THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: PERSONALIZATION

‘Personalized content can now be delivered through whichever touch point the customer prefers.’ BARE shares an article by Dale Renner for Forbes on Transforming the Customer Experience: Personalization.

‘Though the technology has advanced leaps and bounds — even in just the past few years — companies have only begun to crack the surface of personalization capabilities.

Twenty years ago, nearly all companies considered the use of broad segmentation, demographic data and batch outbound marketing as the keys to delivering personalized customer experiences. Ten years ago, Amazon began introducing product personalization into an online experience. Now, as vast amounts of data become readily available to marketers and businesses, they are charging forward to compete on customer experience using personalization on a granular scale not seen before.

In Forrester’s Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer report, only 9% of responding companies indicated they had implemented digital transformation to a degree that they felt gave them an advantage among their competitors.

For companies looking to create a personalized experience regardless of where, when or how a customer chooses to engage, it is essential that they leverage new technology to create an enduring relationship between the brand and the customer.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

As technology advances, the customer journey has become more granular. What began as large-scale blanket advertisement has moved toward specific, targeted and strategic advertisement. This trend echoes in other aspects of a brand’s relationship with the customer. Direct mail became more personalized as the content catered to whichever segment profile the customer most closely aligned with. Interaction and engagement moved to new mediums as customers embraced smartphone technology.

Personalized content can now be delivered through whichever touchpoint the customer prefers. However, customer experience still often relies on asynchronous or batch-and-blast communications. Without knowing all that is knowable about a customer and having that knowledge available in real-time across the enterprise, the content then merely caters to the segment a customer “belongs” to without knowing if the content is relevant at that point in their customer journey.

Today, we live in a world of instant gratification, and customers’ expectations have mirrored that.

A frictionless customer experience can only be enabled through real-time engagement that spans touch points and multistage journeys.

Using digital channels, mobile apps, social media, SMS and IoT, there are countless ways to build out a completely personalized customer journey for a segment of one.

Companies need to embrace new technologies such as machine learning to keep up with the proliferation of touch points and the explosion of data, and to create a scalable process in which machines detect intention and then seamlessly prescribe the optimal path to purchase for each customer.’

Today, BARE International sets the industry standard as one of the largest independent providers of customer experience research, data, and analytics for companies worldwide. BARE’s customer experience research can provide you with critical data to make meaningful business decisions. Ask us how.

Read the full article at the source here

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