With new technology, businesses need to balance delivering customers' value and maintaining trust to deliver the best customer experience. Yet, so many fall short.

• 61% of customers say most companies treat them as a number‍
• 57% of customers thought customer service had actually gotten worse in the last year
• 65% of customers have lost trust in organizations due to their use of AI.

The gap between delivering value through better technology and maintaining customer trust is precarious at best, but it’s vital to get it right.

• 55% of consumers say trustworthiness and transparency are the most important traits they look for in a brand.

So, how can businesses using technology to create a better customer experience satisfy customers, gain their trust, and keep loyalty long-term?

Table of Contents

1. How does technology impact customer experience?
2. How would technology influence the relationship between customer and company?
3. How technology is used to enhance CX?
4. How to provide exceptional customer service when using electronic tech?

How Does Technology Impact Customer Experience

Just how does technology impact customer experience in business?

Technology connects brands and customers and creates avenues for engagement that never previously existed. It creates convenience, 24/7 buying cycles, and access to global alternatives in ways unimaginable decades ago.

Businesses can easily capture data in their tools and platforms to learn more about what their customers seek, help them meet those needs, and make more informed, data-driven decisions.

Let's look deeper at how the right tech creates deeper customer/brand relationships.

How would Technology Influence the Relationship Between Customer and Company?

The impact of technology on customer satisfaction is subjective and hard to measure. For starters, customers may not consciously seek out businesses with better technology.

In fact, most of the most powerful customer experience platforms or tools aren’t in customers’ faces, they’re working seamlessly in the background to help customers more quickly take desired actions (like finding information, buying products, or contacting a team member).

But, customers certainly notice when a company has outdated, frustrating, or insecure technologies powering their digital experience. If their website or customer service responses are slow, aggravating, and unrewarding, customers lose patience fast.

Businesses that continuously invest in their customers’ experience are better able to create moments of surprise and satisfaction for customers. They can guide a customer to discover a product, research alternatives, or resolve an issue without irritation.

Plus, tech-savvy businesses gain better information and data to inform strategies to attract, engage, and retain their customers.

They proactively look under the hood to reveal issues and untapped opportunities to up the ante of their customer experience, deepening their relationship with each customer.

Let’s look at three examples of how technology enhances customers’ experience.

How Technology is Used to Enhance Customer Experience?

Powerful technology enables better customer experiences by increasing resolution speed, elevating social influence, advancing security, and automating repetitive tasks to save people time and money.

It builds communities, improves communication, and reveals opportunities for businesses to scale, differentiate, and make better decisions. What else?

Let’s look at three CX focus areas for 2024:

1. Digital personalization

Personalization has been around for a while and is table stakes.

Your customers expect meaningful personalization (not a vanity approach, like auto filling a person’s first name in an email). Personal customer experience technology examples might look like:

• Product/content recommendations to help customers find what they’re looking for faster.
• Improved promotions and incentives, based on previous purchases, loyalty tiers, or predictive models.
• Shipping and purchasing preference recall to buy with a click.
• Better information and targeted outreach to inform more rewarding sales meetings and business engagements.

Personalization is centered on reliable data, captured over time and normalized in a way that marketers can act on it.

Technology is the mechanism to store, normalize, automate, and act on that data (we recommend a customer data platform).

Strategic, thoughtful, and compliant use of data to fuel personalization is challenging and technology enables us to deliver on this promise in consistent and secure ways.

Which brings us to…

2. Compliance and accessibility

Data privacy and other laws continue to evolve over time.

Businesses must confidently protect their customers’ data, secure their websites against breaches, automate compliance with privacy laws (like GDPR or CASL), and remain compliant across every digital platform.

They must measure and improve accessibility of digital products and continuously optimize against current benchmarks to deliver more rewarding experiences for all users.

From automating data capture, to safeguarding your website, protecting payment processing, enabling more accessible experiences, and more, technology is front and center empowering businesses to operate with greater sophistication, speed, control, security, and consistency.  

3. Customer support, feedback, and issue resolution

Customers need plentiful options to resolve issues.

From phone support, online chatbots, FAQs, and more, technology empowers businesses to offer their customers multiple ways to resolve problems or get help, which reduces customer frustration.

AI is increasingly integrated into customer support functions, like chatbots or routing systems, helping businesses resolve their problems faster and with less irritation.

Plus, tech empowers customer support agents with reliable data to deliver that personalized resolution. Agents can speak to customers as if they’ve always known them, mentioning recent activity or past purchases, and putting the customer at ease that the business cares about their circumstances.

Full-circle, technology also delivers a feedback loop to businesses. Whether it’s by automating customer feedback through surveys, analyzing customer data, or aggregating common support issues, businesses can improve overall business operations and relieve pain points by investing in better tools, platforms, and processes.

How to Provide Exceptional Customer Service when Using Electronic Technology

In 2024, reliable data is the gatekeeper to exceptional customer service and elevated digital experiences. Foolproof ways to improve customer service are:

• Integrate your technology, so all team members - sales, marketing, customer service - can pick up a customers' experience where it left off and act on it.
• Streamline workflows and automate tasks to save customer service teams time to focus on more meaningful interactions.
• Measure and analyze common customer service issues to build simpler and more rewarding digital experiences that remove friction at every turn.  
• Always go the extra mile to make the experience more personal and valuable for users. Customer service technology examples might be: autofill known customer information to save users time; use chatbots for common issue resolution; score and route higher impact issues to the proper person for resolution, etc.
• Respond quickly and completely, with empathy for customers’ frustrations.

These are some examples of how better, more connected technology empowers your customer service teams to deliver exceptional support – leading to higher customer lifetime value and loyalty.

Better Tech Means Better CX

Technology enables businesses to easily get in front of their customers and make those experiences more valuable.

As technology advances and moves more daily interactions online, it also gives businesses greater access to their customers.

Businesses can communicate more proactively across channels, and customers, in turn, gain greater behind-the-scenes access to companies.

Need help updating your tech stack to empower customer service teams and deepen customer loyalty? We’ve been doing it for two decades. Reach out to connect to a digital expert to discuss your unique goals and challenges.

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