Have you been spending less money since the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping through the world? That’s one of the questions analytics firm SAS sought to answer through research.
The Experience 2030 research results have recently been published and there are some really interesting findings.
Perhaps the most interesting finding is how folks will spend once they have been vaccinated.
Globally, 19 percent of respondents said they would spend more once vaccines were available while only 10 percent said they’d spend less once vaccines were in play.
This makes a degree of sense considering entertainment services have all but fallen away since the pandemic came into being and once folks can go out in large numbers again it would make sense that they would spend more.
Diving a bit deeper into the report we can see that digital storefronts have soared in popularity and won’t fall anytime soon.
“Customers in South Africa, for example, have increasingly moved to digital channels over the last 16-months. 65 percent of all customers locally have indicated that they will not be returning to ‘normal’, with 37 percent of these saying that they will use even more online and digital apps than they do currently, and only 30 percent of all customers will revert to the same pre-pandemic balance of online and offline shopping habits,” writes SAS.
Things get even more interesting when we look at data sharing and online shopping. SAS reports that, according to its data, 33 percent of customers are more likely to share personal data with companies than they were pre-pandemic. We find this rather curious especially when massive Silicon Valley firms are trying to limit the amount of data advertisers are able to glean.
However, SAS also reveals the following about shopping habits:
• 60 percent of customers see low prices and special discounts as a top three priority
• 55 percent value convenience as a key component of the customer experience
• 48 percent ranked companies that act fairly and responsibly as a top three priority, and
• 46 percent cited good customer service over lockdown/s as a key area of the customer experience
We want to point to the second point – convenience. While we may want advertisers to stop tracking us as we surf the web, when it comes to shopping we may give more information in order to speed things along.
That doesn’t mean companies can just siphon up data as we provide it to them however with 69 percent of those surveyed by SAS stating that they vigilant when it comes to fraud. This means businesses need good anti-fraud measures and as an aside, need to guard their customer data more closely.
While South Africa is not out of the woods yet when it comes to COVID-19, the Experience 2030 report is a worthwhile read as we work our way out of these woods.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
