Welcome to the late-January 2021 installment of TheCustomer QT – the quickest, skimmiest customer-focused newsletter on the planet. Have a great day!
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 
60% of organizations have the capabilities for digital transformation
Quick take: More organizations today involve employees in their digital initiatives: 63% in 2020, up from 36% in 2018. Despite this progress, Capgemini found less than half of organizations (48%) are investing in building soft skills such as emotional intelligence, adaptability, and collaboration.
DATA PRIVACY & TRUST
Pandemic, privacy and the CX
Quick take: CX is highly impacted by trust. Tamper with privacy and risk losing customers, considering that 87% will take their business elsewhere if they don’t trust a company is handling their data responsibly.
WhatsApp could face €50 million GDPR fine
Quick take: Under this principle, multinational companies with potential violations that are cross-border in nature will be investigated by a lead supervisory authority on behalf of the wider EU.
Entitlement creep
Quick take: As noted in the 2020 ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report, unauthorized access (40%) was the number one attack method by cybercriminals in 2020. It’s no wonder there has been a 78% increase in compromised consumer records over the previous year.
CX
MarketingEventsAwards spills
Quick take: Marketers need to move beyond CX and further entrench themselves across the business to become advocates for experiences that connect clients to what they want.
Building a robust customer experience in 2021
Quick take: Considering 80 percent of shoppers expect to increase their BOPIS and curbside pickup over the next six months, retailers upping their 2020 BOPIS and mobile app retailing game is crucial to growing 2021 revenue.
3 ways to better understand your customers
Quick take: As the first stage in the design thinking process, empathizing helps me, my team, and many business leaders develop a deep understanding of the problems and realities of the customers we are trying to serve. Business leaders must step outside their frame of reference and take the time to understand their customers before they can develop a product or service that stands out in the market.
Boost Customer Experience and Online Engagement
Quick take: As this validation study for retail magnate River Island demonstrated, a slight increase in UX correlated to a predicted $4.2 million in additional monthly revenues for River Island.
From Customer Engagement to Customer Participation
Quick take: True participation requires brands to have open dialogue with customers as often as possible, giving those customers a voice and a seat at the decision making table,” Ellis related. “In this model, consumers are integrated into every stage of the innovation cycle.”
TECHNOLOGY
SAP puts turnaround strategy into motion
Quick take: The shopping spree put together a collection of businesses that may have helped modernize SAP’s offerings, but weren’t necessarily well integrated.
2021 is the right year for a martech audit
Quick take: Gartner reports that marketing leaders only utilise 58 percent of their martech stacks’ full suite of capabilities. And by 2025, 80 percent of marketers will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI.
TRENDS
Retail Marketing’s Need-to-Know Trends
Quick take: NetElixir forecasts year-over-year e-commerce growth for 2021 to be muted at 9 percent, which can be attributed to three factors: spike in returns due to impulse purchases during the 2020 holiday season, ongoing inventory issues, and the pandemic’s continuing effect of economic uncertainty and uneven demand.
CONSUMER SENTIMENT
Online consumers not finding much joy
Quick take: The fact that most people engage in a little retail therapy from time to time is not a new concept, but this statistic is interesting because it shows that consumers do expect brands to help lift their mood.
