As customers move from brand awareness to engagement and beyond, it’s essential for businesses to deliver personalized, human-centric experiences. In the current climate, what steps can brands take to elevate the customer-first approach?
Since 2018, Deloitte Digital has used research and statistics to better understand how emotions affect loyalty across the entire customer life cycle. Deloitte Digital helps companies understand how to translate those findings into tangible actions and initiatives that can improve their brand.

Turning brands into bonds

Our research shows that in good times and bad, people expect brands to be empathetic, responsive, respectful, and reliable. And while rational considerations may connect customers with brands, emotions are what bond them in a sense of relationship. But what’s the most effective way for brands to do that? Enter the Operationalized Human Experience, or OpHX.

We recommend companies focus on four key initiatives, which serve as the pillars of the OpHX discipline:

  • Enterprise-wide strategy: Reimagine your enterprise wide strategy to humanize core operating principles and to tie more closely to experience management operating processes.
  • Empowered people: Reorganize, incentivize, and empower your people to build experiences, offerings, and systems of value for the customer while creating a culture that is difficult for competitors to match.
  • Robust governance: Recognize that customer data is likely underutilized, undervalued, and increasingly a proprietary differentiator for your organization—and that robust governance can help you use that data correctly in ways that elevate the experiences of customers.
  • Harmonious technology: Respect that this new way of working is difficult and cannot happen without investing in harmonious technology that helps meet customers where they are and predict where they want to be—and that can scale to meet the growing demands of an increasingly diverse and evolving customer base.

Between competitive pressures and rising consumer expectations, building stronger emotional bonds with customers is no longer just a nice-to-have for businesses. It is becoming a vital safeguard against competition and a driver of value in today’s increasingly crowded markets.

Fully embracing the Operationalized Human Experience business discipline can have a long-lasting impact across your company’s operations and culture, helping it become a more empathetic and responsive brand.

We know that customers expect companies to work hard to earn their trust, resolve issues, listen to feedback, and protect their data. In Creating Human Connection at Enterprise Scale, we offer research insights and practical, data-driven steps that can help infuse customer interactions with the right tone, at the right time, and in the right context, adding lasting loyalty, value, and emotional relevance to your business.

Learn more about creating human connection at enterprise scale.

Tim Greulich is the Operational Customer Experience Practice leader at Deloitte Digital, and a managing director with Deloitte Consulting LLP. He is a thought leader on Operational CX, with a focus on taking innovative concepts and turning them into executable realities.

Jennifer Buchanan is a Customer Experience Insights leader at Deloitte Digital and a VP of alliances with Deloitte Consulting LLP. She is a thought leader in CX research, with a focus on finding innovative approaches to understanding the human perspective.

Sarah Logman is a Specialist Leader at Deloitte working at the cross section of data science and marketing to produce actionable insights for clients on marketing effectiveness and customer journey. Her work helps clients use analytics to better understand their customers and make better marketing decisions to proactively run their business.