Customer experience takes the cake

Good morning, Marketers, and if you think you know what your customers want, you better be sure of it.

Last weekend I decided to order a cake. The first bakery I visited was shut down due to a health violation. The associates at the other shops told me to order online.

I ordered my cake from the shop with the best experience. Most websites had a handful of tasty-looking high-def images, but I had to keep tapping on my phone to get to important cake specs.

The winner was a bakery with a simple spreadsheet produced on what looked like Windows Office 98. It had all the cakes listed, the sizes they were available in, how many slices and the price.

Personalization was done at the counter, when I picked the cake up. This all could have been achieved through digital transformation. But the bakers with more updated experiences had made it more difficult for me to find what I needed. I was pressed for time, and in a pinch, the spreadsheet worked best. Food for thought.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Quote of the day: “How we bring all of that data into one place is the challenge. What we’re ultimately seeking is the ability to bring data together to discern each customer interaction and its contribution to revenue. It’s going beyond basic business rules like first-touch and last-touch and moving toward data science models that incorporate the nuances of each customer touchpoint.” Leslie Lorenz, head of North American retail industry at Snowflake, in her presentation at The MarTech Conference

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.