Creating a hyper-personalised customer experience
Vishalan Moodley, Head Partner and Product at TechSoft International
Every organisation is familiar with the concept of putting the customer first. But events of the past two years have seen this important stakeholder evolve into someone who expects service providers to be digitally-driven and leverage the data at their disposal to provide a hyper-personalised customer experience. But knowing the customer is only one piece of the puzzle. The other is understanding how to better talk to them and deliver solutions targeted to their unique needs.
Fortunately, companies have embraced digital transformation at a rapid rate. This has resulted in the exponential increase of customer data captured in real-time using many ingestion points. The theory is that more data will bring a greater understanding of customer preferences and habits. In turn, the organisation can deliver what customers want in real-time. And by injecting a level of advanced analytics into the process, a business can even pro-actively identify personalised offers that their customers might not even have been aware of they needed.
Overcoming obstacles
Of course, understanding, managing, and analyzing customers and their data are not without their share of challenges. For instance, incumbents face digitally-agile competitors and new start-ups shifting customer expectations.
As such, customers expect fast response times to their queries. They also demand an integrated (and consistent) experience across channels and business lines. An example could be in the retail environment where the bricks-and-mortar store needs to align with its e-tailing counterpart regarding customer rewards, discounts, and other specials.
Despite data growth, many companies still struggle with accessing what they need. This could negatively impact the decision-making process and limit the extent to which personalisation and contextualisation for individual customers can occur, all of which require information to be updated in real-time.
The power of hyper-personalisation
Going the hyper-personalised route offers too many benefits to ignore. Take customer acquisition as an example. Personalisation shifts from solutions based on broad market segments, preferring to focus on marketing messages directly relevant to customers at an individual level.
And by providing something truly relevant to the customer, a company can reduce churn and engender loyalty. It becomes more profitable to target customers through personalisation as it identifies those likely to be most profitable.
Along with this comes a level of scalability not experienced before. Being targeted means a company can increase its digital traffic (and feet in store for retailers) while reducing costs and increasing revenue while benefitting from increased customer satisfaction.
The retail perspective
Retailers know a lot about their customers based on data captured at multiple touchpoints, for example, store visits, use of an app, loyalty programmes, and even social media engagement with the brand. Integrating each of these into a cohesive whole means retailers can gain an invaluable understanding of who the customer is, what they want, and how they want it.
A customer might be browsing a retail site but gets interrupted. The moment is gone, potentially losing a sale for the business. But that does not have to be the case. Using sophisticated data intelligence, a retailer can view all the customer’s historical data, including their purchases, preferences, and interactions, while combining it with real-time information to provide a better view of the products they might enjoy purchasing. The next time they log in to the app or visit the site, the retailer can personalise the interaction to increase the chance of a conversion.
Hyper-personalisation benefits the customer who gets tailored messages in real-time while the brand can increase revenue from more sales and drive loyalty.
The business-to-business benefit
Hyper-personalisation extends to non-consumer environments as well. Take manufacturing as an example. Having a complete view of factory operations, and connecting and integrating data from machines, systems, process historians, and operational data stores, will result in an enterprise gaining a complete overview of operations.
By connecting and unifying data across all these data points, think Internet of Things at scale, analytics can provide invaluable insights across the entire manufacturing process. Thanks to sophisticated data intelligence solutions, a manufacturer can ‘connect the dots’ like never before. For example, identifying the plants that are not running efficiently from a power consumption perspective and delivering a hyper-personalised solution that can reduce their electricity usage to save costs.
Achieving the impossible
The hyper-personalised customer experience requires businesses to embrace modern technologies, services, and models. Providing the glue that ties these together is access to clean, tightly governed, and highly secure data. Speed is of the essence as customers will only increase their expectations of companies to provide them with contextual relevance, the right products, and opportunities to access new services better reflective of their immediate (and future) needs.