As digital transformation and automation reshape our expectations for growth in 2022, business leaders are looking beyond the horizon to drive strategic growth agendas in the post-COVID era. Much of the past year has been focused on reacting to short-term disruption, plugging holes and weathering the storm. With some light at the end of the tunnel, business leaders must now explore how they can foster a perpetually agile and constantly learning culture.
This emerging era is one in which progressive leaders help leadership teams consolidate lessons from the global pandemic, improve customer experiences, and establish a vision for growth models that respect customer privacy. They must leverage the worlds of hyper-personalization, AI, ethics and workplace culture to deliver engaging, exciting and compelling consent-driven customer experiences.
How should leaders realize their customer experience and growth visions, and what are the biggest challenges they face?
Here some of the highlights of our discussion:
“We’ve all been in the same storm, but we haven’t been in the same boat.”
Leaders are taking time to reflect since the pandemic hit and, realizing that organizations are more resilient than perhaps expected, has caused surprising leadership to emerge within their companies.
While digital transformation was on most companies’ radar, the pandemic has forced leaders to accelerate their efforts. The need for agility, innovation and the creation of new customer experiences is critical to business growth in what has become a digital world.
It’s not the time to sell to customers, it’s the time to listen
The disruption of the last year has significantly changed customer behavior and expectations. The fact is that the “old ways” of doing things simply won’t work in 2022.
Very few companies score high on “customer intimacy.”
“Most companies didn’t know their customers well before the pandemic, so they don’t necessarily know them well enough now to know what to do”
With so many customer touch points and expectations so varied, now is the time for companies to truly engage with their customers and understand their new needs to better deliver the experiences they want.
Leveraging technology to deliver information
Providing data to people in a way that they can visualize and make sense of it is an increasingly important factor in any organization.
For marketers, leveraging this type of technology to gain customer insights will ultimately lead to greater foresight into what customers expect and what behaviors they will engage in in the future.
Privacy and trust must be at the forefront of innovation
As access to and use of customer data increases, it is increasingly important that companies use it ethically and securely. It’s all about earning and maintaining customer trust. To do this, leaders must now think about data strategically and systemically.
Companies are starting to think about what data they really need to help the customer. Not only is this an added security risk, but it can also cloud the insights gained by having too much data to analyze.
Customer behavior will continue to change in response to constant technological advances and other external factors. For business leaders, it is critical to continually empower their teams to embrace change and be creative in solving new customer experience challenges.
Source: Adobe Blog