Is Your Customer Engagement Creating A Great Brand Experience?

With the drastic paradigm shifts which the Covid-19 pandemic brought, customers are expecting much more from the companies they patronize. One of the largest changes – as detailed in this article from Forbes – comes in the experience customers expect out of their retail expeditions. Personalization, for instance, is one of the most important elements for a brand to focus on when aiming to improve brand experience. “According to Accenture, [of the] customers who abandoned a business relationship in 2016, a full one-third did so due to a lack of personalization.”

Customers don’t want to feel like they are just consuming; instead, they want to feel like they are supporting a brand creating quality products and creating positive change in the world. They also crave personal, human interaction, much like how one grows a relationship with the owner of their favorite restaurant or other local business. Of course, the level of intimacy of these relationships cannot be replicated on a large scale, however personalization and humanization can help bridge the gap and improve brand experience exponentially.

“It’s entirely possible — and in fact, probable — that your customers want different things from your brand than they did pre-pandemic.” The world is different now than it was in December 2019, and the needs and wants of customers have changed. In fact, what people find important in life has changed too. 50% of consumers in an Accenture survey reported “rethinking their personal purpose and reevaluating what’s important to them in life due to the pandemic.” With this in mind, companies need to understand and cater to the needs of all customers now more than ever before. As listed above, much of these demands revolve around returning to a more human-oriented brand experience. “Always give customers the option to engage with technology when they want and switch to interact with an agent when they desire.”

Perhaps it’s the months spent socially distancing from one another, but people are craving human interactions, even in places where automation had begun to take hold pre-pandemic. Naturally, technology is not going to move in reverse; automation and new tech will push the brand experience forward. However, it is worth considering how things used to be, and using those principles to inform how we implement new technology. Despite all the conveniences of modern commerce, sometimes a positive, human experience is more important than saving a little bit of time.