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Steve:
CX pros need to keep up to date on consumer attitudes and behaviors, and we know just the research you need to check out for the latest data.

Moira:
We set out to understand consumer behaviors on a global level. We wanted to understand their behaviors today and get an idea of how we can all expect them to change as people start to transition into a post pandemic world.

Steve:
Exploring the new report from XM Institute, 2021 Global Consumer Trends on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com/.

Steve:
Hello everyone, I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thanks for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore all the topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of their customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Well, our friends over at the Qualtrics XM Institute have been busy. They've produced yet another insightful report for experienced management professionals. The 2021 Global Consumer Trends report focuses on how consumer behavior will continue to change in a post pandemic world. The report takes a look at consumer behavior and attitudes across 18 countries and covers many topics, including loyalty, NPS and post COVID online behaviors. My guest on this episode is no stranger to the podcast. Moira Dorsey is a principal XM catalyst at Qualtrics XM Institute. And over the next couple of episodes, she's going to walk us through some of the insightful findings in this report. Moira, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Moira:
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Steve:
Well, you're always a delight to have on, and I'm so glad you're willing to do these podcasts. And I know you got a lot of interesting stuff to share with us today over the next couple of podcasts. But just for the folks that might be new to the podcast or don't know who you are, just give us a little bit of background on your role and a little bit of insight into what the Qualtrics XM Institute does.

Moira:
Sure. So the XM Institute exists to help some professionals succeed in their roles and to drive better business results through experience management. That is our mission in a nutshell. And we do research and thought leadership. And in addition to that, we publish about two to three pieces of research and thought leadership each week on xminstitute.com. And we also have the XM Professionals Network, which is a peer to peer networking community for XM leaders. And we also have training as well as certification for XM professionals. And I have been with the XM Institute coming probably past a year and a half now, and prior to that spent a number of years in customer experience management in a variety of roles.

Steve:
Yeah, well, you guys are really the thought leaders in the industry and you mentioned the website I'll hit it several times here during the podcast. But if any of our listeners have not visited xminstitute.com, definitely put that on your favorites and bookmark it because it's a great resource for XM pros. All right. Well, let's get into our topic that you've come on for today, and that is the 2021 Global Consumer Study. Why don't you just give us the background on the scope of the work and what the overall objective was and and how you conducted the work.

Moira:
Sure. So you set it up really well. Steve, as always, we set out to understand consumer behaviors on a global level. We wanted to understand their behaviors today and how to get an idea of how we can all expect them to change in the coming year. As people start to transition, we hope into a post pandemic world. And so we studied consumers in 18 countries. We looked at 17 industries and the study included 18,000, nearly 18,000 consumers. That included a thousand consumers per country that we looked at with the exception of a couple where we came in a little bit under a thousand and we gathered a representative sample for each country because we we gathered a sample based on age, gender and income that was representative for each country. Those are the big pieces. The other thing that two things that I would add, I am fortunate to be here to represent what it was a large team of people that did a lot of work on this, both the study and all of the deliverables that are coming out of that. And that leads to my second point, which is that there is just a breadth, a ton of data coming out of this report, which is great. So many insights and we're publishing a variety of reports, so. Those include reports that are by geography and country that were coming from Qualtrics and then a number of reports that are coming from the XM Institute that are doing deeper dives by some of the topics that we looked at.

Steve:
Yeah, I did look a little bit online at your blog, and that's why I wanted you to set it up, because what you have here is a tremendous benchmarking set of data for XM pros. You know, 18 countries representative of each country, 17 different industries. And so the the analytical opportunities here are literally endless. But maybe just give kind of an overall take on kind of what some of the big trends that you saw, what we're kind of the big takes on on sort of from a global and overall basis.

Moira:
Yeah. So the list of things that we are topics that we looked at were things like how customers, how consumers choose to do business with companies. We also looked at satisfaction with recent interactions as well as trust and advocacy, and we did some analysis around impact of experience. We also asked some questions to understand and do some get a sense of calibrating NPS by country. So asking people how they rate organizations that they like and how they rate organizations that they dislike just to get a sense for how that pans out across different countries when you normalize the questions like that. We also asked questions about channel preferences for different types of activities and looked at that through a couple of different lenses. And the other thing we did was to ask about new online behaviors that people picked up during the pandemic. And we also asked about what people expect to do in terms of whether they'll continue those new online activities or not. Post COVID.

Steve:
Yeah, let's dove into a couple of those little deeper. So, you know, obviously, COVID brought on a massive digital shift, particularly for organizations that didn't have a digital channel, because all of a sudden they needed to have one. What are the results and what are some of the interesting differences you saw in what is the kind of the prediction of of the future behavior?

Moira:
So we looked at – we asked about activities that people could reliably give us answers about. So we asked about whether they picked up new activities like online video or with family or friends, video calls and online shopping and grocery shopping and ordering from restaurants and things like that. And at the top level, the top three activities that people picked up across all of the countries were participating in videos with family and friends, shopping for groceries and shopping, just general online retail shopping. We also asked about things like handling personal banking, attending religious services, participating in online exercise classes. And, let's see, I think those are those are most of the big ones. So in terms of what did we find, we actually ended up calculating a bit of a… So we talked about things that the top three things that people adopted. We then asked people about that same list of activities and asked, do you think you'll do more about the same or less post COVID? And what we found was that we should expect to see and again, this is on a global basis, we should expect to see more growth in digital interactions for activities like handling personal banking. That one actually came out on top and buying products, watching movies and contacting customer service. But for other activities like fitness classes, religious services and videos with family people, the overall trend, when you subtract the people who expect to do less from the people who do more, the trend than the momentum is away from some of those activities and the second bucket. But the key takeaway is that handling online personal handling, personal banking online was the one that that came out looking like it would have the most momentum in terms of continued growth post pandemic.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Moira Dorsey and Moira is talking about the 2021 Global Consumer Trends report from Qualtrics. Moira, You know, these are such important macro trends for customer experience professionals because in you described it really well. I mean, I can't imagine that grandparents are going to continue to video chat with their grandkids if they can go see them. Right. And we're already seeing that. I've traveled a couple of times in the last month. And, you know, you go to the hub airports and it's like, you know, nothing, nothing ever happened. And planes are packed in. The concourses are packed. And so people are starting to travel again. And I know the business travel is off, but, you know, so it's been mostly personal travel. But then, you know, for other folks that maybe they never got around to learn an online banking until the pandemic. Now they've learned it and that one's probably not coming back.

Moira:
Exactly. And, well, we'll probably get into this later. But some other things that when we look at things like just looking at choice and preferences for different channels, for different kinds of activities, just separate from the question about the pandemic adoption, while people expect to do more online banking, they would still, when we asked them about channels they prefer for things like opening a bank account, they still prefer to do that

Steve:
In person, right?

Moira:
Yeah.

Steve:
So it will still be a hybrid experience. But, you know, this is obviously this has been going on in retail for 10 years or so, I guess coming up on a decade.

Moira:
Yeah.

Steve:
We talk a little bit more about the customer experience in one area where I know you guys have done a lot of work is the the the element of trust in relationships. And I imagine that the COVID thing probably, you know, really amplified that, given that people are having to change channels and, you know, the way they were doing business. But talk a little bit about for our newer listeners generally, how you guys look at trust in the overall kind of customer experience and satisfaction score. And then what were some of the findings that came out of this

Moira:
For satisfaction ratings for this particular study, I'll mention a couple of things that are that are different. People happen to be familiar with our XM Institute ratings that we do annually in the US. For this particular study, to make good comparisons, we did a couple of things. One, we asked people about their satisfaction with organizations that they've recently interacted with in different by industry, and we asked them to rate those experiences on a five star scale. Why? Because we think of that as a scale that people are reasonably familiar with across as many as 18 countries, and they can give a reliable answer. So that's one tidbit about how we asked about satisfaction. In terms of some trends with with satisfaction, and then I'll come back to to the the link with trust, streaming media companies came out on top in terms of satisfaction when we look at it by by industry. And there were also some some interesting findings we can come back to in terms of countries and satisfaction levels. But in terms of the the link between satisfaction and trust, we definitely did that analysis that you're alluding to where we looked at for consumers who gave ratings on that five point scale, we looked at whether and how their their trust in those organizations varied and whether and how their likelihood to purchase more from an organization varied. So all those loyalty kinds of metrics that you mentioned and as you would expect, we we see very similar. We see the kind of correlation you would expect where people who rate an organization at a one or two in terms of that five star scale are less likely to trust or purchase more. And the ones who it gradually trends up, the ones who rank an organization at a five star rating for the experience, give higher scores in terms of trust and likelihood to repurchase more. And the general trend across all 10 industries is like three X or four X in terms of the likelihood to trust and the likelihood to to purchase more. When you look at the delta between someone who rates an organization of one or two and one someone who rates it to five, so so that we might have expected. But it's still really interesting to validate it. And that data we have because of the sample size we have across, we have it at the global level, but not at the country level.

Steve:
Yeah. Did you see some interesting differences either by industries or by countries related to trust and satisfaction?

Moira:
Yes, we definitely saw some by industries.

Steve:
Yep.

Moira:
We saw that hospital hospitals and medical clinics came out on top in terms of consumer trust and government agencies were the lowest in terms of trust. And these are overall.

Steve:
Yeah.

Moira:
Then in terms of some some trends by country on average, Japanese consumers gave the lowest ratings in terms of satisfaction, trust and likelihood to recommend. And Indian consumers generally gave higher scores on average.

Steve:
Yeah, and I know from the early days of doing international global CX type work that there are definitely cultural differences geographically.

Moira:
Exactly.

Steve:
It's kind of interesting that the highest and the lowest are both in Asia. For our listeners, again, this is where this is going to be such a great tool for them, because if you have a global business, you know, and maybe you don't have all the data for your customers on a global basis, but you could make some inferences or some hypotheses of how those things may change or if your company is entering, say, a new global market, these these would be kind of foundational things to put into your design as you would seek to add that new market to your XM program.

Moira:
Right? Exactly. Exactly. And it just, I think, a great starting point for thinking about where should you point your own tools for sensing and responding to needs. And so actually, we did do a level set on satisfaction and ask people about the companies that they've recently interacted with. And I'm looking at the data. It's an average. 66% of consumers were either extremely or somewhat satisfied with the experiences companies deliver delivered in recent interaction. But then just looking at extremely satisfied, here are the top one, two, three, four, five, India, US, Hong Kong, Thailand and Brazil and the U.K. and then from the bottom up, I'm extremely unsatisfied to mention Japan, Germany, South Korea, France and Spain. It gives you a sense of either end.

Steve:
Yeah, and we're all over the globe. You know, we're in Asia, South America, North America on the high end and on the low end. We're in Asia and Europe, both north and south.

Moira:
Exactly.

Steve:
That stuff is fascinating. Again, if if our listeners do have a global business, that's why this is going to just be such a great resource for you. Well, Moira, there is so much information in this report that we're going to have to continue this conversation in our next episode. Thank you for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Moira:
Thank you so much.

Steve:
And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our Web site, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. Also, you can if you enjoyed this program, you can go back and find the other episode that we did with Moira. You can also get a link to the report and there's contact information. Drop us a note. Tell us how we're doing. Give us an idea for a future podcast. Again, The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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