This edition of TheCustomer QT is heavy on the practical, light on the theoretical, and has a sprinkling of the behavioral. If you think about it, that pretty much mirrors marketing these days. Happy skimming.
DATA & PRIVACY
Analytics Insight Predicts 3 Million Job Opening in Data Science in 2021
Notable: In a recent survey conducted by Analytics Insight, by 2021, there will be 3,037,809 new job openings in data science, worldwide.
Canada’s New Data Privacy Bill: the Digital Charter Information Act
Notable: If passed, companies could face fines of up to five per cent of global revenue or $25 million — whichever is greater — for the most serious offences. It is believed that Bill C-11 will therefore provide the heaviest fines amongst the G7 nations.
What brands need to know about consent and data
Notable: “When it comes to data security, I think the word security is out the window, it’s going to happen. Regardless whether we want to stop it, using GDPR or PDPA or not, it’s going to come to a point where everybody’s data will be available somehow. The question is, how are we going to have a little bit of control? And can we have a little bit of ethics behind all this?”
Why Data Privacy Is Crucial to Fighting Disinformation
Notable: “While the United States has sometimes acted with strength against purveyors of disinformation, e.g., by indicting IRA-connected individuals, U.S. policy is inconsistent. The U.S. government has no equivalent to the European Commission’s Action Plan Against Disinformation and no corresponding Code of Practice on Disinformation, and there remains no one in the U.S. government in overall charge of disinformation policy”
Companies of the Future Should Focus on Data Privacy Rather than Data Collection
Notable: “You own your data, but you don’t control it as you click it away for most of the services you use,” she said. “I like to think about controlling your data, that means we can put it beyond the scope of a simple click agreement and there are some situations where control cannot be taken from you and sometimes not at all.”
2021: The Year Dark Data Turns Light
Notable: “over 80% of companies’ data is considered “dark,” or unused and unanalyzed. The majority of which is unstructured, meaning it is information created by humans, for humans: emails, file shares, messages, etc.”
Belgian DPA to Take Down Websites Infringing GDPR
Notable: The purpose of the cooperation agreement is to allow DNS Belgium to suspend “.be” websites that are linked to infringements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”).
LOYALTY
Six Steps for Improving Customer Engagement and Loyalty
Notable: A new research report from dotdigital found that 80% of omnichannel brands don’t have a customer loyalty program.
Brand Loyalty in the Age of Ecommerce & COVID-19
Notable: In today’s uncertainty, “next-normal” consumers, or consumers who are defining the current wave of shifting consumer preferences, are turning to larger, more established brands they feel they can trust — holding on to their tried-and-trues. COVID-19 has further established these loyalties, with essential products leading the way for the greatest brand specificity.
MARTECH
Twilio Segment Highlights Future of CDP Industry
Notable: Surveying over 4,000 decision-makers and drawing on expertise from leading marketers at HubSpot, AWS, Peloton, FOX, Okta, and more, the report finds that 73% of respondents believe a customer data platform will be critical to their customer experience efforts.
What it takes to create an effective martech stack
Notable: According to the analyst firm’s recent CMO Spend survey, marketing technology represents the largest overall piece of the spending pie for CMOs at 26.2 per cent. This is ahead of paid media (24.8 per cent), labour costs (24.5 per cent), agencies and services costs (23.7 per cent). Yet in the same survey, marketers reported millions in wasted spend on their martech stacks.
Martech Stacks Are Being Underutilized By Marketers, How Much Does It Matter?
Notable: “There are a ton of capabilities in martech products these days. Which percentage of them you use doesn’t seem like it should matter as much as: (a) are you getting value from the features you are using? And (b) are there features that you are pretty sure would be valuable to your business?”
SECTORS
Is ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ PayPal’s Next Mega Growth Opportunity?
Notable: Pay in 4 allows a customer to pay for an item that costs anywhere from $30 to $600 in four installments over a period of six weeks. Customers pay no interest on any of these payments; a fee is only assessed if the customer is late on a payment.
Grocers are turning to personalization during the pandemic
Notable: To stay competitive and grow profits, retailers are starting to turn to price personalization to create and capture new margin, offsetting their rising delivery and supply-chain costs without increasing their sale prices.
Banking Providers Still Aren’t Ready for Big Data
Notable: Part of the data maturity continuum is that trust is built along the way. If quality data is collected and validated, business-driven analytics are leveraged, and recommendations are provided that can improve results, stakeholders will increasingly accept the process that is many times new to them. The trust increases exponentially as KPIs are achieved.
CX
How to deliver great customer experience at scale
Notable: Yet in the 2020 Achieving Customer Amazement survey, U.S. companies across a variety of industries fell short of customer expectations by 38 percent, and 96 percent of customers said they would leave a company because of a bad customer experience.
A Little Bit AI, A Little Bit Human
Notable: Live interaction channels (phone, chat, and email) cost an average of $8.01 per contact and self-service about $0.10. But in practice, it simply doesn’t work. Fewer than 10% of customer service issues in 2019 were fully resolved without a live agent. So, although customers and organizations may prefer self-service in the abstract, it’s simply not yet advanced enough for most situations.
The CX Technology Revolution: What To Expect In 2021
Notable: The Covid-19 pandemic has shined a light on just how many customers are vulnerable — and for brands, understanding vulnerability will become more of a priority than analyzing sentiment. Sentiment is based on feelings; you can be angry, happy, sad, etc. While many brands are leveraging sentiment analysis to understand their customers, their attitudes and beliefs, it’s more important to understand the “why” behind feelings. Understanding vulnerability can provide that explanation.
