9 Trends in Customer Experience in 2024

The impact of customer experience on your business outcomes cannot be overestimated. PwC's report shows that 73% of customers consider an excellent experience the main factor in making a purchase decision, 65% believe that a positive experience with a brand works better than any advertising, and 43% are willing to pay more to brands that provide such experience.

However, digital customer experience is rapidly evolving, and your task is to keep up and adapt your business to all changes promptly. In this article, we want to give you a head start and talk about the predicted trends in customer experience for 2024 so that you can prepare for them in advance.

9 CX Trends in 2024

Improving the customer experience is a never-ending strategy that requires constant updates, changes, and revisions. And foresight plays an important role here. Understanding the CX trends for next year will help you adopt them into your strategy before your competitors and thus gain an advantage in the fight for consumers.

1. First-Party Data Collection

In 2024, the cookie-free future will become much closer. By the year's second half, Google plans to ban third-party cookies for Chrome users completely. While purchased audience data remains the primary source of information for 81% of businesses in 2023, they will no longer be able to rely on it next year. It is good news for customers looking forward to a cookie-free future to control their data and its usage. That is why collecting first-party data is a central customer experience trend and key to brand loyalty and trust.

First-party data is data you collect only from your customers, prospects, and visitors and with their consent following the General Data Protection Regulation. The source of such data may be your website or social media profile. Adding tracking pixels there will allow you to monitor the actions and behaviors of customers and then transfer this data to your CRM or CDP. Besides, your support team can always capture valuable insights about your customers when interacting directly with them. 

Finally, you can ask customers to share their preferences, opinions, and expectations when subscribing to your newsletter or through surveys. Claspo allows you to add custom input fields to your opt-in pop-up to get more information about your audience. Additionally, you can easily create a survey pop-up by dragging checkboxes, a drop-down list, or radio buttons into your layout. But most importantly, having an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate, Claspo guarantees that your audience’s data is reliably protected and your pop-ups are GDPR compliant.

First-party data is higher quality, accurate, and relevant since you collect it yourself and do not just trust external sources. Thus, collecting them in 2024 will allow you to improve the customer experience and take your online strategy to a new level.

2. Omnichannel Approach

Customers interact with a brand via 9 touchpoints on average, and more than half of these interactions occur online. Therefore, multiple digital communication channels have become the norm for many businesses. An omnichannel approach as one of the digital customer experience trends means not just being present on different channels but providing a consistent customer experience at every touchpoint.

The simplest example: if a customer interacts with ads for specific products on social media, consider this when they go to your website - you can provide relevant recommendations or display a pop-up that quickly redirects them to the product page they are interested in. With Claspo, you can show personalized pop-ups to those visitors who came to your site from a specific channel or campaign. This way, you keep your online strategy coherent and effective.

Medium reports that an omnichannel strategy improves customer retention by 91% and increases lifetime values by 3.4%. Most importantly, tracking and processing customer behavior information on different communication channels provides you with the valuable first-party data mentioned above. That is, each communication channel is a personal source of information that can replace third-party ones in 2024.

3. Hyper-Personalization

A consistent customer experience across all of your communication channels means, first and foremost, personalization - that is, taking into account previous interactions with your brand to develop relevant future messages (recommendations, offers, etc.). Such triggered cross-channel communication increases the efficiency of marketing expenses by 10-30% and, along with them, income by 5-15%. It sounds great, but customers have long been accustomed to personalization and demand new solutions from companies to meet their unique interests and needs. And this is where hyper-personalization comes in as the customer experience trend of 2024. 

Hyper-personalization involves studying the behavior and preferences of each customer INDIVIDUALLY based on real-time data to give them what they want right now. On the one hand, you no longer need to segment your audience as the message "for the group" gives way to a message "for each representative." On the other hand, a deep dive into each customer's data can drive you crazy. Therefore, hyper-personalization is only possible with the automation of data collection and analysis processes.

4. Use of AI for CX

The use of artificial intelligence in itself is not an innovation. However, according to Medium’s forecast, AI will become an indispensable assistant to business owners in improving the customer experience in 2024. This is due to the urgent need for hyper-personalization and the associated work with vast data. Thus, these two CX trends go hand in hand.

AI can become a game changer for your personalization strategy and overall marketing efforts:

• AI processes data in real time and thus allows you to respond to the changing preferences of each customer quickly.
• AI identifies patterns and trends in data and allows you to predict your customers' needs before they even realize them.
• AI can save you from many routine tasks, such as A/B testing, and make room for creativity and strategic planning.

Given these and other opportunities, it is not surprising that retailers have high hopes for AI. In particular, a recent survey of retail directors found that 48% expect AI to revolutionize the industry over the next 3-5 years. At the same time, 35% are already using it on a large scale, and 59% are even ready to declare an improvement in the customer experience with the introduction of AI. Thus, using AI in 2024 is a must if you want to keep up with the rapidly growing needs of customers and beat your competitors.

5. Voice Assistants

AI can work not only with customer data but also with customers directly. Voice assistants are a success story. Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa - the number of smart voice assistants is growing yearly and can reach 8.4 billion by 2024 (roughly speaking, every inhabitant of the Earth can have a personal assistant).

Their main goal in e-commerce is to simplify and speed up the search for goods upon customer request. It is expected that by 2025, the value of purchases made with the help of voice assistants will reach 164 billion dollars. Therefore, introducing a voice assistant is a customer experience trend for the coming years.

A 2023 study revealed precisely how this tool improves the customer experience. Some respondents say that voice assistants have increased the efficiency of their shopping. Others note that their shopping time has been significantly reduced because virtual assistants understand their needs perfectly. Thus, simplifying the search for the right products will make a difference in your sales and shoppers' loyalty to your brand.

6. Conversational AI Chatbots

The chatbot market is projected to grow at an impressive 23.9% CAGR by 2030. However, traditional chatbots will give way to innovative conversational AI chatbots. 

Traditional chatbots have pre-defined conversational flows based only on FAQs and common queries. In contrast, AI chatbots identify customers' intentions and offer the most relevant solution in real-time without any pre-prepared scripts. Besides, AI chatbots have advanced omnichannel capabilities and can be integrated into different platforms, not just the chat interface. Finally, future chatbots imitate natural language and completely replace customer service representatives, surpassing them in speed and quality of answers. 

Thus, conversational AI chatbots are expected to increase productivity and the quality of customer service by 30% - 50%. In this regard, 95% of companies want to delegate customer service to chatbots at least partially in the next 3 years. According to The Guardian, this customer experience trend will primarily affect e-commerce in 2024 since the high growth rates of this industry require a quick response to customer requests. Meanwhile, the usual human-to-human contact is insufficient to meet the needs of today's shopper.

7. Augmented Reality (AR)

According to Shopify, the average return rate in online stores varies between 20% and 30%, compared to 8% in offline stores. At the same time, shoppers mostly return goods because they do not fit or do not correspond to the description. Indeed, one of the e-commerce problems is the lack of opportunity to try on a product. Therefore, customers are essentially buying a pig in a poke. Retailers, in turn, lose about $10 for every $100 of returned merchandise. 

AR performs the function of virtual trying on a product, allowing the shopper to evaluate the product before purchasing it directly in the app without leaving home. Result? 80% of shoppers feel more confident and secure using AR during the shopping process, and 66% are less likely to return goods. That is why the augmented reality market is gaining momentum and is predicted to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 39.8% from 2023 to 2030. Thus, this is one of those digital customer experience trends that is here to stay.

Meanwhile, AR could benefit more than just online clothing stores. For example, Sephora uses AR to help customers try on makeup with their products. Ikea lets shoppers virtually place furniture in homes to see if it fits the interior.

8. Mobile CX

Between 2023 and 2028, the mobile commerce market is expected to grow from 420.2 billion to 1,709.6 billion, with an annual growth rate of 32.4%. And already in 2023, sales through a mobile device accounted for 60% of all e-commerce sales. Despite the popularity of smartphone shopping, cart abandonment rates on mobile devices reach an alarming 85%. Based on these data, the conclusion is obvious: customers want to buy via smartphone, but something prevents them from placing an order. And that "something" is a poor mobile version of an e-commerce website.

Thus, one of the main CX trends in 2024 and subsequent years is website adaptation to mobile devices. It includes but is not limited to, mobile-friendly design, optimizing page loading speeds to custom-required 3 seconds or less, and adapting all page elements down to pop-ups for mobile screens.

9. Video Marketing

NogenTech conducted a global survey on the use of video marketing among 1,500 businesses from various industries. Its results showed that more than 90% are using video as an essential part of their digital marketing strategy in 2023. Compared to 2016, this figure has increased by as much as 30%, and already in 2023, 70% of even those marketers who had not previously used videos included them in their "must have" list. In this regard, it is predicted that the global digital video content market will have an annual growth of 12.9% and reach 355.2 billion in 2028. 

The classification of video marketing as a digital customer experience trend is associated primarily with the increase in consumer involvement in video content. A recent study has proven that: 

• 91% of customers want brands to offer them more video content as early as 2023 
• 96% enjoy watching videos to explore and understand better a product or service 
• 89% say that a video influenced them to make a purchase decision. 

These numbers are a great incentive to adopt this customer experience trend for your company in 2024 and start with video types that the NogenTech survey found to be the most popular to create among marketers:

Customer Experience Trend: Conclusion and Practical Application from Claspo

Adopting CX trends does not happen overnight but can become easier and faster with Claspo. Created by marketers for marketers, our pop-up builder includes features that can take the on-site customer experience to a new level without delays.

Collect First-Party Data with Pop-Ups 

As mentioned above, ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification allows Claspo to store and protect your customer data securely. But in fact, Claspo can simplify your task even at the stage of collecting this data. Our smart pop-up builder contains a "data processing and terms of use" component. By dragging it into your layout, you get a ready-made first-person consent text and a box for the customer to check. 

All you have to do is insert the current link to your Terms of Use and edit the text if necessary. This way, you can be sure that customers’ consent to processing their data is clear, free, specific, and unambiguous, as the GDPR requires. Moreover, Claspo integrations with the most popular ESPs and CRMs ensure instant data transfer to the selected repository to provide a consistent customer experience across all communication channels.

Personalize Pop-Up for Omnichannel Users 

Thanks to Claspo’s UTM targeting, you can display pop-ups depending on the customer’s previous interaction with your company. 

For example, you launched an email campaign for your prospects announcing a discount on women's shoes. In this case, you can specify the UTM campaign parameter when setting up your pop-up, and it will be displayed only to those users who navigated to the website from this email campaign. This pop-up can remind them of your discount and take them to the relevant product category page to shop. 

Another example is that you have a special offer for your Instagram followers. By adding a UTM source parameter to the pop-up settings, you show it only to visitors who come from Instagram. A pop-up can welcome them and direct them to your special offer page. 

In both cases, you ensure a consistent omnichannel strategy and deliver a personalized experience in line with 2024 CX trends. 

Improve Mobile CX with Pop-Ups 

Claspo pop-ups are responsive to the mobile version of your website. In our editor, you can always preview how your pop-up fits into the page layout on a mobile screen. Moreover, the live testing feature allows you to check the appearance of your pop-up directly on your website before publishing it. You can also send a test link to other stakeholders and evaluate the pop-up on the screens of different mobile devices. 

Finally, if you're betting on mobile commerce in 2024, you can set up your pop-up to display only on mobile devices. All Claspo widgets have a 100 performance score on Google PageSpeed Insights, which allows you to maintain high page loading speeds and provide a flawless customer experience. 

Show Video on Your Website 

YouTube is the most popular and, just as importantly, the most effective video marketing platform, according to a survey of marketers. With this in mind, Claspo allows you to meet this customer experience trend by displaying videos from your YouTube channel directly on your website. You only need to add the corresponding video link to your pop-up layout. 

When a video is added, the Claspo pop-up automatically takes its cover and play button from YouTube. But if their default looks do not suit you, you can replace them with custom ones directly in our editor. Plus, Claspo always goes the extra mile for an enhanced customer experience. That’s why our default settings include a muted autoplay of your video. This way, your pop-up video does not disturb the peace of website visitors and invites them to turn on the sound themselves. 

With Claspo, you can customize your pop-up to display in the proper context. The simplest example is placing a pop-up with a product demo video on a specific product's page. But you can go further. For example, you can show your explainer video when a customer has visited several pages on your website. They may be looking for how to use your product, and your video will come in handy. In another scenario, you can display your pop-up with video testimonials if a customer has spent a certain amount of time on your website or remains inactive. In this case, such a pop-up can engage them and help them make a purchasing decision.

Move Towards the AI Future with Claspo

Claspo keeps a pulse on digital customer experience trends. That's why 2024 will also be the year of innovation for us.

We plan to introduce a chatbot invitation feature. This way, your pop-ups can easily and quickly redirect website visitors to your conversational AI chatbot to resolve any issues or queries. Also, we want to employ AI directly into our pop-up builder. Its intended functions will be the creation of compelling texts and smart pop-up displaying management on your website.

Claspo takes care of an impeccable experience for you and your customers. Let's make a difference together!