Over the last 12 months we’ve seen the pandemic pendulum swing hard in the direction of digital. 2020 forced everything that could live in digital into digital. While this swing has made customers more open to trying new brands  and new experiences, it’s also made them increasingly more intolerant of bad experiences and more demanding in terms of their expectations.
 
At yesterday's Marketing Society’s talk titled Is Convenience the new Narcissism? Deirdre Bourke Marketing & Operations Director Microsoft, Ronan Mc Evoy Consultant @ Free Now and Paul Sweeney VP Product Webio, joined us to share a lively discussion on convenience and what customers expect from brands in a post pandemic world. How do we meet customers growing expectations now the digital genie is out of the bottle!
 
Here are the 5 KEY TAKE OUTS from the session:
 
1.  Convenience is king & incremental improvements in time can add up to big disruption: For  every small incremental step in making the customer journey easier the more likely customers are to use it again and again.
Slightly easier is cumulative then disruptive.  Make small changes to make the service that little bit more convenient in every aspect of before -during-after the event. FREE NOW focus every day on trying to make the overall experience better for passengers and drivers. The vast majority is unseen, but it all adds up. Remember that it isn't always about Big – incremental improvements lead eventually to disruption.
 
2. Service is one continuous conversation with customers  and marketers will need to begin adapting more fluently to voice searches and conversational interfaces as a way of continually staying connected to customers. Customers tell us more when they are interacting conversationally. These could be valuable bits of context. The best conversations are going to require live data, so integrations with enterprise applications will be important. 
 
3. Data is the new oil

• Organisations need to ensure they get a return on their data and don’t let it go to waste
• Apps can make intelligence of data
• There are now solutions like Power Apps that allow brands to build custom apps for their business needs.
• Data is democratising apps by enabling users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.
• It is also providing rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform manual business processes to digital, automated processes.

 4. Liquid interactions v Friction: The journey to convenience will require understanding multiple contexts. But you do need to strike the balance between how easy you make it for consumers to use your service, and how much information you need to gather - versus the risk to your P&L (e.g. payment default, fraud, etc.).
 
 5. Blended experiences will become the new norm combining offline with online with different technology platforms continuing to blend in 2021. Having a balanced approach between digital commerce, owned retail, is most stable approach. That’s not to say we should move the focus away from digital,  but finding a balance is key. Each channel is there for a purpose representing varying degrees of risk, reward and brand messaging. This is probably the best way to keep such pendulum swing in check.