According to the Arktic Fox 2024 Digital, Marketing & Ecommerce in Focus study, 87% of marketing and digital leaders in Australia rate CX as an important strategic area of focus for the next 12-24 months when looking to differentiate, drive engagement, and deliver on strategic outcomes. But there are challenges in the way. Brands are falling short on their CX goals due to gaps in enterprise strategy, failing to adopt a customer-first mindset, siloed data, and fragmented customer technology.

This article will explore insights from the first webinar, Levelling up your CX strategy for tomorrow's customer, in our three-part series with Arktic Fox, Mastering CX: Balancing strategy, data and tech to gain the competitive edge, to uncover trends set to shape the world of CX and how leading Australian brands are forging a path forward. 

The challenges brands face

 

While the gap is narrowing between the best performing brands and the laggards when it comes to CX, there is still much work to be done to make CX a driver of customer loyalty and trust. Currently, CX has placed too much focus and emphasis on pain points and driving ease and convenience – factors that are important, but will not support differentiation, which is a necessity to drive choice, preference, and loyalty.

Another big challenge brands are facing is the channels themselves. Digital channels often lack the ability to build an emotional connection the way physical or face-to-face experiences and interactions can. But technological advancements combined with brands emphasising the delivery of one seamless connected experience will help usher in a new era of CX.

Trends set to shape the world of CX in the coming years

 

Many brands are dealing with factors like technological advances (AI), rapidly evolving privacy and compliance regulations, and shifting customer expectations which are all shaping and evolving CX delivery. Some other key trends that are impacting Australian brands include:

1. Privacy protected experiences. GDPR has fundamentally reshaped global privacy regulations and the tech and data landscape. Privacy isn’t just challenging based on what is collected by third-party platforms, brands also need to think about how they build and deliver their own privacy-protected experiences, giving customers greater flexibility and control, including the ability to decide what data is utilised and how.

2. A shift to hyper-personalisation. 59% of Australian brands believe they are lagging the market in personalisation capabilities, which is delivering sub-optimal personalisation for customers. Generative AI and Augmented AI promise to accelerate hyper-personalisation, helping brands to offer highly curated products and content in real-time and at scale.

3. The blending of digital and physical experiences. As extended reality devices become more mainstream and voice becomes more central to how customers engage with technology, we will see an even greater convergence between digital and physical experiences.

4. Emotion combined with behaviour will improve CX delivery. Customer experiences have largely been driven by leveraging behavioural data. Brands understand customers through signals, interaction, and purchase data, but they don’t know why customers are acting or how they’re feeling. Biometric technology and voice will help brands better understand how a customer is feeling based on facial expressions, tone of voice, and other emotional signals in the moment.

How to leverage essential insights to build a customer-first experience strategy

 

CX technologies will start to bridge the gap between behaviour and emotion. Innovation in MarTech and customer tech can enable more emotional CX experiences and privacy-protected experiences. Your tech stack needs to be fit for purpose to deliver on your CX goals. If your team is smaller and has less technical capability, consider no-code or low-code solutions like Acoustic Connect to put greater power in the hands of your marketing team.

It’s also important to place an emphasis on how your first-party data strategy underpins your CX. Ensure first-party data capture promotes and fosters experiences that are privacy-centric for customers and aligned with their expectations. Emphasis should be placed on transparency, flexibility, and control of a customer’s data, allowing them to understand what data your brand holds and providing them with the opportunity to choose how you use their data. Powering your customer experiences based on a better understanding of emotional cues will help your brand build more empathetic experiences.

Case study: The Australian Ballet and the importance of going beyond marketing channels to deliver end-to-end experiences

 

The Australian Ballet has a loyal and engaged community of customers. The key to their success has been actively listening to their customers. They have strong customer listening and feedback programs in place from customer service right through to social media, and those insights are regularly shared across the organisation. They have created transparency in their workflow and priorities to ensure the entire team is driving effective resource utilisation, freeing up time to spend on solving customer problems.

The Australian Ballet is a loved and trusted brand. Keeping this trust is critical to their success and it informs how they develop experiences while navigating the changing market. For example, The Australian Ballet now offers streaming of performances. When they first rolled this out, the feedback from customers wasn’t great. When the team looked into it, they found that the issues were mainly technical difficulties that were leading to a poor CX. The team was able to address these issues quickly and offer more self-serve options for customers to improve the viewing experience and create stronger customer engagement.

For more insights about how CX is shaping the Australian market, explore the other sessions in our Mastering CX webinar series or watch the full instant replay of session one, Levelling up your CX strategy for tomorrow's customer. Also, be sure to check out our book, Charting a new course in CX delivery.