By Kate Hamer, Customer Experience Consultant at CX Den
The term “personalisation” has been thrown around Board Rooms and Marketing Departments for years (normally alongside the equally bruised “Omnichannel”) and yet how many brands have been able to leverage the customer data they harvest to deliver truly personalised experiences? With the volume of data being captured and held on an individual customer and the technology advances in putting that data to use, we as consumers now have elevated expectations on how our data is being used to enhance our digital (and physical) experiences.
Today, the speed of CX messaging delivery, and relevance to the customer journey, is critical as consumers are more impatient and have higher expectations than ever.
“The last best experience that anyone has anywhere, becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.”
Source: Bridget van Kranlingen
An observation from multiple different retail clients is that the understanding of “The What” ie. what they should be doing (“personalising the customer journey agnostic of channel”) is clear however, the challenge comes with “The How” (“how do we deliver that?”). With legacy technologies, big backlogs and strict budgets, business teams normally find themselves bypassing IT to get something “quick and dirty” in place to semi answer the personalisation need. Over time the architecture becomes so complex with add-ons it becomes inevitable that the customer experience ends up fragmented and inconsistent. These challenges coupled with the noise of technology advances from AI, machine learning, IoT and advanced analytics (the list goes on) can make it hard to know where to start on activating data to deliver an enhanced, personalised experience.
So how do we address “The How”?
CX Den has a few tips on how to address “The How” by stripping out the noise and focusing on the customer:
- CX Strategy
Understand the customer journey
It sounds straightforward, but many businesses when working in their internal siloes rarely look at the customer journey holistically to identify some glaring pain points causing frustration for their customers as well as recognising key “moments of truth”. By reviewing end to end journey’s, the business has the ability to resolve these points of friction, remove barriers in the journey and identify how best to address the “moments of truth”.
- Data Data Data
Identify the valuable data points
Many businesses think more is more when it comes to what customer data should be captured and thrown into the data warehouse and CDP but very few have the capabilities to activate that data to derive value. By completing the journey mapping, the brand is able to identify which data points are really required to deliver relevant messages through the right channel against the identified “moments of truth”, enhancing the journey and bringing value to the business and end user.
- Ways of working
Facilitate Business & IT collaboration
Collaboration amongst teams creates an alignment in understanding the brand purpose, vision and CX strategy. It is critical for business and IT teams to closely collaborate and align on the intended end goals and work together to achieve them. Adopting agile ways of working and cross-functional teams brings a new energy and capability to delivering “The How”, breaking down siloes, removing internal friction and increasing speed to delivery.
By following these steps, the business can then test and learn, scale or strip back and over time begin to understand where new capabilities such as AI can be leveraged to accelerate growth.
For personalisation to deliver business gains there must be momentum and measurement which is simplified through understanding the customer journey, value-based data points and the critical “moments of truth”.
