaders of some of the world's largest and most disruptive brands within a wide range of industries. What he's seeing lately is a lot of excitement around post-pandemic recovery, particularly in industries like travel and hospitality, retail and financial services that were heavily impacted. But businesses are also concerned that they won't be able to keep up with the demands as customers start to engage again in new ways and at different paces.

Kory Laszewski: We're seeing a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about "How do I forecast accurately in this new environment and how am I ensuring that I'm capturing all of the mediums and the technologies that my customers want us to communicate with them over?" It's "How do we focus on the customer? How do we identify and break down where those trends are within each customer segment based on a lot of different factors?"

Robert Zirk: In the 2024 CX Leaders Trends and Insights report from Execs In The Know, in partnership with TELUS International, one in four CX leaders identified “gathering and utilizing customer feedback" as the most important area to invest in to improve the customer experience. But while 84% of CX leaders are using surveys to get a sense of customer sentiment, less than half are leveraging other channels to gather other indirect forms of feedback. Annette highlighted different opportunities for brands to understand how customers perceive their experiences.

Annette Franz: As I wrote in my first book, there really are three ways to understand the customer and those are three data heavy activities and things that we can do, right?

So the first one is listen, and that's feedback, both solicited and unsolicited, right? It's both things we ask for and things that customers just want to tell us, and so it might be surveys. It might be interviews. It might be social media. It might be feedback forms. It might be suggestion cards, might be a conversation with an employee.

But there are also what I call the breadcrumbs of data that customers leave behind as they interact and transact with the brand and I think that's such an important part of the data that you're going to use. And when you marry that data, the attitude, behavior, what's happening today versus how they feel about what happened in the past, you have such a robust analysis and really can create those predictive and prescriptive insights to deliver a better experience for the future.

The second of three ways is characterize. It's to interview customers, talk to customers, really understand their needs, their pain points, the problem they're trying to solve and develop personas and use those personas throughout the organization to design products, to design your marketing, to design the experience, et cetera.

And then the third way is empathize, which is all about creating journey maps with your customers, map the customer journey, identify what they're doing from point A to point B, what they're doing, thinking and feeling. Bring that data in and bring data into that journey map as well to really create this robust image of what's happening. And then also creating the service blueprint, which is what's happening behind the scenes, the people, the tools, the systems, the processes that are supporting, facilitating and creating that experience for the customer.

All of those are huge data sources and CX leaders need to use all of these different ways to really get a solid understanding of the customer, of the experience today, of customers' expectations and using that to design the experience going forward.

Robert Zirk: Through that three-step framework of listen, characterize and empathize, leaders can gain a better understanding of what customers are experiencing, what they're expecting and how to design the experience so that the two previous points align.

I asked Annette whether she's seeing that the data is being collected but not properly leveraged or whether leaders need to find more ways to find the most relevant data points.

Annette Franz: It is definitely a little bit of both. But a lot of times folks are doing this work and it's just checking a box or they haven't gotten the executive commitment to take what they learn and go and do something with it. I think that's a huge piece. Or the culture just isn't there. If you're operating in a customer centric culture, it's a data driven culture. It's a collaborative culture. It's one that puts the customer at the heart of the business, and you get this feedback and you're going to immediately, you're going to analyze it, share it, get it to people who need to act on it.

Robert Zirk: In the 2024 CX Leaders Trends and Insights report, one in five leaders say their organization is not using their program data as effectively as they could be. Finding ways to leverage the right data for greater customer insights can present a big challenge, especially when working with legacy technology systems.

Annette Franz: Data is at the heart of designing and delivering a great experience and data is what's going to be at the root of delivering that personalized experience. So it's "where's the data - what I refer to as contextually relevant data - what do we have, what's the quality of that data?" It's everywhere, right? And then we have the technology. We've got these disparate legacy systems where the data is housed all over the organization, especially if there have been mergers and acquisitions, and so that makes it really challenging.

Robert Zirk: When your data is fragmented across several systems, it creates real challenges for those looking to see the complete picture. More than a third of CX leaders surveyed in the Execs In The Know report said legacy systems, processes and tools were their biggest challenge for their CX operations. And that's an ongoing issue that Annette continues to see among the organizations she's worked with.

Annette Franz: I've seen it over the years. I've seen it especially over the last 20 years, but I'm still seeing it more today than I would like to see. But I think it's also a matter of it takes a lot to update those systems, and especially in large organizations and organizations where there have been multiple mergers and acquisitions and now you're bringing all of these disparate systems together.

So it absolutely is a focus for organizations today because they know you can't personalize. You can't orchestrate the journey. You can't do all of these things with the data all over the place. And so I think that's one of the positive things that I'm seeing right now is that more and more organizations are spending their IT and tech money on bringing in those types of platforms so that they can use the data to do the right thing.

Robert Zirk: Kory highlighted the importance of assessing your CX program data across every channel where customers interact - not just the primary one.

Kory Laszewski: A lot of our clients - again, these are very large organizations globally - there's a lot of legacy systems that are still out there in the world today and that our clients are having significant challenges with because their investment in those technologies have been so great that it's very difficult for them to just lift and shift those to newer technologies. I think we're helping a lot of our clients take those technologies and move them into a cloud based environment, but we also have full stack development resources that can go in and actually help them build and augment those technologies.

Robert Zirk: When you effectively use data to generate insights and inform your CX strategy, you can better identify what about your customer experience that is or isn't working.

Kory Laszewski: Taking the data that we're collecting about what is actually creating that positive experience and then aligning that with the actual customer surveys that are coming back that says, "Okay, this was a positive experience." And this is corroborated by the fact that this customer submitted a survey that said "This was a great experience for me."

And so being able to take all of that data and bring it back to our customers in a format that allows them to be able to very easily see what those issues are but also see what is a good call? What is a good interaction? And how does that translate into that customer survey back to them that corroborates "this was a very positive interaction for me"?

And, yes, we absolutely help significantly in terms of the strategy, but I think the vast majority of our clients are looking for us to be able to partner with them to provide the data back to them in a format that they can ingest it and say "Here are the trends that we're seeing. Here's what good looks like. Here's what great looks like, and here's what maybe not so good looks like." So that's going to now allow them to be able to create their strategy of "Here's the direction that we want to take as an organization to ensure that we are differentiating our brand by the experience that we deliver to our customer."

Robert Zirk: It would come as no surprise that our guests identified customer-facing and agent-facing AI as another major trend for 2024.

More than half of leaders surveyed by Execs In The Know say their organizations have invested in customer-facing and agent-facing AI solutions. And according to an Everest Group survey supported by TELUS International, 55% of leaders say their organizations are considering investing at least $1 million in generative AI solutions over the next 12 to 18 months.

Kory mentioned that the majority of clients he works with have been deploying AI over the past five to six years. And while there's a lot of discourse around the way AI, and particularly generative AI, will change how businesses support their customers, Kory notes that it takes time for organizations to fully embrace emerging technologies.

Kory Laszewski: Even going back 10 years ago with speech applications in the IVR world and such, there was a hype cycle that certainly said, "Oh, this is going to definitely change the industry. We want to make sure that we're prepared for it." But at the same time, we're not seeing as much as we thought it was when we first got introduced to generative AI.

I think a lot of our clients, they're taking a very cautious approach given some of the challenges and security concerns with GenAI in terms of the hallucinations and providing information that may not necessarily be completely accurate or making up answers that may not necessarily exist. We've been helping a lot of our clients with what those guardrails look like, so putting in the guardrails around those large language models to ensure that not only are we providing answers, but we're providing answers that are accurate and sound.

Robert Zirk: Kory highlighted that he's seeing more clients implement agent-facing AI and that the trend of technology-augmented agents will continue to grow into the future.

Kory Laszewski: They are going to have access to information significantly faster. They're going to be able to provide responses, proactive responses, using technology to help augment the decisions that they're making real-time throughout a call. I almost think about it as an Iron Man-type of a scenario where agents are literally going to have a Jarvis, a digital assistant, that's on their screen, that's listening to the conversation in real time, giving them examples or advice, pulling information proactively from clients' databases to be able to provide a response back in real time to a customer.

Robert Zirk: On the agent-assist side of AI technology, Kory spoke about how live language translation using voice will change how customer experience is delivered.

Kory Laszewski: This is probably one of the most exciting things that I've certainly seen as I've gone through this industry, and I've been doing this now for 25 years. It's the culmination of multiple technologies, right? So you've got speech to text technology, then you've got your language or text translation technology, and then you've got the text-to-speech technology. And when you put all those three together, it forms a really impressive capability to be able to do real time language translation via voice. Now today, we're seeing it already pretty dramatically across the text version. So emails and chats and SMS response, we're seeing a lot of text language translation capabilities.

The adoption of these large language models has allowed that particular technology to advance pretty dramatically, just even in the last 10 months or so. Historically, language translation capabilities were very good and they've gotten better slowly over the last five years, but there's still some inadequacies in picking up things like sarcasm and such, that now, using the large language models and being able to produce large amounts of data through these systems in a very short period of time, it allows the machines to now understand where there's a little bit more context beyond just what was the sentence or the paragraph that was surrounding each phrase, right?

So I think we're seeing that the technology has expanded exponentially. We're seeing a lot of clients, especially in Europe, where there is a requirement in a lot of cases to support anywhere from 7 to 15, 16 languages within a single hub center. And so being able to have language translation capabilities that is of really high quality has given a significant advantage for us to be able to support, and a lot of the folks that have operations in Europe, to be able to support multiple languages with a much smaller subset of actual agents.

Robert Zirk: Near real-time voice translation can help reach and support more customers while also providing a greater level of personalization, right down to different voices, dialects and regional accents.

Kory Laszewski: And what it's really helping is, at any one point in time, our goal would be to have native language speakers responding to customers. And in a lot of cases, because the volumes are fairly small in some of these languages, it might be possible to staff an agent within particular hours of operation, but what happens to all those calls that kind of flow towards the end? We call them the bookmarks, right? So at the beginning, prior to a shift, or after that peak volume. And so, it's allowing us to be able to still respond to those calls but actually staff humans during the peak hours that are those C1 native language speakers. And then during those off hours where it might not make sense to have a person staffed, we can now leverage this technology to be able to still support and provide really good experiences from a customer perspective.

Robert Zirk: While technology like generative AI will change processes, it won't remove the need for contact centers or the humanity in your customer experience.

Kory Laszewski: We don't see that happening anytime in the near future. And, although we do think that the contact center interactions are going to continue to be more and more complex, the key is going to be the ability for us to be able to leverage the technology to support an agent so that the agent can now focus on making that human connection with a customer during each interaction, as opposed to having to navigate through multiple systems and still try to keep a conversation going at the same time.

Robert Zirk: Many top brands choose to work with a digital CX partner like TELUS International to reach these new objectives, including prioritizing customer centricity, delivering data-driven CX, and leveraging agent facing and customer facing AI. But as our final trend highlights, these types of CX partnerships are trending in a new direction as well.

Kory mentioned that, a decade ago, clients were looking to deliver the same level of service and performance at the lowest cost. But today, that's changed, and partners need to bring more to the table.

Kory Laszewski: So the assumption is: "You run a call center operation as good as, or better than, either my current existing partner set or my internal operations." And so now the question becomes "What other services can you provide, what other value can you deliver, outside of running a really good call center operation," right? "What kind of data can you deliver back to me in terms of the interactions that your teams are handling? What kind of transformation, digital consultancy services can you provide for me that can help me guide my path in terms of strategy on the deployment of various technologies?"

Now it's innovation. It's digital consulting. We've been doing a lot of customer journey mapping to understand where that process flows within a client's environment, where their customers are interacting with their brands, and where live agents and technology are interacting to ensure that interaction happens seamlessly and smoothly.

Robert Zirk: The questions brands need to ask are less about "How do we respond to customer inquiries?" and more about "How can we create value by optimizing the customer experience?"

Kory Laszewski: We had a client, a large technology and communications client, and they had a challenge each month because their billing system would send out an invoice. The customer might cancel a particular account and, through the month, they pay their account, but at the end of the month, their billing system would still send out a bill to that customer. It would say zero amount owed, but it would still send the bill at the end of the month because it would automatically process that customer as a customer. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of these invoices were sent out every single month and hundreds of thousands of phone calls were generated by those customers that said, "Oh, hold on a second. I canceled this. Why am I still getting an invoice?"

And so our customer came to us, along with several other of their partners, and said, "Help us handle these hundreds of thousands of calls. Is there a way for you to divert them into an IVR? Is there a way to create some sort of a self service tool or to communicate with those customers if you are calling about a particular invoice?" So everyone thought through it and we came back to them and said, "The challenge is not 'How do we handle these calls?' The challenge is 'How do we provide a solution for your billing platform so that it doesn't send out the invoice in the first place?'", and so we were able to actually work them through. We happen to have quite a few application development resources familiar with their billing platform and we said, "Let us write an automation capability within your billing platform to identify invoices from customers who had canceled, who have a zero bill, and pull those out of the queue so they don't get sent out in the first place."

And I think one of the things that illustrated from a client perspective was, "You're not just looking at how to help me downstream." And so a lot of these things that we see, even as the technology progresses moving forward, are not going to be visible things that the customers even see, right? It's going to be all these things on the backend that ensures that the customer never has to reach out and have an interaction in the first place. And I think those are some of the things that we're going to see more and more. Every single client that we talk to today is actively engaged in various strategic initiatives to improve those technologies, reducing the need for customers to have a poor experience.

Robert Zirk: And every positive interaction along the customer journey adds up. Even if the customer doesn't make an additional purchase from your brand, they might keep your brand at top of mind when making a recommendation to a friend, family member or colleague.

Kory Laszewski: We call it the value sell, right? So there might not be an upsell or a cross-sell in terms of a pitch or a potential opportunity to increase a dollar amount, but the value that you're creating during that interaction and the value that you're creating for the brand in that interaction matters.

And I think that's what's ultimately going to start to differentiate. We're already seeing it across a number of our clients' environments. They are differentiating themselves through the value that they create and by how easy it is to do business with them in their respective industries. Those are the brands that we love to partner with and those are the ones that we're already starting to see move leaps and bounds through their industries.

Robert Zirk: As we wrapped up our discussion on trends, I asked Annette how soon she thought this podcast episode would be out of date and she brought up an important distinction to remember.

Annette Franz: For the last 20 years, we've been talking about technology and how it's impacting or influencing the customer experience. I think it's important to note that technology is not the experience either, right? It's a tool that supports and facilitates or helps to create the experience, but it's not the experience itself.

And it's also one of the reasons that I talk about some of the basics, right? While we talk about AI and technology, shiny object kind of thing over here, I still like to talk about, "Hey, remember the culture, remember the employees and the employee experience and remember those kinds of things," because that's not going away either. Those are the foundational elements, the basics, that always have to be in place if you're going to do anything mightier than what we're doing today and the shiny objects won't be successful unless you have those foundational elements in place either so you have to remember that there's people involved and so you need to view how you're going to use the technology through that lens.

Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to Kory Laszewski and Annette Franz for joining me and sharing their insights today. And thank you for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS International podcast.

If you'd like to dive deeper into some of the trends we spoke about today, you can download the 2024 CX Leaders Trends and Insights report from our website at TELUSInternational.com/insights. You can find a direct link along with links to some other great resources in the description of this episode as well.

And if you'd like to explore more big questions that are trending in the world of digital customer experience, be sure to follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice and make sure you're getting notifications every time there's a new episode.

I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.