Research from Google has found that people are 40% more likely to spend beyond what they’d planned when they identify the shopping experience as personalised. However, personalisation in a simple sense is no longer enough. Most of us now expect brands to deliver hyper-personalised experiences. This means meeting our specific needs across every channel and adapting changes in our preferences in real-time.
Delivering this can be challenging, particularly for large businesses with legacy systems that are moving along their digital transformation journey. The answer to the issue lies in implementing technology to transform how they collate, analyse, and use customer data. In this article, I’ll cover some basic steps of adapting such technologies to improve the customer experience.
Understanding your customers from the inside out
The first step to hyper-personalisation is building a 360 degree-view of the customer to understand how they interact with a brand across their entire purchasing journey. This includes insight such as general demographic and buying behaviour, information on their previous communications, purchases and sentiment with a brand.
Getting this comprehensive overview of the customers’ interactions can be a challenging task. It requires the extraction of information from disparate systems, often in different formats, and can tie up significant amounts of team resources and money.
Technology like intelligent automation can be a powerful solution, helping to build and maintain the rich customer data banks businesses need, while also reducing overheads and freeing-up employees’ time. Such technology works by extracting information from a company’s channels, cleaning and formatting, before feeding it into a centralised Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
For example, brands can use intelligent automation to manage and update delivery and returns information. Additionally, brands can use such management systems to collate and combine sales data from in-store point-of-sale systems and a customer’s online shopping history.
Writing your CX transformation roadmap
If companies remove the manual tasks from the agents, they can spend more time delivering the more complex, value-add, elements of customer interaction. With a centralised data repository that is updated in real-time, brands can subsequently use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), predictive behavioural omnichannel routing and customer journey analytics to draw real-time insights to tailor the experiences agents provide.
In a practical setting, this could mean producing an on-the-spot offer for a product that a customer’s history suggests they would want or need, helping convert their initial interest into a sale. Additionally, it can automatically prompt agents with customer-specific ‘next-best actions’ to help them more quickly and proactively address specific problems helping to reduce customer effort and foster greater brand loyalty.
Building your transformation plan
While consumer demand for greater personalisation is clear, knowing how and when to implement technologies like intelligent automation or AI can be a serious challenge for businesses. At Arvato, we’ve developed our CX Transformation Roadmap Builder to help brands tackle this challenge head-on.
The free-to-use tool delivers a bespoke transformation plan that highlights the greatest opportunities for a business in terms of reducing costs, increasing sales and improving service. Moreover, the assessment can pinpoint the technologies businesses could use over the short, medium and long-term to unlock meaningful results for their operations.
With this insight in place, management teams can better understand the scope they have for deploying the technology that underpins critical customer experience elements like hyper-personalisation. In today’s customer experience landscape, businesses simply can’t afford to be behind the personalisation curve. Technology will be key to enabling brands to deliver the standard of service customers expect. Having the right tools in place will pay dividends for customer satisfaction – and ultimately brands’ bottom lines.
Click here to build your CX transformation roadmap.