A Meet the Boss roundtable brought to you by Twilio 

The world looks different with 2020 behind us, and we are still grappling with the seismic impact, unsure what 2021 will bring – be it political, social, or medical. One thing is clear, digital engagement will underpin business strategy for many years to come.

The trends we see all point to a new paradigm for how companies operate:

Personalisation within reach: soaring digital engagement drives new insights, but businesses face a tidal wave of data. Businesses have no intention of going back. The challenge is turning this data into actionable insights that drive personalized customer experiences at scale.

The agile workforce: while COVID moved companies into the cloud, it moved employees into home offices, sheds, hotels, car seats, and, in more than one instance, a construction trailer. At one point, more than half of the global workforce was working remotely and many will never go back full-time. The opportunity is in increasingly distributed teams and new talent markets – enabling an agile workforce that can serve customers anytime, anywhere, any channel.

Industries embrace digital: highly regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, and the public sector become first-adopters and lead with customer centricity. We saw contact tracing efforts and virtual healthcare developed in days. Financial services companies (finally!) learned how to close mortgages and insurance policies with digital signatures. These industries will attract new generations of customers and constituents through these new experiences, requiring followers to keep up.

Video enhances virtual: almost all respondents reported that video communication accelerated more than any other channel. Zoom became a verb and entertainment was transformed, with late-night TV hosts like Stephen Colbert doing shows from home and musicians like John Legend performing concerts from their living rooms. While video stood in for in-person interactions in 2020, the next generation of video technology will be about enhancing our in-person and virtual interactions rather than replacing them.

Join Twilio and a select group of senior thought-leaders to share best practice within customer engagement, to discuss shared challenges in moving digital transformation forward and to understand the future of customer experiences.