Customer experience plays a major role in driving businesses. And today, brands need to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to acquire customers, gain loyalty and improve retention. With today’s technology, customers do not want to be restricted by time zones or distance when doing business.
They are now after consistency, relevance, and authenticity, and having the same seamless experience across different digital channels. They want to feel seen and appreciated as customers. They want to belong and be heard. Customers will no longer settle for subpar services and fragmented customer journeys.
Statistics say that 71 percent of consumers feel frustrated with impersonal shopping experiences. Meanwhile, 74 percent of them get frustrated when website content is not personalized. Their frustrations result in low engagement and can put your brand in a bad light. Here’s how you can deliver a hyper-personalized experience to customers at scale:
Actualize a Self-Service Experience
When it comes to personalized experiences, it’s always quality over quantity. Less is more — less questions, lengthy forms to fill out, calls and emails; and more automations, fast replies and one-click processes. As customers are now living their fast and modern digitized lives, hyper-personalization means less communication and more of a self-service experience.
A self-service experience offers information that customers can leverage to receive service. It must offer lots of benefits, comfort, timeliness, and satisfaction, with less physical interaction needed. Make a customer-friendly website that’s easy to navigate, where customers can find what they need in a few clicks, without requiring them to send you an email or make a call and wait in queue.
Having chatbots on your website that can respond to customers in real time about common queries is a quick self-service solution many businesses now offer. An easily accessible FAQs section can also help them find answers on your website themselves faster, without waiting for your personnel to reply. This empowers them and gives them the transparency and accessibility they need.
Curate Customer Feedback and Use It
Curating customer feedback is highly essential to learning what customers want and how they want it. They are always the best source of information on how you can improve their experience. Be sure to actively ask customers for their insights, questions or suggestions. Hear your customers and let them know that they are heard. Incentivise feedback as necessary. This will encourage customers to provide feedback and will let them know that you are willing to listen to them.
Make use of customer feedback effectively. This can seem like a tedious task, especially if your customer base is growing. You can consider using a system or software that can help you sort, organize and understand your customers’ feedback better.
Create Customer Profiles
Delivering a hyper-personalized customer experience requires you to get to know your customers first. You need to know what they want and need, develop your target customer persona and understand who they are and how they think.
In creating customer profiles, you must first understand your target market, from the global scale to your realistic addressable market. It is important to adopt your buyer’s point of view: what are their problems? How can you solve it? What factors affect their purchase decisions?
It is necessary to determine your target demographics and observe their behaviors and motivations, to paint a more specific picture of your target customers. This can help you create a buyer persona or a fictional portrait of your ideal customer. Having one or several buyer persona/s can help you create more effective and personalised customer journeys for each possible customer that you might encounter.
Data Collection
You can hardly understand your customers, know their needs, and address their problems when you don’t have the right data available. Especially in today’s digital world, data is power and businesses are fighting to gather the right customer data to get ahead of their competition.
Gather data from all relevant sources and make sure you store, treat and process this data in the right and compliant way. You can consider investing in an efficient analytics platform to organize data systematically and draw relevant insights that can help you personalize the service you deliver. If you are handling large volumes of data, opt for more advanced automation solutions.
There are now advanced robotic process automation (RPA) solutions that can perform defined actions, including tedious repetitive tasks, like navigating systems and identifying and extracting data. For faster and more cost-effective options, you can automate with RPA Cloud services or RPA SaaS. It can be installed within minutes and perform a wide range of automation processes, without requiring any hardware or installations and updates.
Build Trust
Certain countries are less interested in hyper-personalized marketing, as they feel it could be invasive. This is a consequence of previous incidents of data misuse, especially in major markets. To build trust, it is important to prioritize your customer’s data privacy.
There are data protection and privacy laws globally that regulates how business can gather and use consumer data. For instance, Europe has established General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The US, on the other hand, does not have a standardized data protection law, but it has various laws governing the usage and privacy of various data types across industries, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
These laws aim to protect consumers. And it is also important for businesses to do the same. The rules of data privacy are dynamic, as the demands and preferences of customers change and evolve over time. But it is always grounded on respecting customers. The basic principles of data privacy always include prioritising customer trust over transactions and going after insights instead of identity.
Put your customers first. Make sure to always ask for their consent. Be transparent with your intentions on how you wish to use the personal data they share with you and ensure that their data is secured. This way, customers will trust you and provide you with the data you need to deliver a hyper-personalized experience.
Data Is Key To Hyper-personalization
Almost everything today is driven by data and insights, especially the development and delivery of hyper-personalized customer experiences. Gather real-time data and use it effectively to get to know your customers and discover what type of products and services they need. This way, you can make timely decisions and deliver hyper-personalized experiences when and where your customers need them.
