According to Brendan Witcher, Vice President at Forrester Research: “Businesses need to evolve their definition of personalization – from tactical segmentation to strategic individualization.”
Combining customer data and AI to generate insights, a hyper-personalization strategy allows such strategic individualization. For example, companies can pre-populate customer forms, send proactive notifications, and kickstart a predictive contact center routing strategy. Each tactic lowers customer effort through hyper-personalization-enabled automation.
Yet, building a service strategy that incorporates these elements takes time. As such, it is only natural for CX leaders to question; is hyper-personalization worth all this effort? A new study certainly suggests so.
The Future of Hyper-Personalization
Kustomer, the next-gen CRM provider, recently released a fascinating report entitled: “What the Future Holds for CX Organizations.” Inside, it reveals numerous statistics and predictions from over 100 industry leaders regarding the future of CX.
One particularly interesting finding was that 84 percent of CX leaders predict personalization will become more important over the next three years. Indeed, as Gabe Larsen, VP of Marketing at Kustomer, puts it: “Many companies now realize that an internet connection is not the same as a personal connection.”
Yet, in the current status quo, companies are struggling to achieve this. Most have deployed digital channels. However, these are often stuck in siloes, isolating interaction data that feeds hyper-personalization strategies. Meanwhile, critical customer context data – such as purchase history – may remain isolated in other departments.
Consequently, it is becoming more challenging for companies to identify, understand, and speak directly to the specific needs of their customers, according to Larsen. He adds:
“Customers expect quick service and the company to arm their customer service agents with the information they need to succeed — such as order history and communication preferences. Customers don’t want to repeat themselves or spend time getting an agent up to speed. But this is often easier said than done.”
The repetition that Larsen refers to comes at a price. For instance, 93% of consumers think retail customer service should be more convenient.
Fortunately, the fix is simple: a platform that can collect, organize and streamline customer data, so it’s all in one place.
Getting Started With Hyper-Personalization
Providing a central platform that stores data regarding customer history, issues, and behavior in context, forms the basis of many successful hyper-personalization strategies.
A CRM that holds and assesses this data to drive extra insights – such as customer sentiment – takes this strategy to the next level, pinpointing customer wants, needs, and feelings.
Such a system should plug into every customer engagement channel to facilitate a seamless flow of information across the customer journey, paving a pathway for customers to engage across platforms in an integrated, ongoing conversation.
Plugging such a data source into intelligent automation technologies then enables companies to supercharge customer service with hyper-personalization, believes Larsen. He says:
