IF you haven’t figured it out already, here is your new customer: digital, unpredictable and easy to lose, and more powerful. And this new customer is changing how companies work and compete.
Adobe, releasing its Digital Trends Survey 2021 in which 13,000 marketing, advertising, e-commerce, creative, and IT professionals, working for both brands and agencies globally, including India, Asia and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) were interviewed, said 2020 brought out a new view of the customer – one that presents both opportunity and challenge.
“New customers arrived in record numbers to sites and apps, creating new journeys and behaviours to be understood. At the same time, existing customers behaved less predictably,” said the report.
It said both groups helped some companies flourish but proved a challenge to those that were slow to move.
1. “Robust and sophisticated” wins
The report focused its attention on the importance of a robust and sophisticated customer experience – that, it said, will be the “unifying thread for the companies that outpace their sectors”.
The evidence is already there. Customer experience leaders flourished in the second half of 2020. Over 70% of its leaders outpaced their sectors and were three times more likely to have “significantly outpaced” their sectors than the mainstream.
These leaders had already been making strong investments and commitment to the customer experience for the last five years.
Respondents at companies that have built strong analytics functions (with ‘significant insight’ into new journeys and marketing attribution) are more than twice as likely to say their customers are positive about their digital experience than their peers with lower levels of insight. (71% vs 31%).
Speed to insight was the key to mitigating loss and fostering growth. “Speed to insight and action are vital to success in a fast-changing environment, making workflow, legacy tech and a lack of digital skills as the top three barriers to great digital experiences,” it said.
2. The marketing role is now end-to-end
Three quarters of senior executives interviewed in the survey said the role of marketing in setting strategy expanded in 2020 – this new customer has pulled marketing into the boardroom.
“Marketing leads in digital”, said one respondent; another said digital measurement has become more sophisticated and has allowed the company to showcase the impact of marketing.
“Marketing has never been in a better position to guide the evolution of corporate vision, go-to market and even product strategy,” it said.
3. Digital Talent will be hard-fought
This new focus and importance on the digital consumer journey means digital talent is going to be a hard-fought commodity. “Companies will unconsciously sort themselves into two categories: rigid and flexible. In the battle for the best digital talent, flexibility will win in a landslide,” said the report.
4. Legacy technology, be gone
Legacy technology was singled out as the common barrier to effective marketing and customer experience. While some companies may find starting from scratch the best solution, for most companies, the clearest and quickest path to improvement combines existing technology with a layer of cloud-connected data management, said the Adobe report.
“Today’s complex ecosystem of third-party platforms, in-house and point solutions will persist for some time, especially at large organisations. At the same time, agility and capacity to add capabilities on demand are high priorities,” it said.
5. Think empathy
Underlying this new customer and its pathway is the need for empathy – a value that the report classifies as “the future of experience”.
Marketers, it said, know that customer journeys have always been emotional, even in B2B.
“There are points of friction wherever there is a decision to be made, which can manifest anything from hope to excitement, or from anxiety to concern.”
“Analysing and adapting to the customer’s emotional journey is the next evolution of experience management,” it concluded.
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images
