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How Customer Engagement Strategies will Change in the Next 5 Years

Over the next five years, the way businesses manage their customer engagement will undergo a significant shift. Companies that don’t innovate and adapt will be left behind.

Over the last 15 years, much of the internet has been shaped around technology to track users across the websites they visit to see personalized ads tailored to their interests and actions.

These practices are now going away through technology and regulatory changes like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

On the technology front, Apple recently introduced new policies to curb the ability for businesses to track users for personalized ads in iOS Apps. Google has followed suit by announcing that Chrome will remove support for third-party cookies in 2023, which have to date been a fundamental part of the advertising ecosystem.

As advertising becomes too costly, businesses have switched their strategies to survive and thrive in the changing environment. Recent trends include:

Given current trends, it’s likely that advertising will continue to become less effective and much more expensive. Nearly every online business will need to make significant changes in its marketing strategies to maintain its growth.

Users are increasingly interacting with digital businesses across multiple platforms. They might order an item from Doordash’s website, then follow notifications about the order from their smartphone. Or, over the day, they might watch YouTube videos on many devices, including their laptop, smartphone, tablet, and smart TV.

As they interact with products across different platforms, users still expect a consistent experience. That consistency is a competitive advantage for businesses that are best able to provide it. Companies like Amazon do this so well that consumers often don’t check competing stores, even when shopping around could save them money.

As user expectations shift, a clear divide is forming between businesses that can’t maintain a consistent omnichannel experience and those that can.

Providing a great omnichannel experience is a challenge for even the largest corporations in the world and requires fundamental changes in how businesses build their products and leverage modern technology.

Businesses that do this best follow several essential guidelines:

We all hate waiting, and recent trends are eliminating the need for us to be patient.

Rapid increases in computer processing speed, software reliability, and network technologies like 5G have made loading bars a thing of the past. The newest generation of video game consoles has brought game load times nearly instantaneous. 5G technology has increased cellular network speeds by 10x over 4G.

As technology provides a path towards cutting out all delays, users are delighted when companies take advantage of it to provide real-time information.

Yelp is a perfect example of how to do this best by combining push notifications and emails delivered at the precise moments that users are most likely to benefit from and engage with them.

Similarly, Amazon now provides real-time tracking of packages on their way to being delivered (And replaces the icon with a sleigh during the holidays). And as Amazon rolls out same-day delivery in more cities, even online shopping is becoming a real-time experience.

Over the coming years, real-time experiences will become even more critical. Timely and personalized messages will be the most common entry point when users engage with a product.

In contrast, users will be less likely to seek out and adopt products organically. With limited time in their busy schedules, users prefer experiences sent to them rather than having to seek them out. They also gravitate towards experiences that provide real-time information rather than experiences that make them wait.

Not long ago, HBO’s John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, poked fun at the ways different organizations make use of push notifications.

It’s hard to disagree. All trends point to a world where undesired interruptions are increasingly rare.

In iOS 15, Apple introduced two features to help:

These features present the content that users care about while delaying or entirely hiding information that is not presently important.

Similarly, product features and apps have emerged to help users surface the content they care about while hiding the content they don’t. Gmail does this through the “Promotions” tab, which places marketing email messages in a separate category. On Android, Google provides a “Focus Mode” that pauses some apps from sending messages. Google’s Pixel phones also go into Do Not Disturb mode when placed face-down.

Over the coming years, businesses will adapt to these changes by understanding and leveraging platform features to ensure that important messages get through while allowing users to silence others easily. For example, iOS 15’s notification importance levels enable developers to indicate if notification is more urgent and displayed even if the user has blocked other interruptions.

Businesses will also provide users with an in-app preference center to further tune what kinds of messages they receive and the frequency. Users will increasingly call out and leave bad reviews for apps that do not have enough control over the messages they send.

There was a time when businesses relied on techniques like oversized buttons, deceptive claims, fine print, or dark patterns to attract and engage customers. Older or less tech-savvy users were prone to fall for these techniques, many of which exist today.

JustFab claims that you can get your first pair of shoes for just $10, with a short time window to take advantage of the offer. But they later reveal that this discount requires subscribing to their “VIP Membership Program” — A $39.95 per-month service. It appears that JustFab designed this limited-time offer to make users make a costly impulse purchase or to miss the fine print.

These deceptive techniques can lead to short-term growth, but they erode user trust and destroy brand loyalty over the long term.

As more people have had bad experiences, these deceptive techniques have rapidly dropped in their efficacy.

Furthermore, Covid has recently created a rapid rise in technical sophistication across all age groups, with 3 to 4 years of technology adoption compressed into one.

This trend is rapidly accelerating. Deceptive practices like fake countdown timers and spammy advertising will soon disappear. Businesses will increasingly adopt strategies like those used by Zappos, which focuses on having a straightforward user experience and world-class customer support.

Over the next few years, businesses will prioritize several initiatives to increase their growth while scaling back misleading tricks that can harm their brand:

Businesses that lose the trust of their customers will find their growth slowing as they lose existing users and get bad reviews that scare away new ones.

Users expect consistency in their experience across platforms, making it essential for product teams to oversee consistency of feature deployment and design on every screen.

Businesses must eliminate slow load times and delayed messages and replace them with real-time user interaction. Online support conversations should happen in real-time, and messages on channels including email, push notifications, and SMS must be sent at the precise moment they are relevant.

Each year, as technology evolves, old techniques in marketing, user experience, and communication change. It’s nearly impossible for a business to stay ahead of all technology trends and best practices through internal expertise alone.

Today’s best technology solutions are much less risky to buy and implement. Instead of months or quarters, they can often be set up in hours/days and often come with out-of-the-box integrations that streamline data flows and interoperability. Many offer freemium plans, trials, or month-to-month pricing that can significantly reduce the cost of adoption.

Working with experienced third-party vendors reduces risk and can help businesses focus on what they’re best at while leveraging outside expertise to help them keep up.

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