It’s the era of personalization. Making your customer’s experience as personally relevant as possible, not only means better engagement with a customer, but also better business through increased customer retention. Read on for the top three customer experience examples to follow.
Marketers have a simple task in essence – make the customer feel a sense of relationship with the brand. And this is possible through personalizing the customer’s experience with the brand. Personalized Customer Experience (CX) has been a focus of marketers recently. “Everything a brand does – the way it does its marketing, research, advertising and more – all play a role in shaping the customer’s experience. Focusing on customer experience management (CXM) may be the single most important investment a brand can make in today’s competitive business climate,” says customer service/CX expert and keynote speaker Jeff Hyken in a post.
Read more: Shopper Experience: Five Tips To Create A Memorable Customer Experience.
What is Personalized Customer Experience?
Personalized CX is more than sending an email to your customer on their birthday. It’s about making each customer feel a special connection across different platforms and channels, such as web, email and mobile. And this must be done in real time, using contextually relevant information about the individual. As a marketer, you have to be more proactive, and enable better interaction with your customer throughout his journey with you.
Why Personalized CX matters?
A 2016 Gartner survey on the role of marketing in customer experience found that by 2016, 89% of companies expected to compete mostly based on customer experience, versus 36% in 2010. That was two years ago, and marketers have been steadily working towards providing a more engaging personalized experience to their customers. Lisa Sigler, Sr. Manager of Content Marketing at Clarabridge, explains it well, “Personalization is a way to make sure customers know they matter. By giving them relevant, helpful experiences that fit their needs, you inspire their loyalty. By intentionally designing experiences to be always relevant and only relevant, you show that you understand them and care what they want.”
“According to the Salesforce’s fourth annual “State of Marketing” report, 52% of B2C customers say they’d switch brands if they didn’t feel they were receiving a personalized experience.”
In an article on MTA, we had emphasized why businesses must adopt dynamic and strategic personalization techniques, as they move towards 2020: “A singular and unified view of the customer and his entire journey across touchpoints and brand interactions is a must to create hyper-customized messages and interactions. Equally important is a robust technology architecture powered by elements like Data Management Platforms (DMP), Marketing Automation Platforms, Web Personalization, Recommender Platforms and Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Platforms. Marketers might even witness a scenario where evolving technologies and consumer demand will create a requirement for individualized products and services.”
Also Read: 3 Ways to Use Your Data to Drive Personalized Customer Experiences
Another Forrester report articulates that personalization — one of the top success factors for customer-centric businesses — is a critical pillar of CX. Today’s consumers have higher expectations and more choices. Forrester consultant Fiona Adler explains, “Firms that succeed with personalization are proactive and intentional about it. They treat personalization as an enabler of better interactions from the customers’ view across their journeys. Rather than contemplating, ‘How can my organization implement personalization?’ they ask, ‘What tasks and goals are users trying to accomplish, and how can personalization enable users to more seamlessly accomplish those?’”
So, who’s getting personalized CX right in 2018? We’re glad you asked.
These three MarTech companies that have set an example for providing good customer experience and have been reaping the benefits of providing better-personalized experiences to their customers:
Also Read: Intrusive or Exclusive – What Would You Choose Personalization to be Like?
1.Salesforce
Each year, for the past decade, Salesforce has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center. They attribute their success to their customers. “They really inspire how we build and innovate our products. Everything that we do is based on what we hear from our customers,” says Bill Patterson, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Service Cloud, Salesforce, in a company blogpost. He adds that Salesforce believes what sets them apart from the rest is: a) their investments in integration technologies that deliver more personalized experiences for every customer — and create lasting relationships that turn a service center into a growth engine; b) their apps and solutions that can connect businesses with customers on any channel they might use; and c) their Ignite team that works with customers to jumpstart their Salesforce integration.
2.Oracle
“I was attending a conference last month and forgot my credit card at the hotel I’d been staying in. Upon finding it, the hotel concierge not only called to let me know,they also arranged for it to be delivered to me at the conference in a sealed envelope. I couldn’t have asked for a better response,” writes Oracle’s CRM Sales ConsultantMichael Bornheim in a company blogpost, highlighting the importance of positive customer experience.
Bornheim adds that the consistent differentiator among the world’s most successful brands is that they have a loyal customer base: “No small feat when you consider the number of options available to consumers today. How have they done this? Like the global hotel chain, I was staying with during my conference, these companies have made a point of ensuring customers walk away with positive experience to share. The simple act of giving each person a personalized service has allowed them to build large networks of advocates who then happily spread the good work on their behalf.”
Oracle has been delivering this through their Customer Experience (CX) Cloud Suite, that is known to empower organizations to improve experiences, enhance loyalty, differentiate their brands, and drive measurable results by creating consistent, connected, and personalized brand experiences across all channels and devices. The Oracle CX Cloud Suite includes Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud. “Oracle makes it possible to generate even more personalized customer experiences by cross-referencing a company’s own data with third-party data, such as web, social, and behavioral data,» writes Nathan Joynt, Content Director, Oracle Cloud Business Group, CX Apps, in a company post about CX.
3.Amazon
If there’s one B2C company that understands personalization, it’s Amazon. Jeff Bezos was right when he predicted that people would not only want to buy books and other things online, but they’d also pay for the privilege to have those things delivered within a day (Amazon Prime). Remember how after you picked up a Stephen King bestseller, the widget would ask you to check out other bestsellers by King? That’s the basics of personalization 101!
Amazon bases its recommendations on a user’s buying history, things they’ve looked at in the past, things they’ve liked and rated after purchasing, as well as what other buyers of those same things have viewed and purchased. Amazon found that 35% of all its sales are generated by the recommendation engine. And how do they do that? Through their “deep learning” technology that gets the recommendation engines to learn and scale efficiently by studying people’s purchase habits.
Also Read: Personalization at Scale: How to Speak to a Million Customers, One at a Time
Amazon has proven that personalized predictions not only help to bring in new customers, they also help keep the old ones.
Have you tried a more personalized approach for your customers? Tell us about your learnings in the comments below.
