According to Gartner® Top Strategic Technology Trends in Consumer Goods Manufacturing for 2023, the top CG technology trends in 2023 focus on customers, technology, and sustainability. This translates to consumer behaviors evaluating three primary areas:

• Financial impact and uncertainty. What is the value of this product? Is it worth the money? Does it work?
• Trust in manufacturer integrity. Is the manufacturer doing what it says it is doing?
• The experience working with and for a company. How do consumer goods manufacturers treat suppliers, employees, and consumers? Are they providing and participating in current platforms and technologies?

The pressure is on CPG brands to meet these accelerating expectations and answer these unspoken questions that are top of mind for consumers.

How can brands accomplish this when not all customer journeys are alike and consumers are in control?

Connect your brands, employees, and consumers

Evolve with changing consumer preferences

Explore solutions

Evolving with the customer is essential

Journeys are no longer linear and are driven by the customer—be it the consumer, retailer, or distributor—who determines the preferred path including any stops, starts, and detours along the way. Giving them the option to choose what messages they want to receive along with when and how they receive them is essential for creating a successful journey. Some customers prefer human interaction, others self-service across digital channels, and many require a combination of physical and digital. Others prefer to avoid personal interaction and choose a tech interface whenever possible. Giving customers these choices require brands to have synergy across multiple experience disciplines. It requires a shift from customer experience (CX) to what Gartner® calls total experience (TX). According to Gartner®, “TX is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining the multi-experience (MX), CX, employee experience (EX), and user experience (UX) disciplines.” A sophisticated customer experience is the goal, but more importantly, it is delivering a total experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Research on this topic brings home how critical this is. 

A recent Harvard Business Review article brings home how critical this is.

“Our recent survey of 6,200 customers in China, France, and the United States uncovered seven CX factors that directly influence customer satisfaction. The first four—convenience, choice, navigation, and payments—are indispensable. That is, the presence or absence of these factors determines whether a customer judges a particular experience as good or bad. Think of them as table stakes. The remainder—ambiance, expertise, and touch-and-feel—amplify the baseline level of satisfaction. While their presence boosts satisfaction from “good” to “very good” 70 percent of the time, their absence turns a “bad” experience into a “very bad one” 89 percent of the time.”

Identifying ways to understand and adapt to evolving consumer preferences along with delivering direct-to-consumer engagement is integral to enhancing the customer journey.

Our approach

It starts with data 

Brands are looking for ways to understand consumers better. They need insights in order to know them and orchestrate customer journeys as well as identify interactions that contribute to customer lifetime value (CLTV), churn, and loyalty. This requires CPG brands to gain a holistic understanding of consumers and build brand equity through tailored data-driven marketing and experiences.  

To achieve this, CPG brands need to leverage data from multiple sources, such as point-of-sale, e-commerce, social media, loyalty programs, surveys, and third-party providers, and combine them into a single view of the consumer. This improves consumer understanding, empowering brands to directly engage with individuals and target their personal needs, all powered by AI.

It requires elevating the consumer experience

In today’s uncertain times, consumers demand an end-to-end experience that provides value, quality, convenience, inclusivity, and sustainability. Brands must not only meet these expectations but also elevate the experience to the next level. This requires real-time personalization throughout the customer’s journey. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys utilizes insights about the consumer and activates them in real-time to optimize journey workflows, to create generative AI-powered segments and content to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that drive customer engagement. For example, Campari Group, a worldwide leader in spirits, wines, and non-alcoholic apéritifs industry is using our solution to increase awareness of Negroni week, an event that celebrates one of the world’s greatest cocktails and raises money for global charitable causes. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys generative AI Copilot is being used to send personalized emails to venue owners to get them involved. With generative AI targeting, Campari uses natural language to describe segments and uses generative AI Copilot for content ideas using key points to generate text suggestions expediting campaign creation and increasing marketer productivity. Watch Campari Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys to learn more.

It’s collaborative

Whether it’s brand building, product development, supply chain, or customer care, everyone is responsible for customer experience and optimizing the customer journey. It is a collaborative effort to deliver a great customer experience and requires breaking down data, technical, and people silos. Customer data needs to be combined with business operations data, marketing, sales, service, and supply chain lines of business should work in unison and be seamlessly integrated.

Collaborative intelligence can help CPG brands and retailers:

1. Understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs to better tailor their offerings accordingly.
2. Optimize their assortment, pricing, and merchandising strategies, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Innovate faster and launch new products that meet customer demand.
4. Build trust and transparency with each other and with customers.

This is exactly what Natuzzi is doing using our solution to bring beauty and timeless harmony to people around the world. Working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables Natuzzi to deliver a well-crafted experience across both B2C and B2B lines of business and empowers their entire global team spanning marketing, sales, field service, and customer care to deliver a seamless total experience. In a disjointed selling environment, Natuzzi can communicate better and more consistently with each customer with improved ongoing messaging, promotions, and events. With targeted campaigns, they are moving contacts to prospects and prospects to customers. Luxury furniture is a complicated market, and our solution keeps Natuzzi close to its customers and on top of market trends.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys and Dynamics 365 Sales to meet your customers’ expectations and bring your customers into focus.

You can also download a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journeys. And for the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers elevate the customer experience, download the e-book Reimagine Retail in the Digital Age.

Discover more Microsoft solutions for the consumer goods industry.

GARTNER® is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Deciphering consumer desires: Elevating customer journeys in retail CPG appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Connect your customers, your people, and your data.

Learn more

The hunt begins

According to eMarketer Insider Intelligence trends, forecasts and statistics, “the search for the best possible price is lengthening the shopping season. Nearly one-quarter (22 percent) of adults have already begun their holiday shopping (October) to avoid future price hikes.” 

Most shoppers start their gift pursuit online, across a myriad of channels, and are continuing to add new shopping methods acquired during the COVID-19, such as buy online with pick up in-store or at curbside. They want to get their shopping done earlier to beat the crowds and avoid shipping delays. They want to be able to shop with their mobile phone and social retail, while some still enjoy the chase, lying in wait to be the first in-store to beat out rival shoppers for the most sought-after gifts.  

Marketers are exhausted trying to keep up and have limited resources to work across an array of tools to meet these demands. And it doesn’t stop there: don’t forget the aftermath of post-holiday returns. Marketers, retail associates, and customer care agents are under pressure to ensure returns are exchanged for exactly what the recipient was hoping for and ensure the original purchase revenue is retained as well as the recipient’s loyalty, who may not even be a current customer. The holiday shopping cycle is complex it not only requires knowing the customer but also the recipient of the customer’s gift, their interests, and brand affinities as well as understanding their own customer journey with the retailer.

Our approach to innovate CX

We know these challenges firsthand. After all, we are also a well-known business-to-consumer retailer. Have you ever seen the lines of shoppers outside of a big box retailer on Black Friday hoping to score the latest Xbox console? We have, and we learned how to capture insights from shopper behavior, turn it into action to personalize customer experiences, and, during the process, transform consumers into super fans. As an example, we leveraged customer insights to pick up a social signal where a shopper who was camping out in a line on Black Friday in front of a big box retailer posted, “I wish Microsoft Xbox delivered pizza,” and based on our understanding of the customer, we were able to orchestrate a promo for a pizza and have it delivered to him on the spot. We earned a heart and a fan who drove significant likes on our social channels. What’s more, this kind of customer experience created memorable positive impressions of our brand beyond the product launch.   

We learned early on that customer experience (CX) is a game changer and built the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform founded on our own needs. As consumer behaviors and expectations continue to evolve, we continue to invest in this space and innovate with every release to bring new capabilities to retailers that enable them to surprise and delight their customers in moments that matter, be it the holiday season or every day of the year.

The gift that keeps on giving

CX knows no boundaries. It goes beyond the holiday season. It continues to grow and expand across organizations. It is not the responsibility of one line of business; it is everyone’s role within the organization, whether customer-facing or behind the scenes. Transform CX with our latest innovations and give shoppers a gift they will remember all year long: the gift of exceeding their expectations and an experience like no other. Here are some pointers on how to use the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to reduce holiday CX casualties and transform CX every day:

1. Maximizing the value of your data

The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and specificities of each customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights capability helps you realize the true value of your data by unifying disparate sources across the complete view of a shopper’s journey to discover insights that enable better experiences. Combining those data points into a unified customer profile improves your customer understanding, allowing you to engage them as individuals targeting their personal needs, all powered by AI.

Once you know your customer you can continue to unlock omnichannel insights with shopper and operations analytics. Using Customer Insights with Azure Synapse Analytics helps you combine business operations data such as supply chain and pricing with customer insights, including demand by demographics, geography, and brand affinities, to conduct advanced analytics to predict and manage product availability, to optimize price and recommend the next best product to ensure customer expectations are met. Read how Edible Arrangements is doing this today.

2. Elevate the shopping experience

The holidays put additional pressure on retail consumers. They demand an experience that is tailored to their tastes and respects their time and energy. Brands must not only meet expectations but also elevate the experience to the next level. This requires real-time personalization throughout the customer’s journey. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform capabilities with Dynamics 365 Marketing utilize the insights about the customer and activate them in real time to identify segments and preferred channels, trigger flawless journeys, create self-service content, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences not just based on who the customer is, but also in real-time based on what they are doing. For example, Leatherman, an American brand of multitools and knives, is using our solution to better understand customer brand and interest affinities, customer lifetime value, and use this insight to orchestrate highly personalized cross-channel journeys at scale: from welcome journeys to post-purchase communications to checking in when customers haven’t made a purchase in a while. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform helps tailor the experience differently for new customers versus those who are on their way to becoming brand ambassadors. Read the full Leatherman story.

3. Real-time communications and collaboration

Be it the retail store associate, customer care agent, or—in the case of Campari—a Camparista, frontline workers are one of your organization’s most valuable assets. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides the means to utilize data across the customer’s journey and transform it into insights that can be seamlessly activated in customer care systems and in the hands of retail associates, be it on a mobile device, text message, email or through a dashboard in Microsoft Teams. The converged intelligence across sales, service, and marketing ensures frontline workers have real-time insights into customer interactions across the enterprise and are provided with recommendations for the next best action, products based on inventory, store availability, and customer affinities as well as understanding the customer’s last interaction with customer care. Store collaboration and communication fueled by insights empower store associates to maximize sales and customer care agents to be as effective as possible and deliver smart assistance in moments that matter.  

Microsoft’s solutions empower the retail industry to connect your customers, your people, and your data. Connected, these applications unlock unique opportunities to create individualized experiences that meet customers’ expectations whether it be the holiday season or all year round.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail and how you can use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to meet your customers’ expectations and bring your customers into focus with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

You can also download a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. And for the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers elevate the customer experience, download the ebook Reimagine Retail in the Digital Age. 

The post ’Tis the season for exceptional customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.