A new global research study confirms that marketers all over the world changed their digital CX strategies in one way or another during the last year-and-a-half to remain relevant to consumers while, navigating a marketing landscape dramatically altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also revealed the importance of personalization in engaging customers, while confirming that privacy concerns continue to matter to the buying public.

Titled Deliver a More Modern CX: A Guide for Marketing Innovators, the study was commissioned by Acquia, a software as a service (SaaS) company based in Boston providing enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal. Independent research firm Vanson Bourne conducted the study by collecting the views of 8,000 consumers and 800 marketers across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK, and the US. The survey explores shifts in both marketing and consumer behaviors.

“The world doesn’t yet understand the full impact COVID-19 is having on society or national economies. The ramifications it’s having on brands, however, are becoming clearer by the day,” said Lynne Capozzi, chief marketing officer at Acquia. “The results of this year’s survey were clear—brands cannot simply recreate previously existing processes as digital but must actually create a new digital customer experience altogether.”

The study says that an astonishing 94% of marketers have tweaked their digital CX strategy to some extent during the last 18 months, relying more heavily on digital content distributed across multiple channels in order to reach consumers.

Marketers are also depending on technology more than ever before to deliver on their strategies. But while 96% of the marketers surveyed said there was an improvement on their company’s return on investment (ROI) on marketing technology tools, 73% admit that their organization’s marketing technology prevents them from creating and delivering innovative digital experiences to their customers.

Another area of focus for the study was the issue of personalization. Among global marketers, 35%—more than one-third—said they had depended on personalization in the last 12 months to reach customers, with a majority in the group saying the strategy had paid off and helped them boost customer engagement. To deliver a more personalized CX, 55% of marketers adopted a digital experience platform (DXP), and 50% invested in a customer data platform (CDP). Finally, the study shows a distinct gap in what marketers believe to be true of their customers and the reality of their situation. While more than four out of five marketers think customers trust their company’s use of personal data, two out of five global customers do not trust that brands will handle their personal data properly.