Reach3 Insights and Rival Technologies Launch New Customer Experience

Reach3 Insights and Rival Technologies have partnered to create New Customer Experience, a consumer insights tool to help companies better understand how to retain customers gained during the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Customer Experience helps companies monitor the needs of new customers and respond rapidly to shifts in attitudes and perceptions by engaging directly with them and providing an ongoing communication channel for capturing in-the-moment insights. It leverages Rival's mobile messaging-based insights technology, giving users real-time access to both projectionable quantitative data as well as user-generated photos, videos, and other more qualitative inputs to help bring to life their needs.

New Customer Experience was developed in response to research by Reach3 Insights, using Rival Technologies' mobile market research platform, that indicated 45 percent of U.S. consumers had shifted brands during the pandemic, with 85 percent of them planning to stick with their new purchase decisions.

"The results of our ongoing COVID research clearly show that there were both winners and losers as a result of pandemic behavior changes, with many brand-switching behaviors sticking," Matt Kleinschmit, Reach3 Insights' founder and CEO, said in a statement. "This shows how brands that can quickly adapt to evolving consumer routines can steal share even during extreme market volatility and also highlights how important it is for companies to have a tool in place that enables them to better anticipate the needs of both tenured and new customers so they can ensure they, too, don’t lose share to the next brand that comes along."

"New customers are increasingly difficult to secure. The cost of acquisition is skyrocketing," said Andrew Reid, CEO of Rival Technologies, in a statement. "The ability to rapidly engage and retain new customers on mobile is mission-critical. Traditional, email-based methods may actually harm those new relationships. We developed this solution to feel less like a test and more like a meaningful mobile engagement that new customers crave."

Companies like Brunswick, whose boating group has enjoyed a massive influx of new customers during the pandemic, are using New Customer Experience to drive deep, immersive ongoing learning with new customers so they can better anticipate future, unmet needs and prevent future churn.

"Prior to COVID, new customers followed a familiar path to purchase. COVID introduced us to an entirely new cohort of end consumers, a unique segment of end consumers who are a real catalyst for change," said Larisa Mats, consumer and market insights leader at Brunswick, in a statement. "It was imperative to deepen our understanding of this new segment and develop a plan that builds trust, loyalty, and ultimately long-term customer value."