TheCustomer Quick-Take

TheCustomer Quick-Take: December 1, 2021

In this edition of TheCustomer Quick-Take: Crypto takes one more tiny step toward mainstream, Fashion retailers need to speed things up, Ireland isn’t waisting any time toward transformation, Winning with data privacy, and … wine.

Happy Wednesday!

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Innovating Giving

Quick-Take: By accepting cryptocurrencies, Toys for Tots is offering supporters with cryptocurrency portfolios the ability to support the organization in a tax efficient way. The IRS classifies cryptocurrency donations as property, meaning they are not subject to capital gains tax and are tax deductible on the donor’s tax returns.

Our Take: Marketers, pay special attention to that last sentence and envision the rewards possibilities.  There are already several players in the loyalty marketspace delivering rewards in crypto – it’s only a matter of time until the rest of marketing catches on to their flexibility and value.

 

Slow Shopping is Gumming Up the Works

Quick-Take: New data suggests around 50 percent of the top 100 most visible¹ websites on Google.com still fail to deliver a “good” page experience on desktop as defined by the Core Web Vitals (Page Experience) update which finished rolling out in August 2021. And 44 percent of the top 100 websites fail on mobile. Fashion ecommerce sites are one of the worst performing verticals – negatively impacting bounce rates, abandoned shopping carts, conversions and return visits.

Our Take: Google has been very transparent and forthcoming about their intentions to weight website’s user experience signals so there is little excuse for sub-par Core Web Vitals.  Interestingly, the biggest culprits contributing to these kinds of problems are often the easiest (read: least expensive) to fix.

 

A New Paradigm or Just Another Buzzword

Quick-Take: “Customer Science combines technology, customer data, and artificial intelligence (AI),” a transcript of the discussion reads. “The significant difference between customer science and customer experience is the behavioral science aspects of it. With all of these factors working together, customer science can help organizations anticipate customers’ needs and build experiences that meet them. Customer science will essentially predict what the customer will do next, not what they say they’re going to do next.” Ultimately, customer experience is about improving customer’s lives and creating value. By embracing customer science principles, and anticipating customer needs and meeting them, financial institutions can have a material impact on people’s lives.

Our Take: We’ll reserve judgement on issues of nomenclature except to say that our parent company is called “Customer Science”.  So there may be something to this.

 

The Product is the Message is the Product …

Quick-Take: Shopping experiences are now being shaped by ‘need to know’ desires, with shoppers questioning where the product is from, how it was sourced, whether it’s recyclable and whether it suits their intolerances. The list continues and expands across the ever-growing retail landscape of brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce channels and social shopping platforms.

Our Take: In the paragraph preceding this one, the author says “Today’s shoppers are less concerned about the actual act of purchasing but more about the holistic, omni-powered browsing experience.”  We take issue with that statement as it seems to minimize the incredible amount of friction that shoppers have to overcome in the actual act of purchasing.  On the other hand, there’s no denying that matters of brand values and brand authenticity are more important to consumer’s purchase decisioning than ever before.

 

Enabling Digital Transformation

Quick-Take: Valued at €9000, the Enterprise Ireland Digitalisation Voucher helps companies prepare a plan for the adoption of digital tools and techniques across the business. The voucher provides funding for businesses to hire a consultant to carry out an assessment of their digital maturity and develop a digitalisation roadmap for the future. The aim is to assist businesses move along their digitalisation journey and become more efficient and competitive in the process.

Our Take: For many SMBs this kind of assistance will be life-giving.  Could this ever work in the U.S.?  Elsewhere?  Tip o’ the hat to Enterprise Ireland for their progressive thinking.

 

Proactive Data Privacy as Brand Differentiator

Quick-Take: Brands that protect consumers will be needed and rewarded as nearly 50% of consumers feel that brands that respect consumers’ privacy will have a competitive advantage and 35% will only use brands that share where and how data is collected and give consumers control, says Thomas Damon Brauch, the chief data officer for Asia Pacific at Wunderman Thompson.

Our Take: We love the idea of approaching the new customer data privacy paradigm as a brand opportunity rather than simply as an expense and new set of headaches.  Understand that issues of data privacy are only going to become more important (they’re not going away any time soon) and brands that get ahead of that curve stand to gain significantly over those that don’t.

 

What Personalization was Meant For

Quick-Take: “The entire industry — from the winery to the distributor, to the retailer, to the consumer — is forced to make educated guesses, and the risks are high,” said Axelsson in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “What starts out as a million-dollar production at the winery becomes a $30 bottle of wine that gets poured down the drain. The process is wasteful, expensive and a guessing game.” So Axelsson taught a machine to understand the chemistry of wine the same way a human does. With a proprietary mix of machine learning, sensory science and analytical chemistry, TastryAI can pinpoint the palate preferences of individual consumers so retailers and distributors make the best wine recommendations. This ultimately leads to a domino of benefits including increased sales, improved customer experiences and reduced product waste.

Our Take: We don’t yet have a category in for this in our upcoming Customer Innovation Awards but you can be assured that we will.


Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash.

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