Brands that focus on customer experience as a critical function of business process can accrue impactful results. As organizations in the consumer goods and retail sectors expand their global operations, they cater to a diverse set of audience with polarity in customer expectations. A global brand has to adapt to the market in which they are set up, and yet stay focused on their values and mission.

Research indicates that despite of a challenging year, in 2020 global retail ecommerce sales grew by 27.6% for the year, for a total of $4.28 trillion. Interestingly, global retail sales declined by 3% to $23.84 trillion. A survey of over 30,000 consumers indicated that more than half preferred to shop online post COVID-19. These trends clearly indicate a dramatic shift towards ecommerce and direct to consumer. Traditional brick and mortar stores and consumer packaged goods companies are now finding it imperative to have an online presence or risk the loss of precious customers to competition. As a result, there is a pertinent need for blending hyper personalization and unique customer experience of a store visit, to an ecommerce shopping experience.

One of the key paths to delivering a consistent customer experience, irrespective of location is to be agile and adapt to rapidly changing environment. One of the ways of bringing in agility, speed, flexibility, and scalability is by adopting ‘cloud-based customer experience solutions’. This solution gives businesses the required flexibility and reliance to scale up during consumer demand and are also adapted for an omni-channel environment.

Today, most businesses use 8 to 10 different channels for customer engagement. Maintaining efficient digital interactions across all channels requires a robust set of customer experience technologies, which help businesses with engagement metrics to understand the behavioral patterns. Through customer journey mapping, customer experience leaders can deliver consistent and personalized customer interactions across all these channels.

Digital CX platforms fulfill the need to build a reliable bridge between customers and the brand

• Equipped with decision engines that tap machine learning, companies can use the cloud to automate, personalize, and optimize customer engagement
  
• Appropriately deliver messages to customers―both online and offline by connecting decision models with a marketing cloud platform
• Gain richer insights from data to make more relevant decisions in real time, focusing on how to engage with their customers as well as employees and other audiences

With much less reliance on IT support and maintenance, a cloud-based platform also gives a chance to focus resources on more strategic business objectives. Generational shift in IT is an economic shift as well, as the way to gain customer base is to invest in innovation and technology. Some of the other economic benefits include:

• Reduced capital expenditure in the long term
  
• Lower labor costs due to low maintenance
• Faster adaptation in rapidly changing markets

In the current emerging markets, it is crucial for businesses to address the changes required to their IT landscape to not only acquire a bigger market share but also to retain the existing one. At the end of the day, customer satisfaction is the path to customer advocacy and loyalty.