Lachlan Austin headed to the Customer Connect 2021 conference at Doltone House in Sydney on 18 November, on behalf of CapFeather. We asked him to find out the big, emerging problems CX Leaders were focused on solving right now. Here are 15 of them.
How do I perpetuate the beneficial outcomes of COVID? For example Deliveroo, Doordash, Jimmy Brings all established patterns of consumer behaviour. As product providers, how do we keep these new channels to market?
How do I prevent my technology from being an obstacle to my customers and my staff, and from creating more work than it generates insights? A stack of digital transformation goals have been pushed through in short time - including a big technology debt, built-up through badly executed but good-enough-for-now things - this needs to be fixed in 2022.
Hubspot’s Kat Warboys (MD APAC) says that an average mid-tier firm has 137 apps within their marketing environment, while large enterprises have 288! That’s a lot! Understandably, lots of businesses seem to be struggling to keep their “mushroom” of proprietary apps under control and coherent... So, as a CX / CI Manager, how do I keep my marketing tech stack navigable (by consumers and staff)?
How do we deal with the removal of 3rd party cookies? Most current marketing stacks will be hamstrung. We can expect a rise in dedicated apps which can control consumer data as 1st party, but gaining adequate consumer trust for people to willingly surrender their (personal) data will be a challenge.
How do we make sure we meet our customers where they are in a digital environment? For example, how do we appear in their preferred social media environments when contextually appropriate?
How do I get my fragmented systems that cover multiple brands and shopper experiences to talk to each other, so that I can get a coherent view of customer?
How do I deal with the customers I don’t want in my marketing funnel? How do I define and recognise and deal with “anti-personas”?
How do I achieve fast turn-around between “listen” and “act” in my CX feedback system / implementation vehicle?
How do I democratise customer insights to engage more staff, more rapidly and impactfully, on delivered experience?
How do I simplify my CX / SAT metrics? I want them to perform more like a pulse that flags areas to observe more closely, than a full monitor that seeks to explain what’s wrong.
How do we create a metric we can trust internally? NPS is too volatile and creates too much internal burden in chasing after variations.
How do we understand our category and use cases better? We need to take grounded insights into identifying a core need – this gives us a more fertile innovation frontier.
How do we strike the right (new) balance between digital and physical / on-site / human experience? We are told that, in addition to pure online sales, COVID has also seen an increase in ROBIS – Research Online Buy In Store. We need to optimise the combined experience opportunity.
How do we deal with the vacuum for connection on a human level that COVID has created? How can businesses be present where consumers are now (physically and mentally)? Half of consumers surveyed said they “missed talking to humans” in their business interactions in general. It is time to revisit customer journeys to see what’s moved on.
Reduced human channels through COVID have accelerated our digital education and product selection and purchase platforms coming online. How do we simplify our service or product at the design stage to be natively designed for digital and superbly easy to navigate and comprehend for our customer?
What is clear from the Customer Connect Conference 2021 is that there is an enormous opportunity to further develop the customer experience into 2022. From better technology enablement and designing digital experiences, to improved internal knowledge and metrics, there is a wide scope to innovate our customer experience. Next year in the Edition, the CapFeather team will address some of the solutions we see for these problems and provide some inspiration for you to use inside your organisation.
Lachlan Austin is a Senior Associate with CapFeather. He has over 20 years B2B and B2C marketing strategy development and implementation experience across FMCG, Industrials, Health, Defence and FSI. Lachlan specialises in developing customer strategies that get cut through and excels at bringing the ‘process & human’ parts of organisations together in strategy design and implementation.