The Swipe-Right Customer Experience: How to Attract, Engage, and Keep Customers in the Digital-First World

The global COVID-19 pandemic forced everybody to rethink how they operate and the role that digital plays in business and in our lives. While digital may have been top of mind for many businesses, the pandemic made it essential, not just to interact and sell products and services, but as a way to meet the critical needs of your business.

More than ever, people are looking for experiences, not products. And not just any experiences—but real ones that turn transactions into engagement and materialism into experimentalism. The pandemic has changed our view of the world, shifted us away from consumerism, and made us appreciate the basic human needs of finding balance and focus. In this new era, customer experience is not just a digital experience, but a perfect combination of real life and digital interaction. It could be a meditative museum experience combining art with augmented reality, or an entertaining shopping experience at a mall with omnichannel support in a virtual fitting room.

The Swipe-Right Customer Experience shows how the best companies have transformed the customer experience beyond offering a technology add-on and built or rebuilt their infrastructure, processes, talent and culture around the customer experience. You will learn:

• How the world has changed since the global pandemic, the role of digitization, and why customer experience means everything.
• The secret to how top-performing companies in five different industries have rebuilt themselves around the experience they offer to customers.
• The internal components of organizations that must be transformed: culture, skills, processes and workflow, brand, and measuring.
• The new technology trends that are driving next-level customer experience.

Sanna Eskelinen (MSc in Economics) is a leader with expertise in B2B and B2C marketing. She is recognized for introducing innovative services into markets, building global programs and leading complex multi-stakeholder partnerships across the public and private sectors. Sanna is passionate about the impact of technology in different sectors in the society and how digital is creating new and changing existing customer experiences. Building on 20 years of experience in the tech industry at companies such as Microsoft and Nokia, Sanna currently works for Adobe and helps to transform the education industry digitally.

She is an avid proponent of diversity, especially bringing more women into the tech industry. She is helping thousands of young people from different backgrounds to find fulfilling work in the tech industry and is an active member of Women@Adobe and a leader of Harvard Women Circles: peer networks that celebrate female voices and the impact they have.

Belinda Gerdt (MSc in Economics) has built a successful international career in some of the world’s leading technology firms. She has almost twenty years of experience of developing digital customer-oriented businesses. Currently working for Philips at their headquarters in the Netherlands, she leads global marketing for healthcare solutions and helps digitize the industry. Previously she has worked for Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

Belinda Gerdt is a thought-provoking speaker who presents international real-life examples. From her positions at top tech companies, Belinda has observed digital transformation across many industries, enabling and spurring her to follow the latest tech trends and innovations and the role they play in the development of customer experience. This is her fourth book about customer experience management.