Today’s Loyalty Newswire tracks some interesting trends in customer experience, scary trends in customer data, a few brand loyalty lessons, and a couple of bits of sound advice. Here is what we’re following…
TRENDS
Customer loyalty trends: Digital channels key to shoppers clicking with brands
Quotable: “The UK Customer Brand Loyalty Survey identifies value for money (47%) and poor customer service (37%) as the most common reasons customers abandon a brand while ecommerce annoyances such as cumbersome return/refund policies (21%), long delivery times (17%) and bad websites (12%) are making a sizable dent in some shopper’s loyalties.”
CX
Brand CX Scores Overall Stagnant, Tech Remains Key to Future CX Success
Quotable: “65 percent of brands received “OK” CX scores from customers, only a one-percent decrease from last year’s 66 percent, and this year, 17 percent of brands received a “good” score, a slight increase from 15 percent the last two years. For the fourth year in a row, no brands received an excellent grade in CX.”
Here’s how you align marketing strategy with your customer’s journey
Quotable: “We also must separate the buyer’s journey from the sales journey. Maybe people consider the two to be the same, but the journeys are completely different. The sales team is looking at their job performance and doing what is best to get users to close. The buyer is becoming aware of a problem and then researching what to buy and where to buy it from to solve their initial problem. It’s our job as marketers to figure out who the audience is, but since users’ paths can be completely different, we need to research audiences in ways that make sense for each user.”
Bridge Customer Experience Gap Between Brands and People
Quotable: “With the majority of North America and UK consumers (63%) expecting personalized experiences, the main challenge for brands is often a technical one. Our research shows data architecture emerged as a top challenge, preventing businesses from meeting or exceeding revenue goals.”
Customer-Centric Business Culture from the Inside Out
Quotable: “Companies with engaged employees see 233% greater customer loyalty and enjoy a 26% greater annual increase in revenue. Loyalty pushes employees to become “evangelists”—they truly love and support the company they are working for, so they naturally promote, share stories, and inspire the customers they interact with.”
The experience economy is blurring the lines between hospitality and retail
Quotable: “The best brand experiences today are not about brands but about life. Life doesn’t distinguish between categories. Consumers increasingly expect experiences that are holistic and seamlessly integrate different aspects of their lives.”
SOUND ADVICE
Does the Conversation Reflect the Cart?
Quotable: “Reframe the conversation using shopper data instead of conversation data, says Kim Kirchherr, supermarket consultant. Look at what’s in the cart.”
Also Read: Why Customer Loyalty Matters More than Ever
Get Ahead of the Retention Game and Save Customers Before Losing Them
Quotable: “The biggest source of lost revenue for companies, on average, is the customer or prospect they never knew vanished.”
LOYALTY FRAUD
St. George man faces felony theft charge after allegedly stealing customer loyalty points
Quotable: “According to the probable cause statement, an audit conducted by the store revealed that Potter had been accessing certain files in the software program that went beyond what he was authorized to open in order to transfer points from customers’ cards onto at least three cards that only he had access to.”
BRAND LOYALTY
Jebbit’s Newest Consumer Data Trust Index Indicates Declining Trust in World’s Leading Brands
Quotable: “In response to the need to better safeguard consumer data and increase trust, and as new legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europe’s GDPR take hold in the marketplace, nearly three-quarters of survey respondents indicated their support for data privacy legislation at a federal level. Only five percent of respondents opposed such legislation.”
Ryanair is starting to hide its brand
Quotable: “It now takes customer complaints more seriously than in the past, when Mr O’Leary would tell customers who asked for a refund to “f*ck off”. That is a hint that after decades of revelling in negative publicity, Ryanair’s brand has become too toxic for some of the markets it now wants to expand into.”
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Customer connections flounder amid centralization, localization efforts
Quotable: “Consumers increasingly demands personalized marketing and digital technology has been held up as a method for meeting this need, as the report points out. However, many organizations are discovering that achieving a connection and proximity to the customer is far more difficult than they expected.”
CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY
Use Nudge Theory Ethically to Improve CX for Your Brand
Quotable: “… only even less than 33 percent of organizations that collect feedbacks from their customers use it for driving changes in their company, and only 15 percent deliver improved results from their customer feedback programs.”
CONSUMER DATA
Without legislation, consumers at risk of losing retail loyalty programs
Quotable: “Without AB 846, a consumer who instructs a company to delete her or his data would not be able to participate in its loyalty program because of the need to track customers' data to properly allocate rewards. But other consumers who allow us to properly identify them and allocate rewards would. Consequently, there’s a risk this result would be deemed “discriminatory” and a violation of the CCPA – even though that’s not what lawmakers intended.”
Merkley presses carmakers for driver data collection info
Quotable: “For example, if a driver uses Bluetooth technology when they’re behind the wheel, could their car extract personal or financial information from their smartphone? It has already been reported that cars can detect a driver’s weight gain.”
The Loyalty Newswire is compiled and edited by the staff at The Wise Marketer.
