CX, Marketing, Sales & Service post-Corona

This week marks the one year anniversary of our first full week of national lock down in the UK. One year ago I wrote a post trying to predict some of the key impacts of C19 to Customer Experience, Marketing Sales & Service. I outlined 5 key themes for CX / Marketing, Sales & Service in a Covid-world. It's interesting looking back… there are some things that have certainly played out (the very different impacts to different sectors, the need for customer understanding and empathy, the radical acceleration of digital-first journeys, the virtualisation of market sales and service), but there were many things that I missed (the enormous rise in cyber fraud, the innovation we've seen in last mile delivery services and contactless experiences, the end of cash etc)… 12 months on, it feels like the time is right to start thinking about a post-corona world. Now, of course I have no idea whether the vaccine program will eradicate Covid, or whether we will end up living with it for years to come. Either way, the last 12 months have created seismic change so let's explore what themes might be important to CX, Marketing, Sales & Service over the next 12 months as we move into a post-corona world.

1. Data-driven journey orchestration - the overwhelming post-pandemic winners have been the tech native companies. Their fly-wheels have spun faster and faster with increased digital adoption driving data & insights, automation, precision targeting and product & service innovation. As my colleague Janet Balis points out in her HBR article, "10 Trusts about Marketing after the pandemic", customers no longer benchmark between competitors, they benchmark against their last best experience. Today the customer's experience has proliferated across many different channels and eco-system players (some owned, some influenced and some completely outside the company's control). Customer's define and experience their own journeys through a complex maze of interactive websites and mobile apps, chatbots, forums, social media sites, last mile fulfilment services, eco-system partners etc. As the world emerges from lockdown, a decade's worth of accelerated digital adoption will need to be stitched together with the physical world. The CX winners will undoubtedly be those that can (with the right permissions and transparency) leverage data and AI to continuously tie together and orchestrate differentiated customer journeys and experiences.
2. People and planet - the idea of Stakeholder Capitalism has been around for more than 50 years, but in some ways it feels like it has built up more momentum in the last 12 months than the previous 49. As skies have literally cleared over polluted cities and shocking social equality issues have been laid bare (race, gender, minimum wage etc) companies have faced multiple pressure points to move beyond a short term focus on quarterly earnings. Employees, Customers, Regulators and Investors alike are all demanding that companies do more for the people and communities they serve and for the planet. The last 12 months have seen a wave of announcements from companies embracing long term value thinking, measuring the intangible value of their employee relationships, their customer relationship assets and their impact on society. Unilever have doubled down on their decision to invest in purposeful brands, Microsoft announced a pledge to become carbon negative by 2030, Ikea announced their new vision to move into the circular economy and Spain became the first EU company to give gig workers employee rights. One key change in the last 2 years has been the attitude of investors. BlackRock recently announced that they would divert funds to invest in sustainable companies and EY's investor survey found that 72% of investors conducted a structured review of ESG disclosures in 2020 (up from just 32% in 2018). 
3. The future of Marketing, Sales and Service operations is hybrid and augmented - many marketing, sales and service team have long wanted to create a more flexible workforce with greater efficiency and effectiveness. The pandemic created a huge accelerant to move large, physical contact centres to cloud-based, virtual contact centres. Office based sales teams have been transformed into remote, video-based relationship managers. Of course office work and face to face meetings will return, but many of the changes and innovations will stick. Deutsche Bank, Standard Life and BP have all already announced that they expect employees to work from home 1 to 3 days per week to reduce their need for prime office space and offer employees more flexibility. Most companies forced to adopt virtual working at scale, struggled at first but have now embraced the move and have introduced new tools to make their employees more connected and more impactful. Many contact centre agents for example have not only relished the flexibility of working from home, but they have also seen a significant upgrade in tools augmenting their daily tasks (e.g. online chatbots, real time transcription services, language translation, remote presentation tools and AI-recommendation engines). Today's virtual contact centre is arguably a big improvement for employees, customers and companies alike.
4. The power of eco-systems is here to stay - necessity has indeed been the mother of invention. The pandemic has forced business model, product and service innovation at speed and scale. Companies with strong eco-systems (start-ups, academia, corporates, consumers) have been at a great advantage as they have been able to quickly embrace new customer propositions, business and operating models. We've seen a rush of eco-system builds, partnership announcements and joint ventures in the last 12 months including supermarkets partnering with ride sharing companies to offer sub-30 minute deliveries, education institutions partnering with tech giants and tech start-ups to deliver remote learning to 1.8bn schoolchildren worldwide, healthcare companies partnering with telemedicine providers, government partnering with private sector, banks partnering with FinTech's and crypto-currency provides and, of course, the most impactful eco-syste, example of the pandemic… pharma companies partnering with academia, biotech, medical authorities, manufacturers and regulators to create vaccines in a timeframe previously through impossible. Eco-systems have changed the world of healthcare forever.
5. Cyber and data privacy is the currency of trust - unfortunately, increased digital adoption has been matched by exploding cyber challenges. From Solar Winds & the recent MS Exchange zero day attack to a seeming boom in fake news, cyber fraud and phishing scams. The last 12 months has been incredibly damaging for trust in the digital economy. Increasingly, as customers experience the ripple on impacts (credit card fraud, identify theft etc) they will start to demand companies take their privacy and their data seriously. Expect an increasing wave of class action lawsuits, regulatory fines and nation state cyber arms wars to follow. From a customer experience point of view, those companies with a strong track record of privacy, trust and cyber-security strength may be well placed to capitalise and differentiate around trust.

It's certainly been an eventful 12 months. As I said in my original post 12 months ago, first and foremost the pandemic has created a human tragedy. But, there's no question that CX, Marketing, Sales and Service have seen perhaps 5-7 years work of change compressed into the last 12 months. There's no chance of simply returning to yesterday's way of working. As John Donahoe, CEO, Nike recently stated:

"We know that digital is the new normal. The consumer today is digitally grounded and simply will not revert back”.