4 Emerging Customer Journey Trends to Test

Our modern day tech evolution has enabled new ways for customers to interact with brands — and vice versa. Retail brands know that brick-and-mortar experiences alone just won’t cut it, nor will insufficient digital experiences that fail to account for the evolving customer experience. The brands that win are the ones who find a way to engage, personalize and reduce friction in their experiences.

Digital transformation in the customer journey requires digital quality, meeting customers where they are now, but also where they will go. It’s not enough to validate a customer journey at a point in time; brands must keep pace with emerging trends, both to satisfy customer expectations and compete with rivals in the marketplace.

These four emerging customer journey trends each play a pivotal role in shaping the future of customer experiences. Let’s explore these customer journey innovations, and why rigorous, real-world testing helps ensure they meet the users’ expectations.

Generative AI in customer service chatbots

Generative AI-infused customer service chatbots represent a significant leap forward in automating customer interactions. The natural language capabilities of LLMs enable a deeper understanding of customer challenges, and they can provide more nuanced and contextually relevant responses. A chatbot can answer questions about whether a shirt’s fabric might trigger a mild allergic reaction, or give some guidance on product choices based on reviews from customers with similar demographics.

Naturally, AI-infused chatbots offer a lot of promise when it comes to a more satisfying and efficient customer service experience. But this novelty brings technical challenges. Responses must be appropriate, meaning culturally relevant, inoffensive and unable to be manipulated by bad actors. Users might, for example, attempt to elicit a negative or toxic response for the sake of hurting the brand’s reputation, or they might attempt to acquire discounts or store credit for illegitimate issues. AI chatbot responses must also be accurate and free from hallucinations, as these issues destroy faith in the experience.

Comprehensive testing, especially with diverse real-world user groups, helps uncover both functional defects and cultural or linguistic issues prior to launch. The key is to go beyond testing the happy path. Think through the uncommon or negative customer pathways, and put real humans to task on validating as many of those options as possible. You can’t fix the defects you don’t find.

In our recent work with a well-known bank, the client wanted to understand how well their non-AI-infused chatbot translated language to Japanese and Spanish. What translated well? What translated poorly? Neither automation nor AI could solve this problem. We sourced testers of varying backgrounds to interact with the system and provide feedback on flaws so that the bank could have confidence in its chatbot. It’s the same task with AI-infused chatbots; you need human validation to have confidence in the outputs.

Personalized customer experiences

It’s table stakes for businesses to deliver personalized experiences to their users, especially in sectors like retail with lots of competition. Roughly 89% of digital businesses planned to invest in personalization a few years ago, according to Forrester. The investment — and the customer expectation — has only increased since then, as there is plenty of proof that personalized experiences resonate. Advanced personalization techniques can deliver as much as a $20 return on a $1 investment, according to a report from The Relevancy Group, with the highest returns coming from real-time personalization.

Personalized experiences help customers feel understood, welcomed and validated. AI-powered recommendation engines can certainly make effective use of past data and interactions to succeed in this area. However, the balance between personalization and intrusiveness is delicate, and customers often have an intuitive sense of when a recommendation engine either has ethically gone too far in assessing their characteristics or delivers incorrect suggestions.

For example, a budget shopper in the northeast United States might bristle at a recommendation for an expensive handbag, especially if the recommendation engine scraped data from a web search or social media post that suggests they might want it. Or a music service recommendation engine might fundamentally misunderstand what type of music a person likes, perhaps serving up too many top 100 hits.

User experience testing can put recommendation and personalization systems through their paces. By collecting groups of people that match customer profiles, organizations can get a clearer sense of the flaws in a process or system. It goes beyond recommendation engines as well, as businesses must strike a delicate balance with how they communicate with customers — marketing cadences, push notifications, advertisements and more. Brand reputation ties directly to the effectiveness of these engagements. Anything less than informed real-world insights will not suffice.

Evolution of loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are becoming more intricate and personalized, reflecting the mutual benefit of catering to customers who are different levels of brand loyalists. Brands are trying to deliver high-quality experiences and meaningful rewards to customers, a natural evolution over some of the feature-lacking and friction-inducing rewards programs of the last couple of decades.

Fortune Business Insights valued the global market size for consumer loyalty management and programs at $5.29 billion in 2022. That figure was projected to grow to $28.65 billion by 2030, a forecasted compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.7%. Additionally, Forrester found that, on average, loyalty rewards program members in the U.S. and Canada spend $99 more than non-members at both traditional and online retail outlets over the span of three months. Businesses see the ROI; customers see the value; win-win, right?

The problem is that a seemingly simple loyalty rewards transaction might involve a host of touchpoints and integrations — plenty of places for something to go wrong. Let’s take an example of a quick-service restaurant (QSR) we work with. The company found that customers could order delivery through a popular food delivery app. The integration with the loyalty program worked as expected, but they neglected to test all paths. It turns out that a customer could cancel the order through the food delivery system, but the QSR would still deposit loyalty points to the customer’s account regardless of cancellation. A loophole like that can incur a significant cost to the business.

Alternatively, the customer can end up on the losing side. What happens if loyalty points fail to redeem across platforms? If a customer purchases and returns an item, are they granted access to those points again? How do they feel when a rewards program suddenly reconfigures its loyalty program? An example of that last point: I recently abandoned a longtime preferred airline company because of changes to its loyalty program and customer experience.

Sophisticated rewards programs necessitate rigorous real-world testing to ensure high quality and fairness toward both the company and the customer. This is especially important where loyalty programs center around brand-loyal buyers — the last group a brand wants to alienate. These customers should feel valued and appreciated, because, at the end of the day, loyalty only goes so far.

The rise of self-service

The blend of physical and digital experiences, or “phygital” experiences, is gaining traction through innovations like self-service kiosks, AR-augmented shopping and checkout-free stores. There is a growing demand for self-service solutions, underscored by a market projected to expand substantially, as much as a 10.5% CAGR over the next 10 years, according to Fact.MR. Advancements in self-service prioritize customer convenience and business efficiency — another good idea on paper that requires sophistication in delivery.

Meticulous testing can help ensure these phygital experiences meet high standards of accuracy, security and accessibility, all nuanced challenges that require human validation, ideally through customer journey testing. Retail self-service technologies must be inclusive and reliable, offering a seamless customer experience — anything less threatens the value proposition that makes them a good idea in the first place.

A recent video showed a YouTuber putting the technology behind a checkout-free store to the test. He picked up items, put them back on different shelves, grabbed them in inconsistent quantities, etc. While the system correctly accounted for most of the items, it wasn’t perfect. Essentially, this one YouTube creator was executing a one-person customer journey testing strategy, focusing on the edge cases and non-happy paths to see how the system responded. It’s an interesting experiment, but a more valuable application of the process might involve more people of varying customer personas executing a variety of tasks, perhaps even with different payment instruments and accessibility needs.

One of the QSRs we work with ran into an accessibility defect that significantly hampered the experience for wheelchair-bound customers. The QSR offers kiosks to place orders, and it created an accessibility mode that could be toggled to account for customers in wheelchairs or people of short stature. However, the QSR did not sufficiently test these experiences. Upon toggling the accessibility feature, the screen shifts to be lower for these customers, but the interface buttons were slightly blocked by text elements, making it difficult to place an order. Perhaps the kiosk worked just fine in a lab or was even validated in the field, but this reproducible bug might have presented a significant business problem if not caught early. Real-world testing identified the defect, which allowed for swift remediation.

The essence of enhancing the customer journey lies in the ability to offer personalized, efficient and inclusive experiences. The customer journey trends mentioned above reflect a customer-centric shift in the digital realm. And, as with any customer-facing digital product, brands must make use of comprehensive digital quality strategies to succeed. At Applause, we evolve with the marketplace. Our million-strong global community evolves with the times, carrying the devices, mirroring your customer personas, living in the markets and possessing the expertise you need to validate customer pathways wherever they go — digitally and physically.

Let’s talk today about how Applause can help you optimize your ecommerce channels and evolve with the times to deliver engaging, valuable digital experiences.