Reflecting On This Year and Preparing For What’s Next

Remember when we all cheered on New Year’s Eve celebrating new beginnings and a new you? Suffice to say, 2020 has not gone the way any of us have planned but now that most of the year is behind us, it is time to look and plan ahead.

2021 is filled with optimism; from increased vaccine productions to opening travel restrictions around the world to finally heading back into the office. 2021 is also the year to perfect the customer experience as 2020 provided the challenge and testbed for many companies that have yet to transform or were slow to transform to the new digital age of customer journeys and customer expectations. Here are a few of my observations that successful brands will continue doing into the new year:

Customers

Listen to your customers. I am sure you’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again, but customers are the key to success and you need to actively listen to them. Whatever journey your current customers are experiencing is a baseline and ripe for improvements as journeys are meant to change and adapt over time. If customer expectations are changing, it means that the journey also has to change. 14% of brands in Forrester’s consumer survey of customer experience quality improved last year and the research showed they did it mostly by finding and fixing problems, (ie. back-end systems and processes). But this year, the number of brands that improved customer experience almost doubled, to 27%.

Ecosystem

Digital technologies need an ecosystem; gone are the days of fragmented and siloed platforms. In today’s customer journey, there are a number of technologies that all work in tandem to stitch together a holistic customer journey. Marketing and CX functions will become more intertwined — with spending on loyalty and retention marketing increasing by 30% in 2021. No organization can change its technology stack overnight to become “all digital” but the strides of improvement are necessary to get to nirvana.

Ask

You’re not going through this digital transformation by yourself. Every brand is evolving in its own way and rejuvenating a different step in the customer journey. When tasked to improve the customer experience, it may seem like a daunting task but you will not be the first person going through this and nor will you be the last. Granted there is no shortage of knowledge and resources online but there’s no need to worry or be overwhelmed – let’s start where the data tells us to start. In this creative and collaborative industry we work and live in, help is just an ask away. Feel free to even reach out to us, at Taplytics, for a free consultation of how your growth stack ranks in the market.

All in all, I believe the digital consumer experience is headed in the right direction. 2020 was the year we needed to push digital innovation and strategy and now that year has come and gone. As we adapt to more personalization and more engagement, customer experiences, and expectations, will only grow from here.