Great personalised customer experiences hugely influence your brand’s marketing and customer service success. According to a McKinsey study, positive customer experience improves customer satisfaction rate by 20%, sales conversion rate by 10% to 15% and employee engagement by 20% to 30%.
However, a great personalised customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design and with thoughtful planning, where customers are the focus.
In this article, we’ll look at the key things you have to consider to ensure a successful personalisation strategy. We start with your company culture.
True personalisation is a customer-centric strategy aiming to provide the best unique experience to every individual customer. Like all other strategies, a key requirement to its successful implementation is the commitment and buy-in from all people involved. This means your company must also have a culture that aligns with your customer-centric approach - one where products and services are aligned to the customers’ wants and needs, and where leaders promote and nurture the necessary mindset and values in their teams.
Every part of your company should be an active participant in the personalisation process - from setting goals and sharing data to providing value to customers at every touchpoint.
So how can you develop a customer-centric culture?
Build customer empathy
Customer empathy is understanding your customer’s needs and feelings, the reason behind them, and responding appropriately. It allows you to see your customers as real people instead of just transaction numbers, providing you with a context of how your products and services fit into their lives.
Instil customer empathy by enabling all members of your company to have a better understanding of your customers. Leverage your store staff and other customer service frontliners to gather customer feedback, and share this knowledge across all departments. Develop a way to facilitate direct interaction with customers (e.g. participating in customer events or even observing customer support calls and focus groups), so your employees can better learn about their challenges and successes.
Make customer insights accessible
Ensure every person in your company is powered by data. When everyone understands who your brand’s customers are, adopting a customer-centric mindset becomes more successful. By democratising customer insights across your company, you’ll enable your employees to become customer champions, ensuring every customer touchpoint is an extraordinary experience.
Data-driven personalisations means the ability to make customer experiences as relevant to an individual as possible. An effective personalised customer experience, however, is impossible if you don’t have the right data that allows you to truly hear the voice of your customers as well as understand their expectations.
As you develop your personalisation strategy, you first need to ask yourself: “What customer data do we currently have and does it give us the capability to recommend offers and content to our customers at the right time?”
Additionally, quality customer data should allow you to:
While having a huge customer database is an important asset for your brand, you also have to remember that it doesn’t always guarantee your personalisation strategy’s success. You must ensure that your data is accurate, consistent and complete. If you have poor-quality customer data, you will only risk annoying your customers with inaccurate messaging or delivering subpar experiences.
So how do you ensure that the quality, accuracy and freshness of customer information is maintained?
You need to design experiences where information is captured anywhere, anytime. This can be made possible with the help of personalisation technologies.
Human interaction remains important in retail, but technology is also vital in helping you become more targeted and effective in how you use your data and deploy your workforce to pursue personalisation.
When thinking about your personalisation strategy, assess what technology you currently have in place. Are you able to track as many interactions across all channels as possible without overstepping privacy boundaries? What systems or applications are available that help reveal customer preferences and buying patterns?
To help you get on the right track, here are four technologies that can help drive extraordinary personalised customer experiences.
Your customers are constantly evolving. This means you need to have the right tool that enables you to understand them on an ongoing basis.
A CDP aggregates and organises customer data from various sources. The best CDPs allow you to get a complete picture of your customers. They provide a centralised and real-time view of customers’ profiles, as well as transaction or interaction histories, to power customer experiences and the staff who serve them. They listen to other systems to enrich each customer profile while also feeding accurate data to marketing, segmentation and business intelligence tools.
CRMs allow you to manage and analyse interactions with past, current and future customers. CRMs become powerful when integrated with every other marketing tool and asset to help enrich every customer journey.
Omneo’s version of CRM is our Clienteling experience combined with our customer service Extensions for best-of-breed platforms like Zendesk and Gorgias. Working in conjunction with the entire Omneo suite, Clienteling empowers staff to redeem incentives, update profiles & align transactions all in one interface.
Marketing automation platforms enable you to streamline and automate your sales and marketing activities.
From tracking customer behaviours to email marketing and social media posting, marketing automation platforms allow you to scale your customer retention efforts with highly personalised and relevant content. They help you develop a nurturing process that builds brand awareness, interest and loyalty.
When personalisation is done at scale, chatbots have the potential to further close the customer experience gap in online channels. They can offer 24/7 around-the-clock customer service. They can also store customer information like preferences and turn them into personalised recommendations. According to Invespro, chatbots can even help brands “save up to 30% in customer support costs by speeding up response times and answering up to 80% of routine questions.”
Amazon
With the vast amount of data at its disposal, Amazon has made incredible personalisation advances in the eCommerce industry. From advertising to on-site content and emails, the company delivers data-driven personalisation messaging and offers in real time.
Their “frequently bought together” and “customers who bought this item also bought” prompts encourage 44% of their customers to buy from these product recommendations. Amazon also sends follow-up emails and personalised newsletters to alert customers about the deals on the products they’ve seen on the eCommerce site.
Netflix
Like Amazon, Netflix has also invested in AI and machine learning to power up its personalisation efforts. They use watch data, search history as well as rating data to inform what shows the platform will recommend to individual users, making the process of finding the next binge-worthy title a lot easier.
Remember those banners and carousels of shows on your Netflix homepage? They didn’t just happen by accident. They’re all based on your interests, preferences and previously watched shows to enhance your overall experience with the platform.
MJ Bale
MJ Bale, a multi-channel Australian menswear and fashion label, uses personalisation to make the shopping experience of its customers as seamless as possible. Working with Omneo, the company enables its customers to have their sizes and purchase history from all channels available visually to store teams via Clienteling and on their own devices using the mobile-optimised Profile Portal.
With this personalisation capability, the store team can recommend relevant new in-stock items, style matches & combinations, making the buying decision much simpler for staff and customers alike.
A sample view of the customer profile in Clienteling
The rapid pace of technical advancements, the market disruption from online players, plus the effects of the 2019 pandemic have significantly changed consumer behaviour and their expectations.
Transactional selling and traditional differentiation approaches, such as strategic discounting, are no longer as effective as they once were. Today, customers expect a more personalised shopping experience and a deeper understanding of their needs from the brands they do business with. By implementing an effective personalisation strategy, you’ll be able to create a positive customer experience that leads to greater customer satisfaction and a boost in revenue.
Are you looking for the right tools to help you provide a connected experience for your customers? Connect with our team today.
