BOSTON, Dec. 3, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Kitewheel, the provider of the world’s leading customer journey platform, unveiled today its predictions for the customer experience (CX) landscape in 2020, stating that brands in 2020 will abandon traditional CX measurement to unlock the value of new channels, and make a return to human-to-human interaction with the help of real-time decisioning capabilities.

Kitewheel President Mark Smith predicted three marquee trends across the customer experience landscape for 2020:

• Brands are going to put less effort into measuring Customer Experience as the leading way to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, opting instead to manage customer journeys. Customer experience is personalized, and the ways in which it’s measured — metrics like time on site, NPS, loyalty — are subjective and inferential. Those measurements will take a back seat to metrics that track personalization, context, and convenience across key touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Customer Journey Measurement, as opposed to CX measurement, will increasingly enable brands to effectively gauge customer convenience. The ability to continuously identify sub-optimal interactions and drop-off points across customer journeys will determine the CX winners of 2020 and beyond.
• The proliferation of channels will enable powerful new means of personalization. Technology keeps adding new channels and capabilities for brands to capture customer data, improve customer experience, and measure customer journeys. Eighty percent of consumers say technology should add value to brand interactions, and voice and AI assistants, in particular, continue to growing areas of engagement — more than half of consumers say they are looking forward to AI making brand interactions better, according to a new Acquia study. New channels open new doors for bespoke experiences at every turn and through every medium, but only if brands have the ability to measure and optimize through every channel.
• The industry will see a return to human-to-human interactions and increased adoption of real-time monitoring and decisioning where AI fails. Gartner predicts that by 2021, artificial intelligence will completely handle 15% of all customer service interactions, a 400% increase over 2017. But don’t discount humans just yet. Artificial intelligence, despite its promise, can make mistakes and is still years away from replacing humans in sensitive situations; it can still only do what we tell it to do. In certain situations, AI missteps could spell disaster. In regulated industries, for example, an AI matching the wrong product to the wrong customer could even mean a hefty fine. The job of human agents will change and evolve, but there will always be a need for human-to-human interaction, particularly in sensitive customer service and support interactions. Real-time monitoring and decisioning can not only incorporate business rules and logic to safeguard against CX hiccups, they can also support and enhance in-the-moment human interactions by providing up-to-the-second information about customer histories, interactions, and preferences.

“Delivering great customer experiences is the top priority for brands in both the B2B and B2C space, rising up from the boiler room to the board room,” said Smith. “As the technology supporting customer experience becomes increasingly intelligent, brands will have a new challenge: determining how to orchestrate a network of increasingly complex customer touchpoints with personalized, cohesive experiences.”

About Kitewheel

Kitewheel empowers the world’s largest businesses to understand and improve the consumer experience with the leading customer journey management platform. Kitewheel’s innovative Customer Journey Hub orchestrates intelligent customer journeys by unifying decisions across disparate systems, touchpoints, and technologies and provides seamless customer experiences that drive real-time revenue as well as long-term loyalty through journey analytics and orchestration. Kitewheel serves its global partner and client base from offices in Boston, New York City and London. For more information, please visit http://www.kitewheel.com and follow Kitewheel on Twitter and LinkedIn.

SOURCE Kitewheel