The impact of online customer service and store features on consumer experience and willingness to revisit their preferred online store Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

The Difference Between Patient Experience and Customer Experience, and Why It Matters

Concentrix found that nearly 70% of U.S. customers are more likely to recommend a brand after a closed-loop follow-up, even if it’s a simple apology. We can respond to an angry comment or poor rating by researching the customer’s interactions with us for greater insights. And with that information, we gain context without needing to ask the customer more questions.

This collaborative approach between AI and human agents ensures that customer engagement is efficient and empathetic. The combination of AI-driven automation and human empathy creates a powerful model for customer service that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations. As AI continues to evolve, businesses that embrace this technology will be well-positioned to deliver the kind of seamless, personalized service that modern customers demand. Additionally, AI is streamlining customer service by automating routine tasks.

The Best Customer Experience Conferences in 2025

Organizations that clearly communicate how their AI and automation solutions work, why customers should trust its output, and how data is handled will be able to earn and maintain trust in this AI-enhanced future. Consumer expectations are high, and there’s no patience for poor experiences – especially in essential services like banking and utilities. A single negative interaction can prompt customers to cut spending, seek alternatives, which risks stunting growth. “In recent months, we’ve seen the release of several AI agents from the big players – but these generalized “all-purpose” agents don’t serve the unique business, use case, or industry needs of enterprises and brands.

This can significantly reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience. Customers expect both self-help options and real-time, person-to-person support. These expectations for seamless, personalized experiences extend across digital communication channels, including live chat, text and social media. In retail, as in other industries, generative AI promises to change the customer experience. Retailers are deploying AI-enhanced tools such as summaries of product reviews, chatbots, and shopping assistants in an effort to facilitate purchase decisions, reduce friction, and increase conversion.

Consumers prefer self-service experiences

This threatens to swamp the customer with content, much of it generic, creating challenges for brands seeking to stand out from the crowd. Place a strong emphasis on making your customers happy from their first contact with your business throughout their journey. Reps must take sufficient time to truly understand the customer’s issue and create the best solution possible. After resolving the problem, reps should ask if there’s anything else they can do to assist the customer, thank them and wish them a nice day before disconnecting. However, when a business messes up, its frustrated customers will likely expect some contrition. I’m Exhibit A. I’ve been unable to respond to all the people who’ve written to me since my column appeared.

The tools are powered by advanced machine learning algorithms that enable them to handle a wide range of customer queries and offer personalized solutions, thus improving the overall customer experience. As more and more businesses adopt conversational AI chatbots, they are likely to become a key driver of customer engagement and loyalty in the future. Looking at the consumer expectations part of the report, Five9 found that today’s digital consumers have strong feelings about what they want and expect, and that customer loyalty is highly correlated to customer experiences.

These results from existing customers’ word-of-mouth and online advocacy for the brand can lead to the acquisition of new customers. Customer experience creates an emotional bond that helps companies build a competitive advantage by capturing more customers, deepening customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. Customers don’t care how your business is organized internally and how many departments need to approve a process change; they just want a simple way to receive your product or service. This makes understanding customer needs and developing each interaction from initial discovery to post-purchase engagement critical.

It turns out they’ve moved beyond the quick case closure as a differentiator. Even though top brands are two times more likely than middling brands — and four times more likely than failing brands — to resolve a case within a day, speed alone isn’t enough. To get connected, BSH reached out to SAP to create its OneConsumer (OCO) platform, a unified engagement platform that revolutionizes how the company handles consumer data. Alongside that ability to attach a chosen LLM, some providers – like Five9 – allow customers to customize the prompt that powers the GenAI use case. In that frenzy, contact center vendors pumped out many GenAI-fuelled features to seize the initial media attention and convince customers that it’s finally time to embrace AI. While the solution is in beta, the contact center QA provider believes the results are “promising” when tested against real-life NPS data.

Telecommunications Providers Automate Network Troubleshooting

Not surprisingly, customers rate mobile apps as the most difficult channel to use. In addition, the dedicated BSH teams across touchpoints, from contact centers to showrooms and stores, can confidently engage with consumers, equipped with accurate information. Flow Modelling by Cresta offers such a solution, determining this path based on its impact on various customer experience and business outcomes. Indeed, the GenAI-powered solution first ingests various sources of such feedback – including surveys, conversation transcripts, and online reviews. From there, Sprinklr customers may harness the provider’s omnichannel capabilities to distribute these surveys, converge the data, and – again, using GenAI – analyze the feedback.

He views AI as the “ultimate alchemist” that can help bring together people, technology, and processes. For “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider takes a look at mini case studies about AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We’ve asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they’re trying to solve with AI, who’s making these decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future. Look for gaps in your CX, examine the hardships your customers are facing and determine how you can improve things. Create processes to separate calls from upset customers and move them to the front of the line. Or, funnel them to dedicated reps trained in calming customers and resolving high-priority problems.

With support from marketing, service agents can turn these moments into personalized experiences that resonate. Marketing can provide tools like discount codes, exclusive content or small gifts to help create these memorable touches. This collaboration ensures a consistent brand experience while amplifying the impact of your efforts. These goals enhance outcomes for both teams, giving everyone something to rally around. When customer service teams are able to meet and exceed their service delivery standards, marketers reap the benefits of heightened customer satisfaction. Determine a long-term plan along with the teams and tactics to guide a cross-functional customer experience approach.

Clean data enables AI systems to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, allowing companies to recommend products and services tailored to individual needs. When you’re ready to roll out your new approach, use our social media customer service training deck. It’s designed to help your support agents master all the nuances of delivering exceptional care on social media, so they can create better customer experiences. The pace of technological innovation has significantly raised customer expectations. However, traditional customer service models, built on reactive frameworks, often leave customers frustrated. Long hold times, the need to repeat personal information, and inefficient resolutions are just some of the issues that lead to dissatisfaction.

Read on for actionable tips to enhance customer experiences initiatives and address the common pitfalls you’re likely to face. Imagine you’re working on optimizing a digital application form for a loan or credit card. Globally, CX Trendsetters were found to be experiencing 33% higher customer acquisition rates, 22% higher customer retention rates and 49% higher cross-sell revenue. This, said Zendesk, proved a thoughtful approach to AI can be transformative – not just for creating memorable and meaningful customer experiences, but also to the bottom line. This was mirrored in the UK, where 90% of Trendsetters reported positive return on investment from their AI tools in CX.

Growth is a crucial component of any business, and sustainable growth is impossible without customer service. And without the resources to efficiently handle the rising demand for support, businesses will leave those customers with a poor experience—and a strong desire to take their business elsewhere. Finally, 272 complete responses were collected; incomplete responses were discarded. Though a convenience sample, the socio-demographics benchmarks (gender and age) were kept according to the Romanian Statistical Yearbook (2020), with slight deviations.

Customers also want the ability to seamlessly transition between customer support channels without re-explaining the issue. To provide a better customer experience, consider offering the most robust omnichannel customer experience possible. According to the Achieving Customer Amazement (ACA) study, 81 percent of customers will abandon your company because of a bad customer service experience, such as rudeness or apathy. Unhappy customers are also very likely to share their negative experiences with others.

Tech-Ing It to the Next Level: Integrated Restaurant Technology Transforms Dining Experiences

Social media customer service tools deliver better customer support, so you can meet customers evolving needs and build stronger relationships. Customer service is an extension of your brand, so it’s up to customer care teams to respond quickly and efficiently. A customer service social media tool makes the difference between one-time buyers and lifelong brand fans. From inboxes to AI capabilities, there’s a solution out there that’ll help you dazzle your customers, keep them engaged and encourage repeat business.

Such knowledge sources likely include web links, the knowledge base, CRM, and various other customer databases – which may also allow for personalization. Precedence Research shows that 21.50% of applications are segmented into customer relationship management (CRM). The market for AI products and services could reach between $780 billion and $990 billion by 2027. When customers feel they’ve received a good value, they are more willing to share data and engage with your company. However, persistent UX problems may necessitate refunds, a product redesign and other measures. Yet, despite companies focusing heavily on leveraging AI to enhance CX, customers are actually rejecting the ubiquitous tech.

That being said, I always find the whole process incredibly rewarding and a great learning experience. Today’s consumer isn’t very patient, for example, as just over half, 54%, would choose dealing with slow-moving traffic than having a poor customer experience. According to a Q Sprout Pulse Survey, 63% of customer care professionals said a high volume of customer care requests is their most prominent obstacle. “Examples of investing in patient experience include having more clinical trials and hiring more clinical staff so clinicians can have more time with patients,” Goad says. “Health systems need to understand how they are investing in these separate experiences to get better efficiencies and outcomes.” Conversely, Way says, a CMO must understand that the healthcare experience is about the whole person, both the patient and the customer.

Top Customer Experience Conferences in 2025 (North America) – CMSWire

Top Customer Experience Conferences in 2025 (North America).

Posted: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:26:15 GMT [source]

Many CCaaS providers now offer the capability to automate quality scoring, giving insight into all contact center conversations. CCaaS Magic Quadrant leader Genesys is one vendor to offer such a solution – automating these post-call processes for agents to review, tweak, and publish in the CRM after each conversation. Again, the contact center must plug the solution into various knowledge sources for this to happen – as is the case across many other use cases – and an agent stays in the loop. Embracing the advent of large language models (LLMs), Zendesk built a customer service version of this – on steroids.

This includes the first instance of brand awareness, becoming a customer, interacting with customer support and even the end of a customer relationship. Over time, numerous subjective experiences add up to a general feeling about your company. There are also organizational challenges related to inventory management and employee training, which also impact customer service. Organizations that attempt omnichannel services but keep their inventory siloed in-store and online will run into supply issues. Instead, they should take an enterprise-wide approach to inventory and order management.

This centralized strategy with the help of AI and automation, lead to better customer service around the clock. Tag rates increased by 37% and the average time-to-action during targeted care periods decreased by up to 55%. Additionally, an audit of the Tagging data enabled our social team to pull more comprehensive insights to demonstrate social ROI to our leadership team.

This involves optimizing supply chains to minimize transportation distances and wasted journeys. Additionally, investments in automation for tasks like inventory management and order fulfilment can streamline processes and reduce energy consumption. By embracing these strategies, smart retailers can lessen their environmental impact while potentially lowering operational costs. By enhancing the biodegradability of the product, carbon emissions can be reduced. Optimization of production quantities for biodegradable items necessitates the equilibrium between the potential advantages of sustainability and the inherent uncertainty of market demand (Sarkar and Dey 2024). Industrial internet of things (IIoT) is a technology that connects and manages technical facilities of the retail industry such as computers, machines, scanners, and sensors (Kumar et al. 2023).

Organizations should provide opportunities for customer engagement on touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey wherever they prefer to receive information and make purchases. With mobile apps and experiential shopping, retailers must connect with consumers through omnichannel marketing and sales. When considering strategy, it’s important to understand customer expectations and behavior. Customers not only want efficiency and convenience; they also want control of the entire engagement. Many customers begin their shopping experience digitally and through multiple channels and devices.

This approach is riddled with inefficiencies that frustrate both customers and businesses. CX4ROCKS and bespokeCX, in partnership with OnResearch, recently conducted a survey to explore customer service in financial services. The findings from this survey identified where FSIs can focus their resources to maximize revenue growth, profitability and customer loyalty. The survey targeted 659 U.S. and Canada customers across the finance industry with a confidence interval at +/- 3.8 with 95% accuracy.

• Once your chatbot is set up, all customer conversations will stream directly into the AI-powered Smart Inbox, which enables you to create filters.
• Customer experience creates an emotional bond that helps companies build a competitive advantage by capturing more customers, deepening customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value.
• Agents gain valuable customer insight to provide exceptional service and increase customer satisfaction.
• He has authored or co-authored a number of books, including Unified Communications for Dummies.
• Social value connects consumers to the social world through technology (Aljukhadar et al. 2020).
• If they seem unhappy or neutral, consider how to proactively change that – perhaps with a personalized discount – and prevent the cancellation journey in the first instance.

Omnichannel retail strategy involves selling products through multiple channels and the interactions between those channels (Sarkar and Dey, 2023). Thus, while the manufacturing firm controls the channels, customers can benefit from the full potential of each channel. Technological progress is changing the dynamics in retail, wherein the involvement of stakeholders in the process of value co-creation is thriving. Immersive technology has been the foundation of value co-creation through customer engagement, shaping consumer interactions and experiences (Dieck et al. 2018). Visual merchandising significantly impacts consumer behaviour, engenders customer satisfaction and purchase intention, and favours purchasing behaviour and customers’ willingness to revisit the online store (Zibafar et al. 2021). Visual merchandising is pursued through product images, videos, product descriptions, and website design.

But others require simpler technology—for example, a web ‘splash page’ that simply asks a customer what they want to do. And still others require no technology at all—like Coca-Cola’s bottles that are labeled with people’s given names, enabling a customer to give a friend a personalized drink. A customer persona also called a buyer persona, is a fictional or semi-fictional character who represents a significant segment of a company’s customers or potential customers. For example, a company that manufactures skiing and snowboarding equipment might create personas representing a novice skier, an intermediate snowboarder or an expert skier or the parent of a child getting into skiing or snowboarding.