Customer Experience
QSRs Take Advantage of ‘Secret Menus’
A number of major chain restaurants serve items that aren’t listed on their menus but are nonetheless popular. Now, many brands are bringing those items to the forefront. “Restaurant chains can track personalized orders and crunch the numbers, helping them learn more about their customer base. If a creative customized order becomes popular enough, it could make it to the official menu board.”
Challenges Ahead for Bed, Bath, and Beyond
The brand’s chief officer is stepping down, and it faces many challenges in getting up to date. For instance, “Any retailer stuck in channel-centric thinking is falling further and further behind. Brands need to embrace the blur and realize that the customer is the channel. BB&B has been playing catchup here for years, falling short on most dimensions of what others like to call omnichannel shopping. The lack of a dedicated BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) area is one obvious fix, but there are many opportunities to break down the silos.”
Workplace
Is Slack Reducing Productivity?
Slack and similar products were designed to increase workplace productivity, but they may be doing just the opposite. “On average, employees at large companies are each sending more than 200 Slack messages per week, according to Time Is Ltd., a productivity analytics company that taps into workplace programs—including Slack, calendar apps, and the Office Suite—in order to give companies recommendations on how to be more productive. Power users sending out more than 1,000 messages per day are ‘not an exception.’”
Data
WhatsApp Hacked, Attackers Installed Spyware on People’s Phones
The Facebook-owned social platform has been hacked. “Bad actors were able to install the surveillance technology by phoning the target through WhatsApp’s call functionality, giving them access to information including location data and private messages.” If you have WhatsApp on your device, either update it or delete it.
Balancing Personalization and Privacy
Adweek has published Acquia’s list of three tips for getting the most out of data while maintaining consumer trust. One highlight: “Many consumers are now familiar with the pop-ups required for website visitors. Brands should treat these pop-ups and their privacy policies as the initial part of the personalization handshake instead of as regulatory agreements.”