Overcoming Barriers to a Personalized Customer Experience

New technologies such as AI have just raised the bar for remaining competitive. Among the different efforts to reach this objective, personalizing the customer experience is the highest priority—more than any other loyalty factor. In this article, let’s examine the main barriers preventing most businesses from effectively offering a personalized customer experience: finding the right loyalty benefits, marketing automation, and reliable data analytics. Addressing these barriers will keep your business ahead of the pack.

The Right Benefits for a Personalized Customer Experience

The most important aspect of having a practical, personalized customer experience is getting back to the basics: What do your customers want? Notice the emphasis on “your” in that last sentence because this varies significantly from business to business and industry. 

Here are some ways you can do that are specific to your business to understand what your customers want regarding a personalized customer experience:

Conduct Customer Surveys

That’s right! Ask your current loyal customers what is missing to keep them coming and what they want to see more of. This survey can be completely automated. For example, for one of our clients, we implemented an automated survey right after the first purchase, asking them what they liked about their experience and what they’d like to see to keep coming back. The survey is designed with multiple choices, so it’s swift and easy for the customer.

Leverage Data Analytics

Narrow down a customer list of repeat purchasers. What does their behavior have in common? What are their pain points, or what do they love about the customer experience? Quantitative data can be a great addition to understanding the big picture, especially paired with customer surveys.

Social Media and Reviews Sentiment Analysis

Your customers' social media and review activity online are a gold mine. Plus, what they write there is unbiased because they don’t owe you anything—when sending surveys, there is a response bias towards satisfied customers. What if you could extract that information and synthesize it into actionable points? That is precisely what we are doing for some of our clients!

Analyze Customer Support Interactions

Your customers will often tell your customer support what they like and don’t like in the form of tickets, emails, or phone calls. Yet, that data stays buried and is often not synthesized in an actionable format. A good practice for personalizing the customer experience is to review transcripts and logs from customer support interactions to identify common issues and requests.

Implement A/B Testing

Interestingly, A/B testing can be used to find what personalization your customers want experimentally rather than analytically. This can be a great way to test different ideas quickly without having to do extensive analysis beforehand or test hypotheses for which you might not already have data.  

Analyze Competitor Strategies

Some competitors already use these strategies to personalize the customer experience at different levels. Why reinvent the wheel? Sometimes, trying to implement elements your competitors have already tested can be a shortcut and save you valuable time and effort. However, it is necessary to monitor the impact of your customer base because they might react differently than your competitors' customers.

With these efforts, you will quickly understand how to personalize your business's customer experience. However, monitoring general trends in customer behavior and personalization is also essential. I like the chart PWC created below, which shows what most executives and customers want regarding personalized customer experience.

It’s interesting to see that some of the things executives think are important are not so important to customers' eyes. A great example is the omnichannel experience. 36% of executives believe omnichannel is significant for a personalized customer experience, but only 8% of customers think it’s the case. That is why it’s crucial to keep biases and preconceptions in check and operate in a data-driven way.

If you don’t have the internal resources for these efforts or you’d like the help of experts, contact us and let us know how we can help.

Marketing Automation for a Personalized Customer Experience

You have done your homework and know exactly what your customers want and need to keep buying from you. You have narrowed down the workflows required for a personalized experience, including email and SMS automation, remarketing, and some in-app interactions. However, with your available resources, this seems insurmountable, too time-consuming and has an unpredictable ROI. 

Do you kick the can down the road and push this project for another quarter? That’s what some businesses decide to do. However, innovative companies choose to unleash the power of Marketing Automation instead and leverage software that requires little human intervention and low upfront costs. Suddenly, the proposition is more appealing. 

Depending on your situation, you can use customer engagement software such as Braze, customer data platforms such as Twilio Segment, CRM platforms such as Hubspot or Salesforce, and more. The tools are plenty, but the secret sauce is choosing the optimal tech stack for your use case and ensuring it integrates seamlessly with your business. 

If you lack the internal resources to set up marketing automation or would like the help of experts, contact us and let us know how we can help.

Reliable Data Analytics for a Personalized Customer Experience

Let’s be honest: the data infrastructure, and therefore the data analytics you can find in most businesses, is a mess. It might be the case for your business as well. However, this is normal and makes sense, especially for smaller organizations. But, before personalizing customer experience, it’s essential to realize that data is crucial for measurement.

Here, I’m not talking about using data analytics to uncover insights but simply measuring the impact of your activities related to personalizing the customer experience. In other words, if your CLTV, CAC, and ROI metrics are wrong, especially when you slice and dice the data, you won’t be able to show the positive impact of personalizing the customer experience. And if you can’t show the impact, it will be difficult to justify further initiatives. 

Even if personalizing the customer experience has a huge impact, if you can’t show it, it’s as if it never happened. Therefore, investing a bit into your data infrastructure and analytics makes sense. That is true for other marketing projects, not only those specific to personalized customer experience. 

If you lack the internal resources to clean up your data infrastructure and analytics or would like the help of experts, contact us and let us know how we can help.