TheCustomer QT is our super-surfable weekly roundup of the important news, facts and opinion driving customer strategy and customer technology.
Happy surfing.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
The post-Covid Consumer
Quick-Take: “Lots of ways in which people consumed pre-pandemic won’t return to those levels,” Small said. “We’ve been permanently changed by different experiences we had in the past year-plus.”
But the Wharton professor also says it is unwise, based on all that we know about the consumer brain, to assume that the habits formed during the pandemic will become a permanent, preferred majority state. A recent Forrester survey found 75% of U.S. adults saying that the pandemic would drive long-term changes in behavior, but its research also stresses that the consumer has always been in a state of flux; it’s just maybe now more likely that change is the “new normal” for consumers.
The State of Personalization 2021
Quick-Take: Customer expectations are outpacing experiences: While 85% of businesses studied by Twilio Segment believe they are offering personalized experiences, only 60% of consumers seem to think that’s the case. Customer loyalty is on the line: If brands fail to offer a personalized experience, 45% of consumers say they’re likely to take their business elsewhere. Personalization and privacy aren’t mutually exclusive: 69% of consumers say they appreciate personalization, so long as it’s based on data they’ve shared with a business directly.
CONSUMER SENTIMENT
Demonstrating transparency increases consumer trust and brand loyalty
Quick-Take: Trust is the most important consideration in purchasing decisions, after cost and quality. More than 90% of consumers say transparency by a brand is important in deciding who they buy from. Additionally, 94% of shoppers will stay loyal to a transparent brand, with 75% of those spenders happy to pay more for products or services from a business they believed to be open and honest. The open exchange of information is essential to demonstrating transparency, with 59% of consumers relating openness to being transparent.
Customers respond to socially responsible business marketing
Quick-Take: The most important thing we found is that there is a cost to being a prosocial follower. Copying another brand’s greater good initiative—for example, by offering a similar cause marketing program or donating to a similar cause—leads consumers to wonder whether a brand has ulterior motives for doing good. This is because followers seem more opportunistic than first movers, like they are considering the risks and benefits in a more calculating, self-interested, and possibly inauthentic way.
Empathy in a CX-Driven World
Quick-Take: Empathy can’t be faked — it’s a mindset, a culture. It must be a driving force that envelops all activities inside an organization, customer-facing or not. Even before 2020, the need for empathetic business practices was clear. A Gartner survey of more than 6,000 customers revealed that proactive customer service programs have typically been met with boosts in customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.
LOYALTY
SMBs and the Consumer Loyalty Challenge
Quick-Take: The data confirmed as much as 53 percent of those surveyed worldwide reported that it is more important to shop with these local businesses today than it was before the pandemic began. But believing something is important to do and actually doing it are far from the same thing — and while a clear majority report supporting local businesses conceptually, PYMNTS’ latest research shows that in practice just 18 percent of the consumers in these four countries buy primarily from local shops, while the vast majority populate their shopping experience with mass merchants, online stores and national chain stores.
What Does the Increase in Hotel Deflagging Mean?
Quick-Take: Younger travelers have more brand loyalty to online travel agencies like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb rather than legacy hotel brands. Upcoming generations aren’t as brand loyal to the large hotel chains as previous generations. Travelers who book hotel rooms on mobile devices prefer online travel agencies to hotel brand sites by a three-to-one margin. Additionally, online travel agencies are usually preferred over booking directly with a hotel because of better price transparency.
CHANNELS
Women in their thirties love TikTok
Quick-Take: Although TikTok has become synonymous with Gen Z, women in their thirties make up a substantial slice of the app’s users. Women in the US aged 30 to 39 represent 13.8% of the app’s user base on Android devices, per App Ape research published on Statista this year. They’re the second largest group of monthly active TikTok users (girls and young women from 10–19 account for 16.4%).
CX
Companies that Revamped Experiences Excelled During the Pandemic
Quick-Take: The top 5% of brands that scored the highest across industries — the CX elite — includes Chewy.com, Etsy, Lincoln, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Trader Joe’s. The top-performing brands in the CX Index leaned into meeting core customer needs. They outperformed all other brands in effectiveness and ease, where the elite brands had a 12-point advantage. Additionally, the highest-scoring brands understood the key emotionalneeds of their customers and provided emotionally pleasing experiences. They also developed a core group of loyal customers or devotees: those willing to forgive these brands’ mistakes, pay a premium for the brands’ products, keep their business with the brands, and spend more with the brands over time.
Eliminating the Siloed Data Mentality
Quick-Take: Rigid institutional mindsets, processes and structures within heritage financial services institutions are predicted to bring down 80% of them by 2030 if they don’t embrace digital transformation, according to Gartner.
The “Email Expiration Date” Initiative
Quick-Take: This project is based on the idea of reducing the carbon footprint of the email marketing industry. While the simplest and most effective methods are to reduce the volume of emails sent and to lighten their weight, it is interesting to note that billions of commercial emails are stored indefinitely in data centers around the world. This project aims to reduce the increase in the volume of these messages stored for nothing.
DATA & PRIVACY
As Amazon prepares its Sidewalk Launch, Privacy Experts are Raising Concerns.
Quick-Take: Device owners linked into the Sidewalk network won’t be able to control the security settings on neighboring networks or devices, even as their personal data runs through them, said Lourdes M. Turrecha, a professor at Santa Clara University and founder of The Rise of Privacy Tech. “To be fair, Amazon has stated that the data will be encrypted. That said, given the fight over encryption backdoors, Amazon Sidewalk poses increased surveillance threats, and is another monumental step in surveillance capitalism …”
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Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
