Design systems have been a hot topic in the industry for a good while - promising measurable development time savings in new features, consistency across user interfaces and ability to centrally manage brand in digital products. With such benefits, some of the world’s largest companies – ranging from Microsoft to IBM to Google – have been advocating for the design system way of expanding their product portfolios.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for personal, human connection and communications. Sustainability and digitalization were already trending before the pandemic, but online shopping took a major leap forward when people were forced to stay at home.

As the digital channels gained more importance, these personal connections have taken on a new level of importance. Digital customer experience must be emphatic, and brands need to scale empathy with increasingly personalized communication.

Scene: the management team is having a meeting and looking at NPS metrics. The rate has declined from safe 42 to concerning 27. Panic is raising, something is wrong – but what exactly is wrong? Is there a fault in the product? Has something changed in our customer service operations? Are the competitors doing something differently? The fact is, nobody knows or only has a vague guess. Maybe it's comforting to know that this is not uncommon at all. For a while NPS has been THE metric for everyone to follow, and regular NPS surveys are a common thing to monitor customer experience satisfaction in countless of companies. But like the management team, are you as clueless on what NPS indicates? If the numbers are descending, do you really have a hunch of what’s going on?

Increasingly accelerating digitalization requires a carefully thought-out modernization strategy, as well as controlled design and implementation. Technological development and market turmoils are changing the playing field and rules of the game. A good decision made just a few years ago may today be revealed to be the burden of tomorrow, while the goal posts are moved forward.

Digital customer experience, DX, has become a strategic viewpoint in the intensified competition between organizations. The organizations who fail to deliver a seamless interplay between relevant content, easy experience, and continuous services from the first touchpoint throughout the entire journey, will lose their customers to the competitors, who are just a click away.

What’s happening in the world today? Below you can see some megatrends as stated by Sitra (The Finnish Innovation Fund), that describe the main forces and phenomena happening around us. These are huge waves of change that affect our lives and society on every level, and we need to take them into account when designing experiences, services and business models.

In very short period, COVID-19 overwhelmed lives and caused global changes towards remote oriented work and created the need for digitalization of businesses and services. The ongoing pandemic accelerated the digital revolution and forced many companies to rethink their business strategies and re-evaluate their online presence. This has caused many to push forward the prioritization of their digital channels as a means of engaging their customers and driving revenue.

Most organizations, regardless of industry, want to assure a personalized customer experience. Yet, finding the right approach and investment level is not always easy.

Most companies operating in e-business in industries such as retail, media and digital entertainment face the question of recommendation and personalization: how to personalize their website for each customer and how to choose and rank a small number of most relevant products from a large catalog in order to maximize customer interest and conversion.