TheCustomer QT – what customer engagement professionals need to know right now. So quick.
You can get the Quick-Take Newsletter delivered straight to your inbox each week by subscribing here.
TECHNOLOGY
Wait, More Martech Tools Create More Manual Tasks?!
Quick-Take: When you use martech tools that aren’t deeply integrated, you’re the one who ends up doing the work of integration — cutting-and-pasting data and content, mapping concepts from one tool to another, figuring out how to stitch together disconnected analytics and workflows. It’s manual, time-consuming, hard to maintain, prone to error. You lose a ton of energy in the conversion between digital, biological, and back to digital again. Let’s be honest: it sucks.
Companies Wary of Unexpected Outcomes in AI Adoption
Quick-Take: Half (52%) of companies with mature AI implementations say they check the fairness, bias and ethics of their AI platforms, according to the O’Reilly 2021 AI Adoption in the Enterprise report, released Monday.
Editor’s Note: That begs the question – what about the other 48% of companies??
Artificial Intelligence: Unseating the Inevitability Narrative
Quick-Take: Keys Under a Light Post – The problem, as he sees it with the field, is captured in the parable of the drunk looking for keys under a light post even though he dropped them far from it because that’s where the light is.
DATA & PRIVACY
ACLU Privacy Policy Update Reveals Data Sharing With Facebook
Quick-Take: While the ACLU has been a consistent thorn in Facebook’s side, the group also clearly finds the tech giant’s platforms useful as a means of reaching people (the organization funds itself in part by soliciting private donations). The updated privacy policy says that the ACLU uses targeted advertising and participates in data sharing on a number of communications platforms, specifically naming Facebook.
Editor’s Note: If this is true, it’s one of the most glaring examples of corporate inauthenticity we’ve seen in a while.
A Post-Data Privacy World
Quick-Take: Generally, regulations should continue to pressure companies – including government entities – to provide adequate cybersecurity measures and follow the principle of least privilege to protect the data they have been entitled to collect or process, including transparency and giving users access to their data.
Heineken Launches First-Party Data Strategy
Quick-Take: “An issue we had with DMP-based segments historically was that we lacked a lot of insight,” Kennedy said. “DMPs are built on those more anonymous identifiers, and that will become a lot harder to use once these browser changes come. We needed to really look to replace the anonymous identifiers with a more sustainable solution that was built on identity, which we think is used more consistently across channels.”
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Digital Resilience is the New Digital Transformation KPI
Quick-Take: With the massive market disruptions of the past year, organizations realized that digital processes, infrastructure, and applications require resilience to quickly respond to disruptions. Whether caused by market conditions, legacy technology, or external threats such as ransomware, built-in resilience to meet these challenges has risen to the top as a digital transformation key performance indicator (KPI).
CHANNELS
Email Still Critical for Marketers
Quick-Take: Validity published “The State of Email Marketing” report, and statistics showed that for the majority of respondents (39%), the effectiveness of email is holding steady. For 30% of marketers, it is improving slightly, while 8% said it was improving significantly.
CX
Lack of Customer Knowledge Hurting CX Initiatives
Quick-Take: Despite the clear benefits, companies face major hurdles when it comes to updating their CX strategy. Respondents cite the difficulty of linking business outcomes to real customer needs (83%), insufficient technology platforms (77%), and a lack of vision and alignment among leaders, teams, and employees (72%).
Getting the Most From Your Customer Journey Maps
Quick-Take: Jim Tincher, mapper-in-chief at HeartoftheCustomer, a customer journey mapping consultancy, shared that more important than simply creating customer personas is actually speaking to customers one on one. “You need to talk with customers individually. Journeys are different for each person, so using these consolidated approaches removes all the nuance and learning. It particularly prevents the change management that is so critical to success–journey mapping goes from a way to engage your company on customer needs to being just another report.”
B2B
Reimagining Customer Engagement
Quick-Take: According to a 2020 study by investpro.com, the likelihood of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new customer is 5%-20%.
Editor’s Note: We’ve seen similar statistics for years but this is the first recent and credible data to address these probabilities that we’re aware of.
Four Essential Attributes of Outstanding B2B CX
Quick-Take: The report begins with a rather sobering assessment of the overall quality of B2B customer experiences. Merkle’s report summarized the state of B2B customer experience in stark terms: “We have established that the process of identifying, researching, choosing, and using a B2B supplier is rarely impressive, often ordinary, and frequently suboptimal.”
LOYALTY
Brand Loyalty at Risk
Quick-Take: Amidst the anticipation of the UK’s shops reopening their doors this week, there is some risk of Gen Z shunning real-world shopping altogether; they are much more likely to describe themselves as digital converts who want to keep buying everything online since the pandemic (63% compared to 48% of other generations). Similarly, 66% don’t miss real world shopping as much as they thought they would, compared to 43% of Boomers. Along with Millennials (aged 25 to 34), they are the most likely to say they now find online shopping more enjoyable than in-person shopping; 63% of Gen Z, compared to 29% of Baby Boomers stated this as Gen Z now accounts for approximately 40% of consumers globally.
Editor’s Note: Please note the level of restraint that our editorial team is exercising by leaving out any puns having to do with, or reeferences to, 420.
Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash.
