3 Trends to Adopt for CX Success This Holiday Season

This holiday season it appears that it’s retailers vs. the behemoth in the room — Amazon.com. To keep up, retailers must embrace technology and better adapt to ever-evolving consumer behavior changes. Here are three data-packed trends making their mark this holiday season.

Customer Experience is the Key to Retention Success 

Having a strong data strategy in place is essential for mastering the art of customer experience. Greeting your customers from the moment they engage with your brand must be specially curated, personalized and representative of their interests amid the moments that matter most. And brands must go the extra mile for those who are new customers. Merely obtaining a new email address does nothing without understanding that shopper's needs.

The question then becomes: If you manage to obtain their email address, what else do you know about why they've shown up to your digital property? Why are they here today? What do they want? And what can I do to give them the best experience possible? In an era where the customer is king, if you choose to treat them like a pawn, you will lose their business. Whether it's information gathering or a conversion, it's all part of their unique customer journey.

When a customer visits a brand, they're initiating a conversation. Many marketers choose to ignore this conversation in favor of reacquisition marketing techniques. Instead of engaging in the conversation with the customer when they're ready, marketers are repeatedly forcing the conversation for some time. Think about it this way: a customer calls into a call center and the service representative immediately asks for the person’s phone number, says they will call them back, and then hangs up the phone. The service representative doesn't know the customer’s interests, dislikes or previous search history. That’s exactly what happens when brands snag customers’ email addresses and don’t adopt experience strategies in the moments following.

Additionally, brands that prioritize convenience experiences will stand out from the rest. Three-week shipping? Too long of a wait. Painful returns? No thank you. Chatbots and customer service bots that can’t get the job done? On to the next one. The positive experiences shouldn’t stop when customers hit “purchase”; rather, it should be implemented throughout the entire journey. To keep up, retailers must move as fast as their customers do.

So, how can retailers avoid these major mishaps and close experience gaps? Managing these experiences can be challenging, especially with heavy website traffic during the holiday season. However, adopting customer data strategies that capture the right data from every moment can not only drive operational efficiency during these busy times, but it's also the key to customer retention success. When you're trying to capitalize on the moments that matter to your customers, clean, well-thought-out data infrastructure coupled with the power of true real-time data processing and insight is essential to success.

Betting Big on Facebook: The Odds-On Favorite This Holiday Season

Social media has exploded when it comes to retail marketing, and many are betting big on Facebook. With advertising spend expected to significantly increase, this platform is poised for exponential in-the-moment-that-matters-most marketing. Whether sitting around the dinner table or checking up on your family members online, Facebook is an ultimate connector — thus being the perfect platform for retailers to curate a meaningful experience.

For example, Facebook events traffic on Black Friday hit the billions in 2022, a major uptick vs. 950 million in 2021 (U.S.). On the global scale, we could see events surpass 5 billion, as traffic continues to ramp up with brands hosting a plethora of promotions throughout the entire holiday season. And although you may see an uptick, conversion measurement may not translate. Adopting conversion API (CAPI) strategies can help better measure the impact of Facebook and social media advertising. Working with an agnostic data platform can alleviate these pain points as they can offer integration capabilities with these media players and allow for enhanced visibility of advertising campaigns.

All Hands on Deck: Crush Operational Silos for Data Success

The build vs. buy dilemma has come to a screeching halt. Retail businesses must embrace both to remain agile in today’s climate. Furthermore, all aspects of a retail organization are getting involved in the technology buying decision-making process, as all facets of business become reliant on customer data.

Data has truly become the connector to customer experiences and can accelerate operations from finance to legal, to marketing and beyond. The reality is every department needs customer data to perform at their best, and every department must work together to get the most of their data. To begin with beating down these silos, retailers must access themselves where data currently sits in their organization and establish a data center of excellence (CoE). According to the Organization of the Future Report, a data CoE streamlines talent and resources to ensure cross-departmental teams can quickly and efficiently act on unified customer data. Essentially, this team allows all in finance, legal, marketing and more to have access to the same clean and accurate data, in real time.

Investing in your data infrastructure by partnering with a customer data platform and other data-centric solutions is critical in building customer experience initiatives and can help accelerate your business and WIN this holiday season.

Mike Anderson is the founder and chief technology officer of Tealium, a customer data platform.