Key Insights
Gone are the days when adding a person’s first name into a generic email promotion counted as personalization.
Customer Experience (CX) has evolved into something new.
The pandemic and the disruptions that were brought about in its wake meant the closing of physical stores and offices.
Consequently, the quality of online connections during the pandemic grew far more important. For customers, this meant being engaged in a more unique and meaningful way, specific to their needs and desires.
While shifts in customer behavior and channels of interaction represented severe disruptions for many companies, they have also offered an expanded range of touchpoints to gain customer understanding.
The modern customer expects companies to know enough about them to deliver a meaningful experience and provide maximum value with any purchase.
In fact, studies show that nearly 70% of customers prefer brands to know more about them, with Gen-Z customers skewing more toward this trend than millennials.
What Is a Personalized Customer Experience?
Personalized customer experiences refer to developing products, services, and interactions that meet your customer’s unique and individual requirements. This starts right from greeting your customers by their first name to designing offers that match their likes and interests.reg
Why Does it Matter?
When companies deliver a stellar customer experience, they benefit from increased brand loyalty, higher rate of conversion, maximized revenue streams, and a larger pool of brand advocates.
But how do we go about delivering a great CX? It all begins with understanding the vital components of a personalized customer experience. This article deep dives into this very domain.
5 Ways to Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience (CX)
1. Data & Analysis
To achieve personalization at scale, to truly transform your customer experience strategy, plumbing multiple data sources to form a comprehensive picture of customer behavior and preferences.
Research shows that while most companies recognize the importance of consolidated customer profiles, only a little over half have such consolidation in place.
While a cohesive 360-degree view of the customer is ideal, businesses should not waste vital time waiting for an exhaustive view to begin delivering on CX personalization.
Instead, they can start with a set of significant data sources and broaden their perspective as they scale up. They should also ensure that the resources and talent necessary to analyze data and develop actionable insights receive investment alongside data gathering.
2. Build Your Buyer’s Persona
One of the most important steps in delivering a personalized customer experience involves taking the time to understand who your customers are and what their pain points are.
To achieve this, your marketing team should be able to supply demographic data and customer information.
Once this is done, it is time to involve your best service reps and discuss the types of customers they commonly deal with on a day-to-day basis.
This process will allow you to flesh out a series of profiles based on your typical customer’s needs, wants, and expectations.
3. Personalization Playbook
Focus on developing a playbook of strategies.
These strategies would deeply dive into various facets of personalized customer experience. It should be built on a range of use cases, specific behaviors and actions, and backed by a powerful decision engine.
All these elements are necessary to develop coordinated responses and avoid conflicting messaging across touchpoints.
Companies can begin this journey by creating a few high-impact use cases that are not too complex to account for.
4. Collaborative, Silo-Free Operations
Building a comprehensive view of the customer and personalizing experience in line with that view is not possible if data gets stuck in silos or insights cannot be acted on if your business has departmental boundaries.
Cross-functional teams involving personnel from IT, data science, marketing, and sales are necessary to break down such organizational silos that can pose hindrance in delivering a personalized CX.
In the scenario where talent is in short supply, companies should choose suitable external partners to help build the personalization program and scale it up.
5. Integrated Technology
Personalization and improved customer experience will be incomplete without technology enablement that paves the way for collaboration across multiple systems.
An integrated platform is a key step in personalization maturity.
However, companies need not begin by disregarding legacy systems. Architecting a platform over legacy systems can provide significant ROI in the early stages.
The Bottom Line
Customer experience and the need to make it as personalized as possible needs to be the top focus for companies across sectors.
While the fundamentals of customer experience have not changed significantly, what has changed in the post-pandemic world is the explosion of digital channels, leading to more intersection points the customer has with a business.
In such a scenario, it is incumbent for businesses to create consistent relationships with customers across all digital touchpoints.
An effective and personalized mobile-first customer experience strategy is how companies will pave the way for greater customer satisfaction, increased revenue, and long-term loyalty.
