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So efficient.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
You Just Can’t Digitize Your Business And Think You’re Done
Quick-Take: The authors, Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani, argue that the “accelerated wave of digital initiatives must not be confused with the real business transformation needed for success in the digital age.” In other words, it’s not enough just to scale up your email marketing and web tech to support increased online shopping in the wake of COVID-19. Rather, brands need to “step back and fundamentally reconceive how they create value,” the authors write. “They need to reimagine their place in the world, rethink how they create value through ecosystems, and transform their organizations to enable new models of value creation.”
DESIGN THINKING
User-Centered Design Is Crucial to Member Engagement
Quick-Take: “The challenge is to be able to build an organization that has in its DNA a user-first experience. It typically is not a skill set that payers have — not because they shouldn’t and they haven’t, but because it wasn’t a necessity for them,” adds Jouni. “By rethinking and bringing in more design thinking into the organization, some are better able to engineer their own solutions on their own while others will benefit from partnering with vendors who can bring in that expertise internally.”
Marketers: Let Pictures Tell Your Story
Quick-Take: Shlomi Ron, CEO of the Visual Storytelling Institute, told us: Use a three-act story, make the customer the hero, and use a visual format. A good visual story “should not feel like an ad,” he said. Research and testing can guide visual storytelling — up to a point. After that, talent and sensibility must cover the next step from basic presentation to a successful campaign.
Marketers Need to Reframe Their View of Design
Quick-Take: Cocreation is human-centred design in action. To develop for consumers, you must first walk in their shoes before mapping and understanding their journeys – only then can you find pain points, the moments of delight or the awkward interactions within their current experience. With that perspective you can improve their experience – no matter what stage of the customer journey – based on real insight and empathy. This calls for a shift in mindset on the role of design. It’s not about solving individual problems; it requires a different approach to thinking, with interconnected parts – where you alter one thing another moves.
CX
The Era of Conversational Customer Experience
Quick-Take: Consider that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
CX Change Takes Time, Consideration and Consistency
Quick-Take: “Companies love transformational processes and transformational results. However, when organizations engage in change management activities, transformation is overwhelming.” Too much change at once makes it hard for employees to successfully implement, Cudby explained. If employees can’t keep up with new procedures, the customer experience will likely become inconsistent as a result. In the world of CX, inconsistency leads to messiness, which can in turn cause customers to lose trust, which is never a good outcome.
Redefining CX in Response to BOPIS
Quick-Take: Delaney said customers have become much more aware of which parts of the shopping experience are a “chore,” and which are a “joy.” “Look at stores from the chore perspective,” said Delaney. “Make shopping as effortless as possible, even for pickers. Some retailers are testing putting their top 100-selling SKUs in one area for quick in and out.” As an example of “chore” vs. “joy” shopping, Delaney said shopping for paint is a joy while shopping for hinges is a chore. Similarly, picking out produce can be a joy, but selecting paper towels is a chore.
The Pandemic’s Impact on CX
Quick-Take: “There is often a disconnect in how customer service is perceived by a business and its end-users. Research from Freshworks found that 80% of senior decision-makers thought their customer service teams performed excellently – compared to just 9% of consumers who had no frustrations when dealing with these teams. Customers expect efficiency from brands, whether that’s by implementing omnichannel strategies or ensuring new technologies such as live chats and bots work properly.
TECHNOLOGY
To Build Or Not To Build A CDP?
Quick-Take: Recently, martech influencer Scott Brinker posted the results of a survey that claims 67% of respondents plan to build their own “custom” customer data platform (CDP) rather than buying one off the shelf. It generated a lively conversation on LinkedIn.
DATA & PRIVACY
Will Privacy Advocates Lose the Personal-Data Use War?
Quick-Take: In another blow to the quest to minimize data collection, the race to gather first-party customer data like emails has quickened, as advertisers prepare for the loss of third-party data connections that help them customize messaging and connect ad exposure to sales.
But strategic efforts to gather first-party data are just a continuation of the industry’s perpetual push toward hyper-personalized communication between advertisers and consumers …
LOYALTY
Consumers are Loyal to Experiences, not Brands
Quick-Take: According to the study, 45 percent of all web content goes unseen—a calculation that compares the total number of pages on a site to the number of pages not viewed by 95% or more of traffic. That number is even higher for some industries like fashion (59 percent). Nevertheless, brands have made improvements in the last year, since nearly 70 percent of content was unseen by site visitors in 2019.
Data as Loyalty Currency
*Editor’s Note: This is brilliant on so many levels.
Quick-Take: Leading Philippine telco, Globe unveiled its first-in-market innovation, GBs (gigabytes) to Points, during the first Globe Innovation Fest. This feature is available to Globe mobile and broadband customers, allowing unused gigabytes of customers’ data to be converted into Globe Rewards points. Globe Rewards is the telco’s incomparable loyalty program that can be used to buy essential items like food, groceries, telco products, even appliances and donate to causes.
Photo by Jean Carlo Emer on Unsplash
