3 Mandates for Planning Customer Experience in 2022

As we enter into 2022, how your company is planning customer experience will make or break the success of your customer satisfaction and brand perception. Eighty-seven percent of leaders say customer experience is their top growth engine. But while 80% believe they deliver a superior experience, only 8% of customers agree.

There’s clearly a hefty gap between those polarized perspectives, and the cause comes down to something all companies are grappling with – how to collect, store, and activate your customer data. 

In essence, you can have all the best ideas and intentions toward your customer experience. But if you’re not collecting the right customer data and then using it to fuel the best possible customer experience, then, well, the customer experience will not match customer expectations. 

For example, say you have a loyal customer who regularly makes online purchases. But every time they come to your online store, they change the way the results are filtered. Using customer data to fuel your customer experience goes beyond simply understanding who the customer is (their login and user profile) and what they typically purchase, but also how they want those search queries served up to streamline purchasing decisions.

Our newly released 2022 State of the CDP Report placed customer experience at the forefront of motivators for companies to invest in CDP platforms. But what was also of note through the report was the critical role of properly utilizing customer data while simultaneously respecting their data privacy to create the best possible customer experience – all in a world that is perpetually more digital than ever before and showing no signs of slowing down.

So how can you create the customer experience of your customer’s dreams (and not yours)? You need to use the data to direct your steps and these three mandates for planning customer experience in 2022 will get you started down the right path.

CX Mandate #1: Remember the “Pandemic Pivot” 

A major impact for marketers was shifting to a more digital-centric approach. Let’s consider these two complimentary data points. 71% of consumers report spending more time online during the pandemic, 76% expect this to continue long term. And simultaneously, from the 2022 State of the CDP Report, 79% of survey respondents pointed to pandemic-influenced disruption as a factor in their CDP choice.

Those are big numbers. The pandemic has disrupted everything, but it has also placed customer data at the heart of our path forward. The future is omnichannel and requires real time customer data that can be activated immediately across both digital and in-person customer experiences to truly engage the market.

CX Mandate #2: Prioritize your Data Collection (and Consent) Strategy 

When planning customer experience for 2022, having not just data, but the right data is critical to creating insights that will drive these omnichannel personalized experiences. 88% of consumers say how much they trust a company determines how much information they’ll share. So, customer data is the heart of the new customer experience. But customers won’t just hand over their data to anyone, and new regulations on how that data is collected, stored and acted on are coming up all the time. Soon, there will be so many global data regulations that companies everywhere will have no choice but to create a compliance strategy. 

How do you create a compliance strategy that works? Compel your customers to give you their data willingly. In this recent blog, we cover a number of ways you can create that customer data value exchange.

CX Mandate #3: Ensure Real-time, Connected Customer Communications

Nearly 80% of consumers (the #1 answer) report speed as the most important element of a positive customer experience. Why, you might wonder? Because with the great migration to the virtual space over the last two years (exponential growth), people don’t just expect the right information to make the best decisions for their interests, they are making those decisions quickly. Almost immediately. And if the information from your company isn’t relevant or up to date based on the customer’s interests or issues (insights pulled from their data), they will move on. Point blank.

To act on customer data quickly enough to grasp the fleeting moments of customer decision making, companies must have the right data and tools to be flexible, reach their customers quickly, and provide them with the latest information, offers, or opportunities in real time.

Using Tealium, our customers can set audiences in Audience Stream to those customers and reach out proactively with timely and relevant information these customers may need.  

Matt Parisi, Director of Product Marketing, will be speaking on planning customer experience in 2022 and more at “The Year Ahead in Marketing” virtual event January 25-27th, produced by the American Marketing Association. For more information on how we can support planning customer experience in 2022, request a demo here.