Further acceleration in the CX story

Changes are taking place in the customer experience domain with breakneck speed. The customer is becoming more and more demanding as technology is trying to catch up.

Once you could read a very common sign in Indian shops: Customer is king. At the time it mattered more how the customer was treated. There was no process as such involved. But today all that has changed. There used to be another sign: No credit please! That has also vanished in the age of UPI.

Pre-2019, the concept of CX in the digital era was very much a thing, but not that universal. However, the pandemic changed all that for good. Digital Transformation began its journey to touch each and everything. While joining any service all the forms could be filled on the mobile. The whole journey could be then done in a no touch contactless manner. Everything went digital and whatever you wanted could be done online. If you wanted you could totally do away with the human touch and get the machine to start, use and complain about any type of service.

The ecommerce and app boom in India led to a new breed of customer which required a new brand of CX. Accordingly, Dataquest did a cover story in its February 2022 edition titled “The 8 new rules of CX”.

Rule 1: You can’t force the customer anymore.

Rule 2: Be flexible and agile with your customer.

Rule 3: Follow the intuitive behaviour of your customer.

Rule 4: Reduce all friction at all customer touchpoints.

Rule 5: CX has to be convenient, easy and fast.

Rule 6: Adopt a customer lifecycle approach.

Rule 7: You need to view CX as a profit centre.

Rule 8: Emerging tech will create exceptional digital CX.

While those rules are still very much relevant, there is a new game changer in town: Generative AI, unleashed by ChatGPT.

If companies accelerated their CX development from 2020 onward, they must do so again in the ChatGPT Era. While the humans remain firmly in the background, the AI will have to be more active and humanlike in the foreground. It is not just about mere chatbots anymore. AI will have to react faster, collect data in a more efficient manner, crunch it via analytics better and be predictive. The prediction part is not just about customer preferences and problems, but making sure the supply chain does not fall short at both the global and local level.

We will need a multitude of apps across multiple devices with the mobile gaining more and more importance. Every touch point will be equally important. At the back end we will need more and more data centers. Going forward AR-VR will play an important role. Only when that reaches a critical point, can we talk of CX and the Metaverse.

Now even the common citizen is a customer to the government and the concept of CX comes in there too. It’s not just ecommerce and retail along with things like BFSI and healthcare. The field of data science will have to encompass all the verticals to understand CX better. The industry sure has its work cut out!

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in