The Personalization Playbook: Making Real Time Personalized Customer Experience Possible

Customers want experiences uniquely designed to fit their needs and protect their privacy.

Customer expectations are reaching new heights. The impacts of the pandemic and innovative companies have disrupted the way we work, live, play, and transact, increasing what customers expect from brand interactions. These expectations can be summed up in a two-word mandate from customers: know us!

Dissecting that mandate reveals more: Customers expect brands to understand their changing wants and needs. Further, they want companies to use their data responsibly and ethically to deliver seamless, relevant, and meaningful experiences.

Experiences Designed to Meet Customers’ Needs

Companies can meet these expectations through personalization — delivering individualized interactions that enhance the customer experience (CX). These types of interactions show the customer that the company knows and cares about them. As customers engage across touchpoints, they are increasingly aware of what a brand knows about them and some ways that information is used. Customers want experiences uniquely designed to fit their needs and protect their privacy.

Personalization Is Paved with Data

A great starting point for personalizing interactions is data analytics. Analytics are used to detect behavior patterns and identify correlations to reveal what customers expect, do, and feel. Insights like these should be considered guiding principles for CX design. Since the resulting experiences are based on data-driven decisions and design, they are more relevant and meaningful to customers. Using insights in decision-making is a strong foundation for the success of a personalization strategy.

Gartner’s most recent Customer Service and Support Survey revealed that 71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well-informed about their personal information. As more data is gathered and mined across the customer journey, service delivery teams can use these learnings to improve personalization.

For many firms, access to data to identify who the customer is, their expectations, and previous contact experiences is a challenge. Many CX leaders admit their organizations have a number of issues accessing the right data. These obstacles include not collecting enough customer data, not sharing it across teams, lacking the tools and skills to transform data into insights, and/or having limited ability to act on findings. These roadblocks can prevent brands from providing the kind of personalized experiences customers expect.

The companies that deliver the best personalized experiences are companies that gather an abundance of relevant data and have strong data analytics and insights teams to turn these numbers into actions. Aside from the customer basics — personal information, demographics, and personas — financial, operational/interaction, behavioral, and attitudinal data are critical inputs that help reveal opportunities to increase personalized offerings. Without access and insights to use these important data inputs, brands struggle to design and deliver the personalized journeys that customers crave.

Personalization & Customization

Personalization and customization are often used interchangeably. Although they both individualize customer experiences, there are differences in these two customer engagement strategies. Here are some characteristics of the two to highlight the important distinctions.

Channel Strategy Across the Customer Journey

Another area that restricts CX leaders from developing and delivering personalized experiences is the complexity of the customer journey. As the digital transformation continues and the lines between physical and digital experiences are blurred, personalizing experiences across multiple touch points become more difficult.

Recent research from Genesys reveals that 61% of CX professionals polled cannot engage with customers across channels in personalized ways. These siloed experiences can lead to increased customer frustration and operational inefficiencies.

As enterprises strive to implement omni- and multi-channel strategies to ease contact burdens for customers and reduce organizational costs, the goal of personalization may be left out of the equation.

A comprehensive channel strategy should include an examination of the holistic experience and consider expectations, including the customer’s desire for personalization. Access to preferred service channels and quick and easy resolution are common goals during strategy development and implementation; decreasing cost and contact deflection can also be a focus for many organizations when doing this work.

However, leaders should ensure that ways to personalize experiences across channels are also a goal of this effort. Not including this goal and associated work will likely hinder an organization’s ability to deliver the personalized experiences that customers expect; satisfaction and loyalty metrics may also suffer.

Agent-Facing Tools

For agents to deliver personalized customer experiences, they need to know about the customer they are being asked to serve. They also need context; context-based support helps eliminate the inefficiency of trying to resolve an issue without the relevant background and details. This leads to another potential obstacle to delivering real-time personalized customer journeys: the agent-facing tools that power service delivery, particularly customer relationship management (CRM).

Modern, sophisticated CRMs keep track of and highlight relevant parts of customer history, such as contacts, conversations, issues, and timelines across various channels. Many also give agents access to sentiment data, including previous contact satisfaction data and real-time data like speech analytics.

When integrated with analytics tools, agents can enjoy timely access to insights about the customer’s experience as well as the best actions to take to achieve resolution and satisfaction. Agents that have the benefit of knowing the customer history and having real-time help solving issues are the ultimate in personalized customer service interactions.

Delivering What Customers Expect

How can organizations combat the many challenges that prevent them from delivering real-time personalized customer experiences? This work requires organizations to understand the specific gaps and prioritize and focus on initiatives that help customers get what they expect from their interactions.

A few actions to consider:

• Build or partner across your company to ensure you have access to a strong insights team that is equipped with the latest analytical tools.
  This team should guide the collection of the right kind of data, create a powerful analytics plan to crunch the numbers and provide frequent and regular actionable insights that drive continuous improvement in the contact center.
• Map your top customer journeys to reveal gaps in the way these experiences are personalized. Pay close attention to channel switching, particularly the experience of physical to digital as well as within the digital experience. Consider the learnings from this work in your channel strategy.
• Assess your existing technology stack to see what is missing, going unused, or not yet deployed that can power personalization. This work is an important step before new technology is added to your tech stack.
• Examine your self-service offerings. Well-done self-service options put the power of choice in the customer’s hands. Design a self-service strategy that ensures you capitalize on the customer insights you have and offers customers options to allow them to do it themselves if they choose.
• Consider proactive support, arguably the most personalized experience a customer can have. Identifying and implementing ways to get ahead of issues before customers are even aware of them creates interactions that build trust, show the customer you know and care about them, and even increase loyalty.
• Be transparent with your customers about why your company collects the data it collects, what is done with it, and why it benefits them. Reduce the creepiness factor by explaining what’s in it for customers and give them the opportunity to opt out of this type of data collection and usage.
• Ensure your customers know that their data is safe with you. Share your data-protection standards and help make them feel comfortable that you are securing their personal information — and that you take that responsibility very seriously.

Elevating Organizational Results

The rewards of personalization are rich; in addition to delivering experiences that customers want and expect, making these interactions unique increases your brand’s attractiveness to consumers. According to Qualtrics, 80% of customers are more likely to do business with brands that provide a personalized experience.

In addition, personalization can increase customer and employee satisfaction and elevate organizational results. As you incorporate that upside into your investment equation, the results will likely strongly support approval of efforts to design, build, and deliver what is needed to implement or enhance your organization’s personalization strategy.