How to Personalize Customer Experience: Personalization Strategy in 7 Steps

The era of digital customer experience transformation streamlines the challenges set to businesses in terms of customer experience. This factor has become the main reason for high level customer expectations — 73% of businesses compete primarily based on their customer experience. Personalized or not literally equals to “to stay with a brand” or “leave”. Сustomers are no longer surprised with all the digital options of a product. In most cases, they are taken for granted. However, with process automation, organizations lose human touch with their customers. It puts them at risk, as 80% of customers are ready to buy from a brand that offers personalized customer experience. 

For businesses, eager to personalize their customer experience, it’s important to consider current customer experience trends, analyze the most illustrative customer service statistics, and put efforts into developing a smart customer experience personalization strategy.

What Is Personalized Customer Experience? 

Personalized customer experience means that a business:

• Understands its target audience deeply
• Walks in customer’s shoes by analyzing all customer needs
• Creates a solution that fits customer’s needs
• Invokes the feeling of being understood
• Meets personal customer requirements

 It may be represented in designing products or services that meet customers’ expectations.

Key Benefits of Personalized Customer Experience

If done right, personalized customer experience can help businesses stand out from their competitors. 

Here are the main benefits of having a product or a service personalized.

1. Best Tool to Boost Customer Retention

Making a deep marketing research can help dive into customer preferences and wishes. It can show a lot of creative fuel to increase customer satisfaction and boost customer retention up to 76%. A customized experience makes each customer feel special, heard, understood, and eager to stay longer with a brand, becoming its ambassador.

One of the most prominent examples of how personalization works is the case of Coca-Cola and their “Share a Coke” campaign, when Coke bottles were personalized. It was run for seven years in 80 markets and managed to reverse an 11-year consumption decline and boost the company’s presence across international markets.

2. Natural Way to Increase Conversion Rate

Customers are ready to buy more from a brand that delights them by personalizing their customer journey. The figures show that:

• 93% of organizations have risen their conversion rates by search engine marketing personalization
• 94% of companies had the same result after they personalized their websites
• 92% of brands have boosted their conversion by personalizing their emails

At the same time, these increases were only minor for the majority of companies in the study

3. Way to Drive Customer Loyalty

Customer experience correlates with customer loyalty. Happy customers can eagerly bring up to 11 of their friends by word of mouth to enjoy all the benefits of personalized customer experience together. The statistics show that:

• Customers who have an emotional connection with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will recommend it at a rate of 71%, rather than the average 45% rate
• 82% of customers feel positive about a brand with personalized content

 Considering these facts and statistics can help improve organizational performance.To have it done in the best way, it’s worth choosing the best customer experience personalization strategy. 

Customer Experience Personalization Strategy in 7 Steps

1. Audience Segmentation and Building Customer Profiles

Customer segmentation helps fulfill customer experience personalization targets. It allows communication to become personalized — to offer customers what they want. Segmentation also helps sales managers, as they know the needs of customers in advance, and don’t waste time on irrelevant information.

Customer segmentation helps divide customers into groups, based on certain characteristics or criteria: geolocation, age, needs, actions on the site, etc. Thanks to segmentation, marketing specialists can think of unique approaches to each group of customers, so that everybody could feel addressed personally and cared for their needs.

2. Developing Omnichannel Customer Support Strategy

The main idea of developing an omnichannel support strategy is to achieve truly personalized and seamless customer experience across all channels. As 71% of customers say they expect a consistent experience, organizations have to develop their omnichannel support strategy, based on their customer needs. First, It’s important to define what kind of experience a Buyer Persona expects to get. For example, if the segmented demographic expects personalized and streamlined communication, all channels as well as customer experience strategy should be built around it. 

Teaming with the right technology partners, it’s important to define the channels of communication and balance them. Most organizations have silos that should be removed for the channels to work like one unified system.

Integrating all the channels into a perfect clockwise mechanism is a project that doesn’t stop after it’s been launched. Agile approach to self-service can help enhance omnichannel support. Constantly finding some areas for improvement and timely implementing new and smart solutions can help personalize customer experience.

3. Automation of Customer Experience

Automation of customer service is a system of identifying and meeting customer needs by using modern technologies and equipment without human presence. When thinking about automating interactions between a business and a customer, most managers usually think of chatbots and CRM systems. Indeed, these tools effectively solve part of customer interaction in many organizations.

However, a much wider range of operations can be automated. The use of self-service systems, for example, allows organizing independent registration of guests at a hotel and patients at a clinic, to automate the assessment of service quality and to inform the bank’s customers.

4. Delivering Contextual Support

Showing customers their time and work are valued can help personalize customer experience. Create a communication request flow, so customers can request support team’s feedback. With contact requests, customers don’t have to call and wait for a connection to get help. They just have to fill out a form online. Digital customer engagement tools help personalize customer experience and provide different kinds of chats. For example:

• Live chat connects with customers and helps them improve their customer journey 24/7 by guiding them on each step
• Co-browsing is a quick, safe and efficient way to start a screen-sharing session and create a completely personalized customer experience. It is efficient when a customer can’t cope with a difficult task, like long registrations. With a co-browsing solution, a user will feel supported and will have no unanswered questions. 
• Video chat is a simple and fast way to communicate with a virtual consultant in one click. No suspicious links, third-party programs, inconvenient messengers or waiting for an email response. A quick and personalized conversation helps customers feel heard and supported.

5. Introducing a Self Service Experience

Customer service automation is used to discover customer needs and satisfy them by providing digital solutions with minimal or no human involvement. It has become very popular, with 67% of customers finding having to talk to humans at some point during their customer journey not convenient, and considering self-service options. It can allow companies to handle service requests and save effort and time.

One of the ways to digitize, automate, and personalize customer experience are chatbots for simulating conversations with customers and solving their requests. Chatbots can provide links to useful resources and offer instant solutions to common problems.

6. Considering Customer Feedback 

52% of consumers are ready to tell their bad experience to family, friends, and colleagues on social media. 

Listening to customers and collecting feedback not to punish a team, but to improve company’s service, helps personalize customer experience. It includes listening to negative feedback and using it as a way to increase loyalty, analyzing data from all sources: in social networks, on forums, conducting written and oral customer surveys. Based on them, it’s easier to make decisions about changes in business processes. With this businesses have a high chance to craft the most individual solution and personalize their customer service.

7. Personalizing Every Communication

Personalization or creating a unique user experience is one of the main trends of recent years. 80% of consumers are ready to buy from a brand that offers tailored experience. This is logical, because customers’ tastes are unique and everyone reacts faster when addressed  by name than to a formal “Dear user!”. These preferences are not accidental, they can be explained from a scientific point of view. According to a study, published in “Brain Research” journal, when people hear their name, a unique reaction occurs in the brain — the areas responsible for long-term memory are activated — people perceive the information as highly meaningful and remember it better. A similar reaction occurs in the brain when people receive personal content. They also remember it much better.

In addition, personalization saves time and takes care of customers’ nerves: they quickly receive the necessary information without feeling irritated by intrusive sales. As a result, personalized communication is mutually beneficial: a company interacts with the potential customers more effectively, and customers receive content that meets their needs.

Conclusion

The future belongs to brands that understand and take the importance of customer experience into account. This is the main conclusion of the study Experience 2030: The Future of Customer Service is Now.

Thinking without borders and making decisions based on customers’ capabilities and needs, not the current business model, can help find different ways to personalize customer experience. In order not to lose personal contact with customers, it’s worth placing their interests at the center of all business decisions.

It is important to recognize that technology can create reliability and improve productivity, but it cannot create trust on its own. Trust strengthens consumer confidence and skyrockets CX.

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