A few months ago, Futurum Research conducted a study on how relevant Technology will be to Customer Experience in 2030. The firm surveyed more than 4,000 panelists, covering more than 30 countries in a wide range of sectors such as Consumer or Industry.
Modern technology has changed the way brands and consumers engage. New products, services, consumers and competitors have arrived and continue to evolve. Consumer behavior continues to change.
Agility and Automation as a Customer Experience Engine
By 2030, the brands surveyed in the study see a massive shift toward automating customer engagements. Research anticipates that AI will take center stage and will mostly handle: customer engagements, decisions made during real-time engagement, and decisions about marketing and promotional campaigns.
According to research, by 2030, 67% of Customer Engagement between a brand and a consumer using digital devices will be completed with smart machines rather than human agents. 69% of decisions made during a customer engagement will also be made by machines.
Consumers and Technology
According to the study, 78% of brands believe that consumers are uncomfortable with technology in stores today. However, it found out that only 35% of consumers expressed this concern.
This gap between the beliefs of the brands and their consumers could be a limiting factor in the growth of these brands if they are not careful. Consumers hope to adopt new technologies by 2030:
- 80% say they expect to accept the delivery of a product by drone or autonomous vehicle.
- 81% say they expect to interact with chatbots.
- 78% expect to use an augmented, virtual, or mixed reality application to see what a product will look like, for example, what a garment would look like to a buyer or how a piece of furniture would look like in a house.
- 56% expect to be "visiting" remote locations or experiencing vacation and entertainment events through mixed reality devices by 2025.
- 8 out of 10 expect to use a smart assistant (such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc.) to make a purchase online or using home automation.
- 78% say they expect you to control other devices with their portable devices.
For brands, this level of consumer acceptance and expectation opens up new opportunities to broaden engagement with users.
Digital Loyalty
Consumers comment in the survey that mobile applications, internet access, and ordering through smart home systems are the top three technologies that drive loyalty. They are technologies that they use in their day to day and that generates a habit that can end up with a person having long-term loyalty to a brand.
Brands agree and believe that AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics will also play a crucial role in this equation. They believe that in 2030 it will be an opportune time to use technology in order to provide a quality service, necessary to offer relationships with greater loyalty and fidelity.
Dynamic Trust
Perhaps the biggest challenge for brands today is the ability to bridge the trust gap that exists between brands and consumers. Consumers are suspicious of how brands treat their personal data and feel powerless about it. Cases like Cambridge Analytics and Facebook have made people more aware of the importance of their privacy.
Only 54% of consumers trust brands to keep their data private. In fact, 73% of consumers believe that the use of their personal data is uncontrolled. This is challenging for brands as they work to balance the customer experience they can deliver as a result of the importance of collecting their data for a better and more personalized experience.
Conclusions
There is no doubt that technology will be more present in our day to day. If we look back, we have seen historically how little by little we have been involved with it and, why not say it, more dependent on it. With the current global pandemic landscape, consumer behavior has changed. People who have never related to technology now do so seamlessly. The question is whether truly 10 years from now, will we want to interact only with machines? Time will tell, but the human factor has always been key in the Customer Experience. Artificial intelligence would have to be developed a lot for a person's confidence to land on a machine and not on another human being. What do you think? Do you agree with the data reflected by the study? Do you think we will be highly dependent on AI decisions? Leave us a comment. We want to know your opinion :)
Remember that if you need to contact us you can do so through: franquicias@izo.es. We are sure that we can help you give a great boost to the future of your company.
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