Loyalty is one of those concepts that’s as old as time itself really. Loyalty, as a trait, has played a major role in much of history, from betrayed loyalty, to misguided loyalty, to heroic loyalty that saves the day. In business, although loyalty may not take on such as epic importance, it does play a very important (some may even say the most important) role in building customer relationships.

2020 has revealed new aspects about the economy and the relationship that businesses form with their clients. One of these revelations, increasingly evident over the last decade or so, is the correlation between the customer experience and key business metrics.

The virtual era has arrived, and it’s in full swing. While the past couple of decades have largely been about making the digital transformation, 2020 has truly seen the biggest push toward this new age of digital operations and virtual communications. As part of this transformation into the remote age and digital society, companies have found that the customer experience is one of the most crucial aspects in growing and sustaining a business.

The most important person to a company or organization isn’t the CEO or any of the C-suite executives; it’s not even the chairman of the board of directors or even the majority stockholder. Nope. The most important person to any company or organization is the individual end-consumer.

When working with customers, knowing what they want so that we get to know them individually is imperative. We want to focus on not only what they want to achieve, but also what they expect from us to help them to get to these goals, whichever field, or industry they may be in.

In the past decade, an enormous amount of communication channels have emerged. Most notably, many, if not most of these new communication channels have become digital, a key indicator of the powerful shift toward an interactive world where businesses must be able to operate and communicate with their customers in this realm. ‘Digital-first’ does not necessarily mean digital-only: a digital-first mindset provides companies with greater agility and flexibility to communicate directly with their customer base.