First-party data becomes a first-place priority.
In Europe, the scope of the GDPR continues to grow, as does the size of the fines being levied against organizations that fail to adhere to it. In the U.S., California, Virginia and Colorado will be aiming to update their own privacy regulations during the course of 2023.
In the digital world, Apple has made its customers incognito by default and Google is dropping support for third-party cookies from its Chrome browser.
And of course, this is all happening at a moment in time when creating personalized customer experiences has never been more important.
For 60% of consumers and 70% of under 35s, some level of personalization is now a CX expectation.
However, just over one-third of consumers would be prepared to directly share more of their personal information with a brand to gain this level of recognition.
of consumers would share personal data in exchange for a personalized CX.
This means that 2023 will be the year of building customer trust and of building first-party data reserves in order to deliver on this expectation. First-party data is key to understanding customers, to making the right business decisions, to improving operations and to building new types of services and features.
Relevant data is the key to automation, to developing chatbots that actually speak the customer’s language, and to eliminating the monotonous aspects of many CX-critical roles from contact center agent to coach and beyond.
Luckily, for any brand with a mature CX delivery in place, there’s already a trove of invaluable first-party data available and it rests within the contact center.
If this unstructured data can be analyzed and combined with structured data within the organization, such as information resting within the CRM or analytics from the web and other digital assets, insights will begin to emerge. However, even this level of data interrogation will only provide a partial picture.
For the clearest and most detailed customer personas, organizations will need to look to social listening as a means of generating greater insights and — crucially — engage directly with customers for feedback that goes beyond rating their most recent interaction with the organization.
One-in-three consumers want organizations to survey them in order to improve CX and 17% of consumers would post an online review of an experience with an organization simply if they were asked to do so.
of customers would post an online review
This presents a massive opportunity for organizations to begin and continue a conversation with their customers on the topics of trust and data protection and also about why a greater understanding will ultimately benefit each customer on an individual level.