Providing Hyper-Personalized Customer Experiences to Set Your Organization Apart

 
Your organization must deliver a personalized customer experience (CX) in a highly competitive digital economy. Around 98% of marketers say personalization enhances the customer experience, and 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations and offers. According to McKinsey research, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% are frustrated when that doesn’t happen. If your organization doesn’t engage consumers on a personal level, they’ll turn to brands that will.

The link between personalization and CX is not new. However, you need to understand the value of personalizing every interaction in consumer journeys. Whether you have a personalization strategy or are starting from scratch, you must up your personalization game to attract and retain customers.

Understanding Personalized Customer Experience

Personalized CX refers to providing a specific, customized experience to every consumer. McKinsey survey respondents defined personalization as positive experiences of being made to feel special. Feeling special may come from receiving custom messaging, offers, promotions, support and recommendations.

Personalized customer experiences mean you treat consumers as individuals with unique preferences and tastes. You make them feel special through every interaction and do not just address them via generic communications as part of a mass audience. Hyper-personalization takes things further. Hyper-personalization refers to using customer data and technology [analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation] to create custom experiences at an individual–not a segment–level. Personalized customer experiences start with using customer data to tailor every interaction a customer has with your brand–before, during, and after the sale. Personalized experiences include custom landing pages based on browsing history, product recommendations from historical interactions, and one-on-one engagement with your team.

Another aspect of personalization involves protecting consumer data and providing custom experiences without infringing privacy rights.

Benefits of Personalized Experiences

Personalization offers your organization various benefits:

• Increased customer satisfaction: By showing customers you understand and care about their needs, personalization boosts customer satisfaction and builds relationships.
• Enhanced brand loyalty and advocacy: Delivering tailored interactions with targeted messaging increases brand trust and loyalty. Most (78%) consumers are more likely to repurchase from a brand that delivers personalized communications. Consumers will also share their positive experiences and interactions, becoming advocates for your organization.
• Improved conversion rates and revenue growth: Personalized experiences captivate and engage consumers. For example, personalized emails experience a 139% increase in click rate over a static, generic send. Meaningful interactions boost engagement, increasing conversions and revenue growth. Personalization often drives a 10 to 15% revenue lift.
• Expanded customer lifetime value: Greater customer satisfaction and loyalty translate into higher customer lifetime value.

Critical Elements of Personalized Digital Experiences

Delivering hyper-personalized digital experiences requires you to focus on several key elements:

• Customer micro-segmentation: Micro-segmentation groups small numbers of customers into very precise segments, based on customer-specific data such as preferred products, history with the brand and time since last purchase. Marketers can then deliver tailored messages–such as sending an email promoting Saucony running shoes to people who purchase a new pair every six months (and bought their last pair five months ago).
• Dynamic content personalization: Leverage technology to deliver engaging, relevant content to the right consumers at strategic times, resulting in meaningful interactions and inspiring better outcomes. Consumers want to feel they’re receiving unique experiences. Be smart about personalization. Focus on what matters most to your consumers and personalize those moments with relevant content. For example, you could send a discount offer for a crate–and a video about how to crate-train your dog–to people who recently purchased puppy pads.
• Personalized recommendations: AI technology and machine learning (ML) models enable dynamic recommendations–suggesting products and services based on the customer’s purchasing patterns and historical interactions (e.g., browsing history). By making recommendations based on behavior, you increase cross-selling and upselling and give consumers what they want when they want it.
• Omnichannel consistency: To keep personalization consistent and effective, go omnichannel. Omnichannel communications provide consistent, coordinated experiences wherever customers engage with you. Coordinate your efforts so that all your digital and physical touchpoints deliver personal experiences. Use innovative platform technology to make consumer information available across channels in real-time, providing seamless consumer experiences.

Customer Feedback and Continuous Enhancement of Personalized Experiences

Once you have implemented personalization, you must keep optimizing your efforts. No successful, large-scale personalization strategy is ever stagnant or complete.

You must see your personalization efforts as open-ended, allowing for continual daily improvement. To test your success and keep your efforts impactful:

1. Consider regularly requesting feedback from consumers.
2. Leverage AI technology to get real-time sentiment analysis.
3. Review your analytics to identify potential consumer friction points and see what efforts yield positive results.

Your organization needs to keep exploring and improving your entire CX. Personalization is essential, but having some custom items is not enough to remain competitive in a landscape where competitors are fiercely seeking to outperform you. Keep your consumers at the forefront of your strategies and connect with them to meet their needs and preferences.

CSG Simplifies Personalization Customer Experiences for Your Organization

Delivering personalized customer experiences across the CX lifecycle is now the norm. Companies that don’t provide them–and step up their game to tailor experiences at the individual level–will lose customers. Hyper-personalization may seem daunting—but it doesn’t have to be.

CSG Xponent is an industry-leading CX platform that helps you do it all. Manage customer data in one intuitive interface. Anticipate consumer needs with predictive analytics. Coordinate communications between platforms. Deliver exceptional CX on the right channel, at the right moment. Turn static customer journeys into dynamic, personalized experiences across touchpoints. Xponent helps your organization:

• Simplify customer journeys: The customer journey management solution maps, automates and refines customer journeys in real-time, optimizing interactions and delivering highly personalized experiences.
• Connect engagement channels: Make communicating with your organization a seamless experience for consumers by connecting your channels. Xponent ensures your comms are scalable, reliable and real-time responsive, leveraging MMS, conversational AI, voice and other channels.
• Organize your data securely: Tame your data chaos with a straightforward solution. Build up-to-the-minute, rich customer profiles and leverage the customer data platform to personalize consumer interactions.

Data Privacy and Security in Personalization

Data privacy and security are important considerations for every organization. You want to enhance personalization but don’t know if your systems are robust enough to safeguard your consumer data.

The CSG security team leverages industry-best encryption techniques, security software and data management tools to help you adhere to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We hold numerous certifications and comply with stringent security requirements.

We will help you deploy personalization across your organization while keeping customer data secure and well managed.

Optimize Your Customer Experiences With Easy-to-Implement Solutions

CSG Xponent empowers you to understand the driving factors of consumer behavior to master the entire customer lifecycle. Xponent is an award-winning solution that helps you upsell consumers, boost retention and communicate quickly and effectively, delivering memorable personal experiences.

CSG has over four decades of experience helping thousands of organizations like yours solve their toughest challenges. We’ll help optimize consumer experiences and build your business through custom messaging.

Contact us online to learn about our frictionless solutions.