The CX Files: Lessons from a Year of Global Pandemic
Just over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we recap the top three trends marketers are embracing to meet growing consumer demand for personalized digital experiences.
Welcome to “The CX Files,” our newest series on Slalom Customer Insight. With the rapid pace of change in marketing technology and ever-shifting consumer expectations, it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends. “The CX Files” was created to report out what the leader of Slalom’s Global Experience Team, Rio Longacre, is seeing from the field.
Over the past 14 months, we’ve witnessed change at an unprecedented pace as the COVID-19 global pandemic impacted consumers and brands across the globe. According to a US Retail Index study, the pandemic accelerated the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping by roughly five years. As the philosopher Plato once said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
The challenges encountered by brands and consumers in 2020 forced 10 years’ worth of digital transformation into just a few short months. Retail, eCommerce, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands all had to create innovative customer experiences in unpredictable times. With customer experiences largely online-only for long stretches of time due to closures or consumers sheltering in place, the quality of digital experiences quite literally had the ability to make or break a given brand. More than ever, customers expected personalized experiences across all channels… and brands were forced to respond.
Across industries, the need to build deeper, more trusting relationships with customers rang clear as brands doubled down on strengthening loyalty and gathering first-party data. By any estimation, 2020 was the “Year of CDP.” CDPs, or customer data platforms, are a marketing-focused technology that unifies customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to marketers for customer segmentation and activation across marketing channels. In an age of heightened consumer expectations and myriad MarTech solutions, CDPs emerged not only as a hitherto “missing” piece of technical architecture, but also a critical tool for centering first-party data and unlocking its tremendous value for marketers.
As the calendar flipped to 2021, the emphasis on first-party data gathered pace as brands pivoted their focus to realizing multichannel journey orchestration and nailing the Customer Experience of privacy — two of the biggest trends we’re currently tracking.
As we gradually move beyond COVID-19, we hope marketers take these lessons to heart. In many ways, the past 12+ months have acted as an accelerator, forcing brands to take chances, embrace bold change, and get closer to their customers in the process. In the long term, many of these moves bode well for the future of retail as we move toward a landscape that is more customer-centric, data-driven, agile, and technology-based.
Rio Longacre is an executive with two decades of leadership and experience in the digital space across strategy consulting, technology services, data, and media planning. He’s a frequent thought leader and subject matter expert in customer experience management, digital business transformation and marketing/advertising technology. Reach him at riol@slalom.com.
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
