Experiences are what bring consumers back to a brand. To truly create a great experience, CX executives must start thinking about moments in time—micro-moments that would be memorable for a customer. It’s one thing to measure points in time with rules-based decisioning, but what really drives personalization and loyalty is behavior, action and the ability to adapt as that behavior changes.
Micro-Moments: Moments of Decision
Google coined the term, defining a micro-moment as “an intent-rich moment when someone turns to a device to act on a need—to know, go, do or buy.” Usually that device is a smartphone.
There are four critical micro-moments across the customer lifecycle:
I want to know — When someone is exploring or researching but is not necessarily in buying mode
I want to go — When someone is looking for a local business to buy from
I want to do — When someone wants help completing a task or trying something new
I want to buy — When someone is ready to make a purchase, and they may need help deciding what to buy or how to buy it
Consumers choose brands that quickly provide relevant answers, especially when they least expect it. Meaningful micro-moments are what make experiences memorable across the customer lifecycle. Connecting with consumers during the above four defining micro-moments influences their buying decisions and drives brand loyalty.
Personalization Pays Off
You know an extraordinary experience when you’ve had one. Consumers don’t want to feel like a number, so brands must show consumers they know them on an individual basis—not as a certain segment, demographic or age group.
Cookie-cutter treatment frustrates customers
Consumers expect businesses to know their preferences, interests and needs. According to a McKinsey survey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t occur. For example, a traditional retail brand has a brand-led website with a generic view of products offered. By contrast, a company like Shoptrue goes the extra mile to personalize the shopping experience by suggesting items to go with a consumer’s past purchases. As the McKinsey study also indicates, companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than less skilled businesses.
Customer data is the key to personalization
To anticipate and meet customers’ needs, brands must understand their past behaviors, habits and preferences. This requires gathering data about purchases, product usage, appointment and payment histories, customer service interactions and communication channel preferences. Stitching all this information together and developing a unique, real-time profile for every customer enables intuitive, proactive decision-making for a journey orchestration platform.
Journey Orchestration: Deliver the Right Information for the Right Micro-Moment
Journey orchestration refers to using real-time customer data to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior, and send the right messages at the right time via the customer’s preferred communication channel. In other words, journey orchestration helps determine each customer’s intent to quickly provide the information or solutions they’re seeking during their micro-moments.
Here are a few examples:
Researching internet plans (I want to know) — When a customer’s internet service contract is about to expire, they will likely check to see which plans are available. Anticipating this, telco brands can make it easy for the customer to search for products and plans by offering options based on their specific preferences (e.g., gaming, favorite channels, streaming movies).
“Near Me” notifications (I want to go) — Imagine a very loyal customer is within 100 yards of their favorite retail location and the brand spontaneously reaches out with a limited offer and directions to the store. Geo-fencing coupled with real-time notifications is an unexpected but highly rewarded strategy to drive in-store foot traffic.
Mortgage loan approval (I want to do) — When banking consumers are completing an online mortgage application, they expect prompt application status updates. Financial organizations can meet consumer demands by sending this information via the applicant’s preferred digital channels (e.g., email or text) to proactively deflect calls into the contact center.
Sales notifications (I want to buy) — If a customer orders flowers for their mother’s birthday every year, notify them in their channel of choice a week or two beforehand, reminding them of the special day and offering a discount for flowers. When the person is ready to buy, the information is at their fingertips.
Automate Responses to Micro-Moments
Anticipating micro-moments and delivering personalized solutions to consumers’ needs are essential to creating brand loyalty. You can do both with CSG Xponent—our award-winning, industry-leading solution that combines a customer data platform, journey orchestration and journey analytics. Our platform listens, interprets and engages at the right time with the next best action during those critical micro-moments.
You can quickly implement the platform using our CSG Xponent Ignite solution, which leverages a CX maturity model and ROI calculator to help you pinpoint where to improve CX for the greatest business impact. To immediately go live with micro-moment automation, Ignite also includes industry-specific, prebuilt journeys for four industries: telecommunications, financial services, retail, and healthcare.
Start delivering memorable micro-moments in weeks—not months or years. Contact us to learn more.
