The Global pandemic brought a fundamental change in the world. It changed the way we interact with customers, prospects, and each other. Things may never be the same again.
While the initial thoughts of retailers were to possibly hold back on making any brash decisions and instead wait for things to settle down. As time passed, some retailers folded and others were left with very few options to mitigate the situation.
Across all industries, the global pandemic made it necessary for business owners and leaders to consider how their businesses communicate with existing and prospective clients.
Failure to communicate, and failure to communicate appropriately meant business survival would have been impossible. Some have still not quite perfected their approach and Pretectum thinks that customer data is a root cause.
The general consensus seems to be that we are likely to suffer this “new normal“ for years to come and if you think your business is going to be immune to the change effects on customer behaviour, it is worth considering how it has impacted these industries’ examples.
Retail
The retail industry possibly felt the effects of the pandemic possibly more than anyone, at least initially. Bricks and mortar (B&M) shops were closed, and when they were open they often had to contend with extreme control measures that limited the number of patrons, the management of facilities, and related activities.
According to Mastercard Spending Pulse, traditional retail sales dropped by 6.3 % in 2020. The pandemic changed the fundamentals of how many businesses sell and how people buy. For retailers, it became necessary to renew their go-to-market approach to develop opportunities; failure to adapt meant an inability to thrive, and ultimately failure became a real threat.
Traditional retailers had, for many years, been content with the anonymous consumer but when they implemented eCommerce in response to sagging B&M sales, they suddenly found that data was now present but often still misaligned or completely divorced from their POS and logistics execution systems, this massive change caused significant data deficits to become apparent.
Logistics and travel
During the pandemic, nearly 90% of the world’s population was subjected to travel restrictions, and airlines and carriers saw a drop in demand and curtailment of flights. Airports were largely shuttered and many air carriers were forced to offer customers credits or refunds on existing travel bookings. In short, the travel industry as a whole was really badly affected.
2020 saw logistics contract by ‘only’ 3.3%. However, with time when consumers pivoted from going into stores to instead shopping online, demand for logistics, particularly domestic, grew. With so much online activity, the sector required systems that streamlined business operations further and gave clarity to not just supply chain managers but also retail operations and consumers directly. eCommerce retailers needed to be able to answer questions like: “Where is my parcel?“, and “When will it reach me?“
Ecommerce
The global e-commerce market jumped over $26.7 trillion during the pandemic.
The industry ultimately has mixed feelings about this apparent surge, with outbursts of demand accompanied by the expectation of zero transportation costs but at the same time having to cope with a highly fragmented and challenging domestic delivery network. This saw carriers that had already established themselves, flourish. This also saw the emergence of some repurposing of related but not directly involved carrier involvement trying to grab a piece of the action. Some that had dipped their toes in logistics doubled down as their ride-sharing business sagged.
It was at this time, that many businesses started their first journey into the realm of ‘the digital‘ and this required setting up a structural data foundation that helped them gather all crucial information on when buyers visit their online store, add products to a shopping cart, or engage in shopping activities.
All this information was crucial for effective execution and ultimately retargeting. Some held out, others leveraged partnerships and even others launched whole new businesses whose whole model was eRetail.
Hospitality
The hospitality industry, for the most part, came away just as battered as the airline industry. Hotels, particularly resort hotels saw their business vaporized by the knock-on effects of restricted travel. In addition, they had to subject their operations to specific health and safety mandates. In some locations, hotels were smart enough to repurpose themselves as quarantine hotels, in particular in countries or locations where quarantine orders were in effect for suspected risk cases or the infected who did not require hospitalization.
Business travellers now stayed at home, didn’t use car rental, didn’t fly in a plane and didn’t stay in a hotel or have a corporate lunch or dinner and instead resorted to Zoom, Gotomeeting, Skype, Microsoft Teams and Webex calls.
Consumers became hesitant to go out to restaurants, cinemas and taverns, fearing catching the virus. In some geographies, these businesses were told to shutter their operations unless they could service their clients with takeaways. Even high-end restaurants suddenly discovered that they needed to offer an in-home dining option in whatever way they could.
The hospitality sector has been considered relatively slow in adopting the latest customer data management frameworks, in part because many of them have long-established customer and customer loyalty databases but nonetheless they too could benefit from improved data management and all that it offers in support of more qualified decision making.
As is witnessed by the differing impacts, some businesses withered, and others saw a decline but then switched their way of working based on increasing pressure to work in new ways. At the heart of all of these though, is the question of how each of these businesses and industries as a whole, look at and consider their customer data management. For some, they had to look at a different set of values that mattered. For others, the most important piece of the puzzle was to embark on a program of gathering data that they had never gathered before.
All of these efforts drive towards improving the ability of the organization to thrive, accelerating digitalization in support of changing customer preferences and working out what methods are the most appropriate for engaging with, and communicating with customers. Some have already matured quite quickly and started to harvest the benefits through better analytics and targeted messaging, others are just starting out. The question is for your business, do you know what the expectations are and how well are you meeting those expectations?
A Customer-MDM creates a unified framework to connect customer data across the organization, breaking through business silos and streamlining processes and making all the necessary data available to all those that need it, in a secure and managed way.
Collecting and maintaining high-quality customer data will give you a better understanding of your customer and in all likelihood help your business to more adequately address the needs and expectations of your customers. A single source of truth for customer data will help your business units like marketing, logistics, sales and service to not only be appropriate and relevant but in fact, even take advantage of aspects of customer data that had previously never been considered.
The Pretectum CMDM helps businesses of all shapes and sizes with the challenge of customer data curation in pursuit of improved personalized customer relations, improved compliance, improved marketing execution, collections, logistics, sales and service.
In the long run, the objective has to be the augmentation of customer lifetime value accompanied by a customer sentiment of trust and loyalty. Contact us to learn more.