Welcome to TheCustomer QT. There’s a lot to catch-up on today so we made today’s edition extra skimmy. Enjoy.
DATA & PRIVACY
Apple to Deliver ‘Privacy Labels’ for Apps, Revealing Data-Sharing Details
Notable: Developers will have to reveal how data is shared with any “third-party partners,” which include analytics tools, advertising networks, third-party SDKs or other external vendors.
We urgently need a Global Data Convention. Here’s why
Notable: But data is now a policy issue in and of itself. Given the importance of data to the globalized digital economy, surveillance, politics and AI, there will be few more important geopolitical issues in the coming years. Some even argue that data is a new form of capital.
CX
Reimagining The Brick & Mortar Customer Experience
Notable: The pandemic has also converted shoppers to mobile commerce. Since the pandemic took root, a consumer study found that 63% of U.S. shoppers made an online purchase for an item or category they never considered ordering online before.
Customer Experience Emerges as 2020 Bright Spot
Notable: While the demands on customer service operations and contact centers, particularly, have increased since the onset of COVID-19, many organizations appear to be adapting well. Six in 10 consumers have noticed and say they’ve seen positive shifts in CX. This suggests a healthy number of organizations do, in fact, view CX as an extension of the products or services they provide and are finding ways to deliver better CX, even in unpredictable times.
In Customer Experience, Accidents Happen in the Intersections
Notable: The truth is that in every customer experience, both B2B and B2C, the accidents happen in the intersections. It’s the hand-off from one person, team or department to the next that often reveals the internal madness of how a company works. And it’s rarely a good look.
STRATEGY
Data-first marketing: A strategy to stop wasting 30% of your budget
Notable: It costs $100-120 per record to clean data once it’s in your systems compared to only $2-$3 to get it right before it hits your database. At 100,000 new records a year that is the difference between investing $200,000 for clean data first strategy versus spending $700,000 to try and fix it later.
Creating a strategy to tackle customer churn
Notable: While you are fixing churn, stop trying to grow. Your business is a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Spending money to build a bigger bucket won’t stop the leak. It’s hard to acknowledge the problem and get off the growth focus — but just adding new customers who will just ultimately churn to build the business is fantastical thinking.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
What Do Digital Transformation Leaders Do Differently?
Notable: Companies that scale their transformation efforts, while also optimizing their existing business, organize themselves around “value streams,” independent but interconnected teams of teams with a shared purpose of delivering differentiated customer value.
LEGAL
Commission sends Statement of Objections to Amazon
Notable: Data on the activity of third-party sellers should not be used to the benefit of Amazon when it acts as a competitor to these sellers. The conditions of competition on the Amazon platform must also be fair. Its rules should not artificially favour Amazon’s own retail offers or advantage the offers of retailers using Amazon’s logistics and delivery services. With e-commerce booming, and Amazon being the leading e-commerce platform, a fair and undistorted access to consumers online is important for all sellers.
LOYALTY
5 Ways CMOs Are Using Data to Drive Customer Loyalty
Notable: According to McKinsey, more than 75% of consumers have tried new brands during COVID-19. That means if companies don’t adapt their marketing and content strategies during these times to drive loyalty, they risk losing customers to brands that do.
Target’s free loyalty program nears 80M members 1 year after launch
Notable: That means membership over the course of the year spiked well over 70 million and now encompasses a big chunk of the U.S. population, who are clearly spending at Target given the rewards. Customers have also directed $7 million to more than 2,500 nonprofit organizations through the program.
TECHNOLOGY
Nearly 60% of Marketing Leaders Expect Moderate to Severe Cuts to Martech Budgets
Notable: The Gartner survey revealed that marketing organizations still utilize only 58% of their martech stack’s full breadth of capabilities – a level that has remained flat since 2019. As marketers invest in tools and add-on capabilities that ultimately go unused, marketing leaders put their credibility on the line.
Big Ops: Converging Digital Ops Domains and Toolsets
Notable: The Big Data movement of the past decade was about managing the enormous volume, variety, and velocity of data flowing through organizations. Big Ops is about the enormous scale and complexity of all the different apps, automations, AI algorithms, processes, and human interactions all operating simultaneously across that data in digital business. I like this metaphor: if Big Data was about a data lake, Big Ops is more about an interactive data water park.
PANDEMIC
‘Unusually high call volume’? You’re being lied to, say experts
Notable: “Most companies just weren’t prepared for something like this.” He told me that, roughly speaking, there are about 25% fewer call center agents answering phones than before the pandemic because of cutbacks and a lack of resources for agents to work from home.
B2B
How B2B Brands Get To The Partnership Stage
Notable: When it comes to reliability, B2B outfits are doing well at meeting minimum quality/functional needs, complying with regulations and standards and taking steps to mitigate risks. But they struggle to be competitively priced. At the preeminence level, B2B brands could do better at being active thought leaders in their category — that means they should be supplying content. And brands struggle to have a clear vision and actively work towards it.
PERSONALIZATION
Oreo lets fans customize cookies in personalization push
Notable: Consumers are willing to pay an average of 25% more for a personalized product or service, according to a study by 3D software company Dassault Systèmes and CITE Research. In addition, 80% of study respondents said they’re more likely to do business with a company that provides personalized experiences, while 90% find personalization appealing, per a study by data-driven marketing firm Epsilon.
Gmail gets update that lets you turn off smart personalization
Notable: What’s new is a clearer choice over the data processing that makes them possible. This new setting is designed to reduce the work of understanding and managing that process, in view of what we’ve learned from user experience research and regulators’ emphasis on comprehensible, actionable user choices over data.
AI
It’s time to talk about the carbon footprint of artificial intelligence
Notable: One of the most elaborate deep learning models, designed to produce human-like language and known as GPT-3, requires an amount of energy equivalent to the yearly consumption of 126 Danish homes and creates a carbon footprint equivalent to traveling 700,000 kilometers by car for a single training session.
Pope Francis urges followers to pray that AI and robots ‘always serve mankind’
Notable: In his message, the pope said AI was “at the heart of the epochal change we are experiencing” and that robotics had the power to change the world for the better. But this would only be the case if these forces are harnessed correctly, he said. “Indeed, if technological progress increases inequalities, it is not true progress.
ICYMI – You can find the past issues of TheCustomer QT here.
