COVID-19 has made businesses more dependent on digital technology than ever before – and a growing number of organizations are seeing an opportunity in this shift. Many businesses have acted swiftly to restructure their approach to delivering customer experiences – and have no intention of reverting to a largely manual way of doing things once the pandemic passes. Digital customer experience is no longer just a way of staying connected during lockdown. It’s swiftly become a deliberate business strategy, and one from which organizations are expecting to gain significant competitive advantage.
Twilio’s 2021 State of Customer Engagement Report draws on data from the more than 1 trillion human interactions that took place on the world’s leading cloud communications and customer engagement platform in the last year. It also includes insights from a survey of 2,500 decision-makers at enterprise-level businesses worldwide. This data reveals a permanent shift in how businesses are thinking about engaging with and understanding their customers – and it has big implications for Israel. The mainstreaming of digital customer experience will create new opportunities for the Start-up Nation while revolutionizing previously conservative areas of the economy. It will also signal a new era of competition for tech talent.
The promise of personalized customer experience through data
Digital interactions on the Twilio platform grew by 45% over the last year. More than than half of the business decision-makers that the company surveyed said they had increased their number of digital interactions by 50% or more. The average business increased the number of digital touchpoints through which they engage customers by 63%.
This trend shows no sign of diminishing., Importantly, 95% of senior business decision-makers expect to maintain or increase their investment in digital customer experience over the next year – and 87% describe that investment as critical or very important to their success going forward.
The reason for that critical importance comes down to data and what organizations can plan to do with it. It’s an irony of customer experience that, while face-to-face interactions or in-person phone conversations feel more personal, they often aren’t personalized in any meaningful way. No matter how empathetic a customer service rep might be, they can’t offer proactive insight and suggestions if they lack background information on the customer themselves. Businesses are recognizing that digitally delivered customer experiences can change the game, enabling a hybrid model where customers can access better online experiences, but also engage with customer service reps who are better informed about them. In the Twilio survey, 90% of business leaders report that they now had greater insight on their customers as a result of engaging them digitally during the pandemic.
The global research and consultancy firm Forrester argues that this will enable personalized customer experiences at scale, not just for big businesses with large tech budgets but for any organization that can use vast new amounts of data to build a more holistic view of those buying from them. This will create new areas of opportunity for tech businesses that specialize in making complex data sets simple and actionable.
Distributed and agile – remote working is here to stay
The pandemic hasn’t just changed the way that customers engage with companies. It’s also changed the way that those companies deploy their resources internally. Digital customer experiences are increasingly delivered through agile, distributed organizations, with call center workers that can deal with customer service queries from their kitchen tables. The key enabler of this trend is the cloud, with 92% of decision-makers telling Twilio that the pandemic has accelerated their adoption of cloud-based systems and services.
Enabling frontline, customer-facing roles to be performed from anywhere aligns businesses with the way that a growing number of professionals choose to work. Even in August, after most COVID-related restrictions were lifted, a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute found that more than a third of Israelis were still working completely or partially from home. With cases rising again and talk of the potential for further lockdowns in the future, building a distributed working model makes a lot of sense as a business strategy. It future proofs an organization’s ability to keep operating. For fast-growing start-ups, it can provide an opportunity to scale operations internationally without having to establish physical offices in new markets first.
Access to developer talent is a business imperative
The pandemic has moved digital customer experience from a point of difference for challenger brands and start-ups to a guiding principle of business strategy for organizations of any size, in any sector. This puts a premium on the ability to design and build new digital experiences as and when they’re needed. Enterprise-level businesses can’t afford to rely on software that comes out of a box – they need developers that understand their business challenges, understand their customers’ changing needs and can swing into action quickly to address them.
In the Twilio survey, 92% of C-level executives said that their developers have been crucial to solving the challenges resulting from the pandemic. That appreciation of the value of coding skills will inevitably increase competition for developer talent, pitting organizations and sectors against one another – and against tech businesses and start-ups that have helped to pioneer developer culture. The businesses that succeed in hiring and retaining the best developers will be those that empower them by putting building software at the heart of how their business runs. Their customer experience and success increasingly depend on it. Digital customer experience hasn’t just become the new normal. In all areas of business, it’s now an essential.
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