Editorial
The Gist
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Advisor mentality shift. Brands should adopt an advisor role to build loyalty and offer personalized recommendations based on consumer preferences and trends.
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AI-driven commerce growth. Conversational commerce powered by AI is reshaping how consumers interact with brands.
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Data-powered personalization. Hyper-personalization through data is key for 2025, and it allows brands to create tailored experiences that resonate with individual customer behaviors.
Well, we’ve done it. We’ve made it to the end of 2024. With an election behind us and a pumpkin spice latte in hand, we are winding down, recharging and reassessing how we are going to tackle all that comes with a new year.
I’ve spent my entire career in the world of digital commerce and customer experience. I often like to think of it as my purpose here on this spinning rock, in a sense. I’m intrigued by buyer behaviors, customer psyche and what experiences truly connect with consumers in ways that bring us closer together, not further apart.
Consumers are humans, and humans are consumers. The sooner brands start to adopt tactics and methodologies that inspire connection and community, the sooner consumers will start to develop affinities and loyalties that will become generational.
Every fall and winter I like to spend time reflecting on the past year and contemplating the most important customer experience trends. I think about what worked and what didn’t, and I dig into the mind of the consumer to understand what’s most important to them going forward. What will resonate with them? What will inspire them? What will be the experiences they can’t live without?.
I’m happy to say I’ve done that. Now I’m here to share with you the top five areas your brand should focus on in 2025 for customer experience and digital shopping.
Become Your Customers’ Trusted Advisor
If you’re like me, you don’t have all the answers figured out, especially when it comes to shopping in a category that maybe you’re not as familiar with. Take for example, interior design. I have no clue what looks good and what doesn’t — but furniture brands do.
Brands need to adopt the “advisor” mentality with customers to stay ahead of emerging customer experience trends. Build in experiences that allow consumers to express a bit about themselves, and then let the brand make style or product recommendations based on who that customer is, what’s in style, what’s trending and what looks good.
One creative way I’ve seen this done is how Amazon offers cross-sells through their “shop the look” feature on product detail pages. Most product images these days have at least a few lifestyle images included, which is a fantastic opportunity to offer additional items for purchase. For example, if I’m buying a TV stand, I might want the end table or the vase that’s shown in the photo to complete the look.
Find other ways to help your customers see that you’re more than just a transaction vehicle and that your brand is an advisor to their life. If you do, you’ll be the first place customers turn to the next time they need something. They might not even care about the product price because you’re providing something way more valuable: advice and expertise.
How to start: Becoming your customers best advisor starts with knowing your customers. When is the last time you’ve completed customer journey or voice of the customer discoveries? If it’s been a minute, start there. Determine what matters most to your customer, and find creative ways to leverage existing or new technology to fill in the gaps.
Related Article: The Untapped Potential of Real-Time Voice of Customer Insights
AI-Powered Conversational Commerce Leads the Future
AI isn’t going anywhere, and large brands are finding creative ways to incorporate practical AI use cases into their business to help automate processes, elevate experiences and build connections with people
How can AI help people connect? Easy, through something called conversational commerce. Conversational commerce disrupts the traditional way consumers have made purchases through digital commerce experiences.
Through conversational commerce, consumers can talk to brands in ways they would talk to friends or store associates. AI gives consumers the ability to have a real-world conversation with a brand through their website, app, email or SMS.
One reason conversational commerce is so important is because it highlights the importance and impact of anthropomorphism, which is the ability for humans to assign human-like characteristics to non-human things like brands. This is a critical step in curating customer loyalty and staying top of mind to customers when they’re making purchasing decisions.
How to start: Start by assessing what technologies you’ve invested in. Many CMS and commerce technologies have generative AI capabilities that you might be able to take advantage of. If not, take a look at some of the new and emerging AI technologies that include chatbots, personal shopping agents and other AI-driven conversational features.
How Personal Shopping Agents Will Drive Customer Experience Trends
Elon’s Optimus robot was a wake up call on the art of the possible. Someone to serve you drinks is great, but can Optimus help me predict when I need to order more laundry detergent or help me match my outfit to a pair of shoes? Not yet, but personal shopping agents can.
Amazon’s Alexa gave us a glimpse of this, but I predict as we get further into the back half of 2025, we will see more consumers willing to adopt digital personal shopping agents to help us shop.
Eventually, these shopping agents will become autonomous, acting and behaving on their own without our direction. While that sounds scary, I predict it will become the new normal for most consumers.
How to start: You can investigate the AI personal shopping assistant technologies that are out there, but before you do, start with the practicality behind it. Does it make sense for your customers or for your business? What impact could this have? One way to understand if this makes sense to your brand is by engaging in some of the previously mentioned voice of the customer activities.
If it does make sense for your brand, look to complete a technology assessment to determine which features make the most sense for your use cases.
Hyper-Personalization Driven by Data Will Shape 2025
Personalization has been around for decades, but AI-driven hyper-personalization has become something consumers actually demand, making it one of the key customer experience trends for 2025. When done right, personalization should surprise and delight customers. That being said, it’s not done to its fullest potential in some cases.
Why not? Data. In order to hyper-personalize, brands need to first have a solid data strategy that gives them a clear line of sight into consumer behaviors, purchases and activity. This must be done in a centralized way that allows other technologies to access data to help curate future experiences based on previous customer behaviors.
More brands are exploring their data to create an action plan that lends itself to hyper-personalization. Consumers don’t want to see content or products based on what they look like. They want to see content and products based on who they are.
If you can create a foundational data strategy that centralizes customer behaviors, you’ll be well on your way to driving personalized revenue growth that will earn you praise from your board.
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How to start: Pop the hood on the data you currently have, and look to see how it’s structured and where it lives. It’s helpful if you have a data team that can show you where the gaps are. Typically, delving into your customer data platform (CDP) is a great way to get started. If you don’t have one, it’s a great time to investigate CDP options. After your data is sorted, take inventory of what customer experience personalization tools your brand currently has access to and if they can serve the needs of your customers, if not, it’s time to look externally to see which tools are good fits.
Related Article: Taking Hyper-Personalization to the Next Level
Transparency in Product Availability Transforms Customer Experience
A great-looking, well-designed website gets your customer in the door, but offering transparency, visibility and flexibility on how products are delivered gets the sale.
Thanks to our friends at Amazon, customers now expect product detail pages to offer multiple shipment options including home delivery, buy online/pick up in store, and same day delivery. Brands should, at the very least, indicate whether an item is in stock or backordered so that customers can navigate to other similar items to purchase.
Back in 2022, I talked about my experience ordering a gold jacket for an event I was attending. Even though the site said the product was in stock and I would receive it in three business days, it never arrived.
Don’t be that brand. Focus on your product and order orchestration so that your customers have a clear understanding of what to expect.
How to start: If your site is offering transparency around what products are in stock and multiple ways for these items to be delivered, make sure there’s accuracy there. If you don’t offer this information yet, begin by identifying which flags or fields within your ERP system may not be configured and explore ways to pull this information into the digital shopping experience. It’s also worth looking into order management systems as a way to help orchestrate orders and make multiple delivery options a reality.
Customer Experience Trends that Will Define 2025 for Brands
2025 will become the year that brands become intimately closer to their consumers in all channels. From social to in-person, brands have a responsibility to be where their customers are. It’s the only way forward for growth. This closeness can and will have profound effects on how consumers choose to connect with you for generations to come.
Think about what brands you’ve adopted because your parents or friends did. Brands and products are woven into the fabric of who we are. They’re an extension of what makes us who we are.
As Steve Forbes once said, “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” Invest in your brand, find out what consumers love most about it, and give them that. Use these five tools to connect what your brand represents with what your consumers truly want.
And with that, I’ll see you all in 2025.
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