Deloitte Digital’s greatest hits of 2019

Where has the time gone? Between attending events around the world, publishing tons of new research, and making big strides in our business, 2019 has flown by. These past 12 months have brought incredible new talent like Rich Whalen to our team and three new studios to our roster, as well as sponsorships at big industry events and some snazzy awards. Take a look at some of our biggest accomplishments.

Work work work work work. It’s kinda our thing—you know, as a consultancy. This year brought some big wins, satisfying projects, and meaningful insights. To name just a few:

• We ate a lot of tacos, and also created digital kiosks at Taco Bell that help customers order alllllll the Cheesy Gordita Crunches. And as if getting tasty food into the mouths of hungry folks wasn’t rewarding enough, we also got recognized for our hard work in the 2019 Elevate Awards. Thanks, guys!
• Can you hear me now? We worked with our pals at Verizon and Salesforce to turn cart abandonment into engaging customer experiences. See the Connected Consumer Platform powered by Salesforce in action!
• Say hello to Hux by Deloitte Digital, brought to you by our acquisitions of Web Decisions and Magnetic. Hux helps companies drive hyper-growth by keeping the human at the focus of Every. Single. Interaction.
• Just this month, we launched Lift Acceleration Program™. What’s Lift Acceleration Program, you ask? Oh, just your new favorite customer-centric operating model that helps brands improve customer loyalty and business profitability!

Cannes and Las Vegas and Los Angeles, oh my! Can you tell we have a penchant for warm locations? (Sorry, Chicago studio.)

In March we were all, “we meet again, Adobe Summit.” That’s right, we were back in Vegas for another year of elevating the human experience. Highlights include a collaboration with always-wonderful The Female Quotient, mingling with 16,000 of the world’s leading digital experts, learning about Marketo, and hosting the brightest, most innovative client party at Summit featuring a glow-in-the-dark dance company! Oh, and belting out our favorite lyrics alongside The Killers.

Then came June so we said “oh la la” a lot because we were in the South of France at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and it’s just fun to say. Our BFFs Alicia Hatch, Barbara Venneman, John Elder, Suzanne Kounkel, Elaine Cox, Nelson Kounkel, Stacy Kemp, Jocelyn Lee, and more gave talks on topics ranging from women in STEM to inclusive leadership to the future of data. And when we weren’t at speaking sessions or sipping on rosé (again, we were in FRANCE), we were drinking water out of our exclusively designed Closca reusable water bottles because did we mention we were the festival’s first ever sustainability partner?!

As the kids went back to school, we headed to NYC for Advertising Week New York and the United Nations General Assembly for what was pretty much the busiest week ever. The topics on the table? Gender equality, sustainability, and representation in ads, just to name a few. While Alicia Hatch helped launch Target Gender Equality at the UN, Maggie Gross was at Advertising Week revealing the results of the “Heat Test” that show that representation in advertising correlates with an increase in stock price and public perception.

And then November came a’ knockin’ and it was inspiration at the door with a trip to Adobe MAX, where our creative team checked out the latest technology and trends. But that’s not all! Later that same month, we jetted off to the always electric Dreamforce where we were proud to sponsor the Dreamforce Equality Summit. We also hosted some great sessions about sustainability as part of our Business for Change platform, launched a little (read: BIG) thing called ConvergeHEALTH Connect, and led smart conversations about treating government citizens like, well, humans.

Man, it feels good to be recognized for the hard work we’ve done. Here are a few of the awards that made our hearts soar the highest this year:

• We’re still riding The Forrester Wave™ that came through last month when Forrester named us a global leader in digital experience agencies.
• As of about three days ago, we’re feeling like the cool kids after Adobe said "you CAN sit with us" and named us Adobe’s 2019 Global Digital Experience Solution Partner of the Year! It’s a good thing you can’t see us right now, because we literally cannot stop smiling and it’s starting to get awkward. 
• Gartner made us blush about a jillion times with awards like the highest rank in our market for customer strategy consulting and complex customer experience implementations use cases, as well as the highest rank for vision and ability to execute in its CRM Magic Quadrant (for the seventh year running, no less). Stop it already, you guys! 
• And while we were at Dreamforce last month we won THREE Salesforce Partner Innovation awards! All thanks to our digital transformation work in B2B commerce, higher education, and health care/life sciences. Go us! 
• MM&M (say that 10 times fast) named us number five on their list of top agencies. What an honor to be at the top with some of the industry’s biggest players!
• If you can count to four, you can count how many 2019 MuleSoft Partner of the Year awards we won this year—that’s right, our pals at MuleSoft honored us FOUR times for our work on growing their business through innovation with training and certifications. Next year, we’re going for five... 
• And at Adobe EMEA Summit 2019, we had the honor of being named Regional Partner of the Year for Benelux. Merci!

Extra, extra, read allllll about it! Across studios, we managed to write, edit, rewrite, edit again, and publish a lot of great research, reports, and thought leadership pieces this year. So, put down the memes for a bit and fill up your brain with some good stuff:

• What’s trending? Glad you asked. Take a look at the Tech Trends report from 2019, then take a look at what Andy Main has to say about it. If we’re doing our math right, it’s the tenth one we’ve published to date!
• If you haven’t met Garth Andrus and Anh Phillips, please give them a call right now and book a coffee date. Not only are these folks the nicest you’ve ever talked to, but they’re also incredible at Digital Transformation. So incredible, in fact, that they wrote a book about it: The Technology Fallacy. 
• In the Global Contact Center Survey, we explored what customer experience means today and how companies can meet and exceed rising customer expectations using technology. 
• Digital Transformation. Digital Transformation. Digital Transformation. Hope we don’t sound like a broken record, but we just really have a lot to say about Digital Transformation! Check out the “Connecting in the Digital Age” series we did with Condé Nast and WIRED. 
• If you’re a digital marketer and you know it, clap your hands! Then read our hot takes with AdWeek.
• There are few trends we love more than high-waisted jeans, but the 2020 Global Marketing Trends are some of them. Take a look!
• If you’re a human, you’re gonna like this one. (If you’re not a human, we’re really hoping you’re a puppy because we love puppies.) Check out how we quantified the value of human emotions with this research, and then used that work to check in to the hospitality industry and drive through the rental car industry.
• And while we’re on the subject of elevating the human experience, let’s talk about all the insightful things our pals Amelia Dunlop, Anthony Stephan, Scott Mager, and Mark Singer had to say on it here, here, and here. 
• Not to get all emotional, but we’re soooo proud of our Hux team. This year, they completed and published research on emotion-driven engagement, proving that the way we feel really matters when it comes to engaging with brands. But that’s not all! They also teamed up with Forrester Consulting to publish research on using customer data to create great customer experiences.
• For the fifth year in a row, we worked with MIT SMR to dive on into the world of digital innovation. Take a look! 
• We’ve seen into the future, and it’s looking bright. Well, for B2B sales anyway. Check out our research on experience selling!
• Oh, and we also published 45 blog posts this year, but who’s counting? Thanks for reading along!

What can we say other than What. A. Year. It was amazing to imagine new experiences, deliver client projects that resonate, and really run in the spaces where humans meet digital. 2019, you were quite a year and we can’t wait to see what future we create in 2020.

Hungry for more things Deloitte Digital? Take a look at how we put the human experience in everything we do with our case studies.