Feature
The Gist
- Understanding core audience. Brands like Bud Light and Comcast faltered by not aligning with their customer base, leading to significant financial and reputational losses.
- Data privacy paramount. Major breaches highlight the critical need for stringent data security and transparent response strategies.
- Personalization pitfalls. Missteps in personalization strategies can alienate customers, as seen with Target and others, emphasizing the balance between personalization and privacy.
As the year comes to a close, 2023 is shaping up to be a masterclass in customer experience (CX), marked by some brands' notable missteps. With customer loyalty as volatile as the market itself, even the smallest oversight in CX can trigger a significant shift in consumer sentiment. From misjudged customer values to a failure to prioritize data privacy, the CX blunders of the year offer a stark reminder of the work that is required to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty. This article will examine the top CX mistakes that have emerged, serving as a cautionary tale and a learning opportunity for customer-centric brands.
Failure to Understand the Core Audience
When considering the top CX failures of 2023, two notable examples stand out: Bud Light and Comcast. These cases illustrate the significance of understanding the core audience, as both brands displayed a disconnect with their customer base, leading to disastrous results.
Bud Light is facing a challenging year with a considerable decline in sales, which has been attributed to a range of factors including major marketing missteps. The largest impact occurred because of a collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, aimed at Gen Z consumers, which, instead of broadening their appeal, led to a conservative backlash. This cost the company a $395 million loss in sales, according to CNN, and sales are still down by approximately 30% compared to last year. Although well-intentioned, the failure to understand its core audience cost Anheuser-Busch ROI, and the loyalty of many of its customers.
Comcast has been grappling with a history of customer dissatisfaction, reflected in its declining rankings in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Additionally, Comcast is rated No. 87 out of 100 on the list of most visible (and reputable) businesses in America.
Complaints about pricing increases, billing problems and service outages, along with difficulties in reaching customer support, inadequate resolutions to issues, and communication problems with customers, have led to a decrease in customer satisfaction, underscoring the need for a more customer-centric culture and proactive issue resolution.
Related Article: 3 Customer Experience Detours That Led to Success
Ignoring Data Privacy
The sphere of customer experience (CX) has been significantly rattled by a series of data privacy mishaps throughout 2023, a trend that has shown an alarming escalation from previous years. In 2013, Yahoo encountered a staggering breach that compromised approximately 3 billion user accounts. Statista classified it as one of the most significant worldwide breaches to have occurred as of August 2023. The enormity of this breach was initially reported in 2016 and was not fully understood until 2017 when Yahoo revealed that every single one of its 3 billion users was affected.
Alibaba, the Chinese multinational conglomerate, faced a significant cybersecurity incident in July 2022. This breach laid bare 1.1 billion records and caused the worst drop in shares in a month, marking a substantial event in the company's history and highlighting the ever-present vulnerabilities within vast digital platforms. This year critical flaws were found in the company's cloud databases, potentially exposing more sensitive customer data, according to The Hacker News.
LinkedIn's security was also compromised, with reports indicating a leak of over 800 million users' data, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and even workplace information. This breach, discovered in March and confirmed by LinkedIn in May 2023, was not due to a system hack but rather attributed to web scraping. LinkedIn's response involved implementing new security measures and legal action against the perpetrators.
The implications for consumer trust are profound. A recent Deloitte survey revealed that a substantial portion of consumers, 67% of smartphone users and 62% of smart home device users, have expressed increased concerns over the security and privacy of their devices, indicating a palpable rise from the previous year. The magnitude of this anxiety is not unfounded, as the first half of 2023 alone witnessed breaches impacting over 100 million individuals. Specific incidents such as Twitter's leak of 220 million email addresses, T-Mobile's second breach affecting hundreds of customers, and JD Sports' exposure of the personal data of 10 million customers have only contributed to this unsettling narrative.
Yet, what's perhaps even more disconcerting is the response from brands to data breaches. A 2022 Comparitech study revealed that a staggering 58% of organizations failed to acknowledge data breach disclosures. The response time for those who did ranged widely, with some taking up to 17 days to respond, if at all. This lax attitude toward such a critical aspect of customer relations underscores consumer distrust and a severe misalignment between customer expectations and brand actions.
Additionally, the sheer volume of these incidents is staggering, with over 31 million accounts leaked in the third quarter of 2023 alone, with the most frequently breached type of data being personally identifiable information (PII). These figures define a disturbing trend: not only is customer data being compromised at a massive scale, but the very essence of individual privacy is at stake.
The message for brands is clear. In an era where consumer trust can be as volatile as the market itself, the responsibility is on these businesses to not only safeguard customer data with the utmost rigor but also to demonstrate transparency, responsiveness, and consumer-centric practices in the event of a breach. The road to rebuilding consumer trust begins with respecting the sanctity of their data and understanding the pivotal role privacy plays in trust, loyalty and the overall customer experience.
Related Article: Evaluating the Successes and Failures of Your CX Efforts
Failure to Personalize
In the context of customer experience, personalization is a crucial factor. However, the line between personalization and privacy invasion can be uncomfortably thin. For example, an overly personal marketing message can feel invasive, as was the case with Target, which famously determined a customer's pregnancy based on her shopping habits. This breach of privacy is a stark example of how personalization, when misapplied, can become a customer experience faux pas.
Additionally, brands often fall into the trap of using the same marketing personalization tools as everyone else, which dilutes the uniqueness of the customer experience. When the personalization strategy is not distinctive, customers receive a generic, one-size-fits-all experience that fails to resonate on a personal level.
Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity, a CDP platform provider, told CMSWire that a common mistake is neglecting to provide tailored experiences based on customers’ preferences and past purchases with the brand. "For instance, an owner of an elderly pet has a monthly subscription for pet products. When the pet passes away, the customer stops the subscription, but the brand continues to send marketing emails and special offers to the owner, despite having information about the pet’s age and the lack of customer engagement,” said Padgett, who added that by neglecting to adapt their content from a sales email to an email checking in on the customers and the pet, customers end up feeling frustrated and maybe even hurt.
Pain Points in the Digital Experience
Pain Points that occur when a customer is using a brand’s website or app are a common occurrence, one that most of us have personally experienced at one point. They can occur when a user has added items to the shopping cart on an ecommerce site, only to find it empty when they attempt to view the items in their cart. This means that they must locate the items they were interested in again, and once again add them to their cart, filled with trepidation that they will once again disappear.
These pain points result in a huge loss in sales. The 2023 Forter Trust Premium Report revealed that over 79% of consumers reported abandoning a purchase altogether at the first sign of friction in the checkout process, and 76% of consumers stated that they had a negative shopping experience in the past three months.
Scott Buchanan, CMO at Forter, a fraud prevention and detection platform provider, told CMSWire that the brands that will win the next generation of online shoppers are those that prioritize a seamless, secure, and friction-free shopping experience. The last part of the shopping experience—the checkout process—seemingly introduces many variables that often result in frustration and irritation for customers. Buchanan said that Forter’s research indicated that US consumers face the highest rate of false credit/debit card declines, with “56% reporting that they have been wrongfully declined in the last three months and 40% refusing to retry the purchase if they are erroneously declined. This is not only a huge setback in a customer’s experience with a brand, but it fiercely cuts into profits.”
Other painful occurrences may happen when the customer is using a website’s search to locate an item that they know an ecommerce site has, only to find that the search cannot locate it. Either they must manually find it, or they move on to a competitor.
Brian David Crane, founder and CMO at Spread Great Ideas, a digital marketing fund that invests in digital businesses, told CMSWire that one of his biggest customer experience mistakes this year was a lack of smooth navigation for a newly redesigned website. "One of our ecommerce sites faced an abrupt fall in sales during the summer months after we did a design makeover early this year,” said Crane. “Even though we expected a spurt in sales due to an eye-catching design and increased product options, we later discovered through a customer survey that customers faced problems finding products, navigating the website, adding to the Save list, and placing orders. After remedying this situation, the sales have sprung up now, but it did cause a waste of time and resources."
The purchase process is often filled with potential pain points. Nobody enjoys having to repeat the process of re-filling out shipping and credit card information. Many web browsers have simplified the process for customers, saving their name, shipping information, phone number, and credit card information so that one click fills out a form, but websites that do not label their forms properly still require the customer to manually fill in the details. There’s nothing that will kill a sale faster than forcing a customer to pull out their card, and manually input every detail.
Additionally, many customers have come to expect that they will not have to pay shipping when purchasing items online. The ordering process often comes to an abrupt halt when a customer has made it through the purchasing process and is ready to complete the order, only to find out at the last minute that the shipping or handling fees are more costly than the items they are purchasing.
Lack of Consistency Across Channels
Lack of consistency is another notable attribute that many brands are guilty of, and is also an experience that many can identify with. How many people have had the experience of visiting a brand’s website, browsing and finding the items they are interested in purchasing, adding them to the shopping cart, and then later, when using the brand’s app, they discover that the items they had placed in the shopping cart did not appear in the app.
Similarly, consider a customer that visits a brand’s website, finds the items they are interested in at a reasonable price, only to visit the brand’s brick-and-mortar store and find that the items are nowhere to be found, or they are being sold at a price much higher than they were listed on the website.
Finally, there’s the customer who has questions about a particular item, and is interacting with the brand’s chatbot on its website. At a certain point, the customer decides it would be more practical to talk with a live customer service agent, and calls the number provided on the brand’s website. Once they are talking to an agent, they discover that the agent has no idea what they are talking about, has no history of their discussion with the chatbot, and the customer must once again go through the ropes of their discussion with the live agent.
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All of these experiences have one thing in common: customer frustration. These pain points are barriers to sales, and add up to equal an unpleasant, emotionally negative experience that will push customers right into the arms of their competitors.
Final Thoughts
It is clear that many brands still have work to do when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experiences. The year has shown us that failure to understand the core audience, prioritize data privacy, provide personalization and frictionless digital interactions, and integrate cross-channel experiences, can have detrimental impacts. The path forward is clear — brands must recommit themselves to placing the customer at the heart of their strategy.
