In April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was just taking hold and in the UK, we were locked down and in uncharted territory. The narrative was about survival and managing cash - little thought was being given to recovery and refresh. So, as our contribution to our client community, we set up a survey to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the wellbeing and economic conditions of organisations and people - the COVID-19 Impact Indicator survey (CVII). We wanted a specific view of how customer experience was changing and we had the support of an independent panel and 25 organisations in completing over 30 individual surveys to 3,500 respondents. From this data we published our 'In with the New' COVID-19 CX Impact report.

It was clear by the time we were assessing insight in May 2020, that the pandemic was going to be having long term impact on organisational economic and wellbeing status. So we made a decision to turn our initial survey into a 2-year longitudinal study with a new cycle launched at six month intervals. We made two other key changes. Firstly, we focused on additional key behaviour change elements that were emerging around work, travel, buying and communications and, secondly, we invested in a core respondent base of 3,500 individuals that would give us a consistent baseline through to June 2022. The survey went into field in January 2021. The results are ground-breaking.

In Q1 2022 we launched Cycle 3 of our CVII study. It had the same foundations as previous cycles to allow us to continue our longitudinal analysis and involved the evolution of the behaviour change elements we added in Cycle 2. We are currently preparing to publish our first longitudinal assessment and are working with a major UK University to develop an academic study for distribution and peer review.