Fresh insights highlight five CX trends for 2024
With all the hype around AI, it’s become hard to separate speculation from reality. But a new report from Acxiom, Where AI and Marketing Collide: 2024 CX Predictions, cuts through the noise with hard data on how brands are using AI to transform customer experiences right now.
The report’s findings are particularly potent because they highlight both the consumer and brand perspectives. Polling opinions from 200 organizations and 2,000 people across the U.S. and U.K. on key AI-powered CX deliverables, the study provides a unique market snapshot. It offers an AI-CX yardstick, describing current and future levels of integration.
It also highlights where company and customer opinions are aligned, and where gaps in understanding exist.
For example, investigating how AI enables customer acquisition and retention, the report uncovered just such a disconnect. While 65% of people want to be rewarded for their loyalty and 72% are willing to stay brand loyal if offered discounts and rewards, only 50% of organizations provide any sort of customer loyalty rewards. This isn’t just an interesting misalignment (perhaps reflecting that only 12% of organizations use AI analytics for loyalty and retention activities) it’s also actionable insight.
And it’s just the tip of the large AI-CX insight iceberg.
In addition to lighting the way to future AI-derived CX benefits, this report also shows how a number of trailblazing brands – including Nike, Burberry, L’Oreal, and Expedia – are making it happen right now across each of the five trends. Speaking of which …
5 AI-enabled CX trends for 2024
AI has the potential to transform almost every industry or function with which it intersects. In CX, however, there are five specific areas in which the technology is likely to have a transformative effect in the coming months and years. Let’s take a quick look at each of them:
- Shoppable Ads – examining how AI can make the path from discovery to purchase faster, more convenient, and more tailored.
- Proactive Customer Service – as AI increases in sophistication, automated customer service can handle more complex tasks and deliver personalized online experiences to individual customers based on their behaviors and purchase histories.
- Healthy Acquisition and Retention – looking at how brands can leverage AI to form accurate views of high-value customers, build lookalike models to find more of them, and analyze their preferences to ensure they’re superserved with relevant CX.
- Predictive Personalization – by analyzing massive amounts of customer information, brands can use AI to anticipate and address how customer preferences and desires will change over time.
- Sustainable CX – people want to feel good about the products they buy, and the companies they buy from. AI can be leveraged to optimize efficiency and promote sustainability across communications, marketing, and far beyond.
Properly harnessed, each of these represents a realistic opportunity to grab competitive advantage.
Identifying key drivers of AI-CX success
AI integration into day-to-day business processes is no longer the preserve of large tech firms. The report makes clear that AI has become democratized. It’s gone mainstream, offering tangible benefits to any brand – as long as, that is, they’re willing to put in the necessary preparation.
This balance between AI accessibility and the rigor required to harness its full potential is one of the key takeaways from the report. It sets out practical steps brands can take to make AI-powered CX a reality for their business – the most important of which, it turns out, is not about AI at all.
It’s about data.
As futuristic and far-reaching as AI can seem, it shares a common heritage with the earliest, most basic databases or CRM systems – you put garbage in, you get garbage out. But feed and train your AI on high-quality, de-siloed customer data – cleansed and aligned with an equally high-quality identity solution – and its ability to deliver hyper-personalized experiences can be transformative.
The beginning of an exciting journey
While many – if not most – brands are still in the formative stage of AI engagement, ‘Where AI and Marketing Collide: 2024 CX Predictions’ sets out a vision of what’s possible and a tangible roadmap of how to get there. Along with fresh insights and real-world use cases for each of the five trends, the report also provides exciting insights into what will come next for AI-driven CX.
Before too long, the hyper-personalization of customer engagements that only AI can deliver will become table stakes – as commonplace as a company website. But this is something to be embraced, not feared. This report can help show you the way. Download it here, for free, now.
