By all accounts, 2019 will be the year marketers (finally!) get serious about customer experience (CX). Defined by BusinessDictionary.com as “the entirety of the interactions a customer has with a company and its products,” CX has long been a hot topic, and in our age of endless distractions, an aspect of customer relationship management (or CRM) that businesses can’t afford to get wrong. Armed with intelligent technologies capable of delivering the highest levels of customization and personalization, brands and their partners will place big bets on CX – and its impact on driving conversions – in the year to come. Now onto a handful of the trends we’ve been tracking, in no particular order

1. 2019 TREND
PREDICTION REPORT

2. By all accounts, 2019 will be the year marketers (finally!) get serious about customer
experience (CX). Defined by BusinessDictionary.com as “the entirety of the interactions a
customer has with a company and its products,” CX has long been a hot topic, and in our
age of endless distractions, an aspect of customer relationship management (or CRM)
that businesses can’t afford to get wrong. Armed with intelligent technologies capable of
delivering the highest levels of customization and personalization, brands and their
partners will place big bets on CX – and its impact on driving conversions – in the year to
come.
Now onto a handful of the trends we’ve been tracking, in no particular order…

3. Eroding Trust in Advertising
Will Push Marketers into New
Territories
If 2018 was the year of authenticity, then 2019 will be the year of
untethered honesty. With trust in advertising in steady decline
(especially among millennials!), marketers will continue to explore new
“storyselling” territories in 2019. Ever on the quest to win the mind and
wallet-share of their most valuable audiences, they’ll turn to tactics like
influencer marketing, ratings and reviews, and other forms of user-
generated content (or UGC) to deliver experiences that feel more
organic, while giving consumers a platform to share their own.
• Consumers trust UGC 1,200% more than branded content (source:
Annex Cloud)
• Brands that incorporated UGC into their marketing plan saw a 161%
increase in conversion and an 18% increase in revenue in 2018
(source: Annex Cloud)
• 60% of customers are more likely to buy from a site that incorporates
UGC (source: Annex Cloud)
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4. Voice Search Will Move
Closer to Ubiquity
• Voice searches averaged one billion per month in 2018 (source:
Alpine.AI)
• Over 20% of WiFi-enabled households in the U.S. own at least one
smart device (source: ComScore)
• Voice-powered commerce accounted for $1.8 billion in U.S. retail
revenues in 2017; this figure is expected to reach $40 billion by 2022
(source: OC&C Strategy Consultants)
With the combined install base for Google Home and Amazon Alexa
estimated at a whopping 45 million units in 2017, brands of every
shape and size looked to voice-enabled solutions as a way of
bolstering their CX activities in 2018. For those early adopters, the
focus in 2019 will shift to dominating search in that arena and prepping
for 2020, when experts predict that 50% of all searches will be
conducted by voice.
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5. 3
Artificial Intelligence Will
Accelerate Business
Transformation
• 30% of companies worldwide will be using Artificial Intelligence in at
least one of their sales and marketing processes by 2020 (data
source: Gartner)
• 83% of early adopters have already achieved substantial-to-
moderate economic benefit by using AI (data source: Gartner)
• By 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled by AI (data
source: Gartner)
Eliciting both fear and wonder, the term Artificial Intelligence (or AI) has
been on the tip of every marketer’s tongue for longer than we can
remember. With mainstream understanding of the technology on the
rise, AI will continue to gain steam – especially as brands employ it
(and related technologies) to deliver customized experiences that are
contextual and captivating. On the business side of digital, we’ll see AI
playing a more transformative role in team development and the
deployment of content marketing, programmatic advertising, and
customer acquisition campaigns where ROI and cost-to-conversion
ratios are continually at odds.

6. Integrated CX Planning Will
Become a Requirement for
Success
• By 2020 more than 40% of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect
of customer experience (data source: Gartner)
• 64% of millennials value “anticipation and customization of the experience”
based on their historical transaction data over privacy concerns (data source:
Genysys)
• Organizations that lead in CX retain a higher share of wallet and have
customers that are 7x more likely to purchase more from the company, 8x
more likely to try other products or services, and 15x more likely to spread
positive word of mouth (data source: Qualtrics)
Having recognized the importance of customer experience in relation to sales
and loyalty, digital marketers will place even more emphasis on integrating its
core components – channels, accessibility, convenience, personalization, and
ease of use – in 2019. Using a customer service-first mindset to determine
and unify activities across paid, owned, and earned media channels, they’ll
employ tools like chatbots, content marketing, geolocation, and social listening
to monitor interactions, and will focus on the entirety of their customers’
experiences before, during, and after a sale. Infusing brand missions with
competitive insights, consumer research, and marketplace data, they’ll
develop strategies that connect “online” and “offline” to deliver positive and
meaningful outcomes, all while deepening relationships.
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7. More Digital Experiences Will
Be Designed for and
Accessible to All
• Approximately 56.7 million Americans live with a disability: 15.2
million have a cognitive, mental or emotional impairment; 8.1 million
a vision impairment; and 7.6 million a hearing impairment (data
source: Interactive Accessibility)
• More than 240 U.S. businesses have been sued by visually impaired
users in federal court over website accessibility since 2015 (source:
The Wall Street Journal)
• Websites that adopt recommended accessibility standards, which are
also considered best practice for search engine optimization, will take
over top search results (source: Search Insider)
In our “Web of Things” world, removing the barriers to information and
designing for all users, regardless of disability or impairment, isn’t just
a “nice to have” – it’s a mandate, and in 2018 several businesses were
called to task for failing to comply. As digital experiences become even
more immersive in 2019, designers will seek to provide alternatives to
content that relies on the senses and adopt a more device-agnostic
approach to meet the needs of all.
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8. CMS Will Lose Its “Head”
• The main motivation for a headless CMS is centralizing content
management in one place (48%), followed by flexibility (47%), and
building lightweight websites (44%) (data source: Kentico Software)
• WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are the most popular CMS
platforms; together, they power approximately 30 million websites
(data source: W3Techs)
• Industries ripe for headless CMS solutions include news, retail,
gaming, travel, software, healthcare, IoT, and government (data
source: eWeek)
Keeping pace with the demands of the modern customer presented
significant challenges for enterprise businesses in 2018, especially
those in the e-commerce game, and that trend will continue to disrupt
in months and years ahead. Surrounded by a sea of choices,
consumers will grow even more comfortable with accessing content
and making purchases through a variety of devices and platforms, a
simple fact that will push brands and their developers to do more on
more channels. To streamline activities, they’ll begin to adopt CMS
tools that store, manage, and deliver content to multiple front-end
frameworks (or “heads,” if you will) and create complex, future-proofed
customer experiences that are device- and channel-agnostic.
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9. Extraordinary Measures for
Managing Privacy Will be Taken
• Nearly 160,000 records are stolen from breaches every hour (data
source: Cybersecurity Ventures)
• 95% came from three industries: government, retail, and technology
(data source: Forrester)
• The average cost of a data breach will exceed $150 million by 2020
(data source: Juniper Research)
Headlines about data mega-breaches and the subsequent compromise
of sensitive details like financial records, health information, and other
personal particulars were so common in 2018, it was difficult to keep
track of them all. With the stakes on privacy raised to an all-time high,
platforms, businesses, and institutions will have to go the extra mile to
regain trust, protect against fraud, and pre-empt vulnerabilities, all
while keeping attackers at bay. Checking the perfunctory boxes on
regulation and IT security, and issuing boilerplate apologies when
issues do arise, will no longer be enough; they’ll have to take
responsibility, be held accountable, and find ways to leverage the
same technologies and tactics used to wreak havoc to deliver
customer experiences that, while data-driven, are as safe as they are
compelling.
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10. CMOs Will Challenge
“Working-to-Non-Working”
Norms
• ROI measurement, marketing technology, and advertising waste are
key concerns among CMOs (source: The Nielsen Company)
• 74% have little-to-no confidence they have the right technology in
place to achieve their goals (source: The Nielsen Company)
• 79% expect to invest more in marketing analytics and attribution in
2019 (source: The Nielsen Company)
The debate over the optimal split between working and non-working
budgets will continue into 2019, as CMOs call into question long-
standing beliefs and practices. With the digital marketing spend in the
U.S. expected to reach $120 billion by 2021, they’ll prioritize
investments in three key areas: data, technology, and customer
experience. Moving away from volume-based strategies, they’ll place
greater emphasis on the quality of engagement across the entire
customer life-cycle and adopt new approaches to experimentation and
sophisticated marketing technologies to look beyond impressions.
Shifting dollars to marketing platforms, account-based marketing, data
analytics, and the people needed to maximize their performance,
they’ll replace “non-working” with a new term that recognizes its value:
infrastructure.
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11. Focus Will Shift from
“Customer Journey” to
“Destination” (or “Outcome”)
• Customers want what they want, when they want it – and they’re
drawn to brands that deliver on their needs (source: Think with
Google)
• Organizations that meet the needs of their customers on their terms
will stand out from the noise (source: Gartner)
• Understanding how search keywords are used at various moments is
important to staying relevant (source: Think with Google)
Shifting focus away from traditional pathways to customer journeys that
are increasingly non-linear, conversion-minded marketers will seek to
capitalize on the engagements typically initiated by seekers in order to
close the sale. Defined by Google as “micro-moments,” the
experiences they’ll create will be designed to address four primary
interactions: “I want to learn,” “I want to do,” “I want to find,” and “I want
to buy.” Informed by these behaviors and armed with a deep
understanding of their audiences’ expectations at every stage, they’ll
place their “humans” at the center of omnichannel strategies and,
through data and technologies, uncover the insights needed to turn
prospects into life-long customers.
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12. Realities Will Converge,
Ushering in the Next Wave
of Customer Experience
• Augmented Reality is expected to have 1 billion users by 2020
(source: Forrester)
• The install base for Virtual Reality headsets is forecasted to grow to
37 million by 2020 (source: Gartner)
• Industries primed for Mixed Reality include healthcare, education,
manufacturing, logistics, military, and real estate (source: ARPost)
Driven by enterprise adoption, innovative applications for Augmented
and Virtual Reality (or AR and VR, respectively) were found in 2018.
As new devices, platforms, and use cases for these technologies
continue to emerge in 2019, we’ll see an increase in consumer
acceptance (yes, even beyond gamers!) and a blurring of the lines
between our online and offline realities, setting the stage for immersive,
multi-dimensional experiences that we can only begin to imagine
today.
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13. THANK YOU!
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