Table of contents

• Data managed right- what next? Personalization.
• Top 10 mistakes to avoid in personalization strategy
  • Inconsistent and broken omnichannel experience
  • Data mismanagement
  • Lack of context and relevance
  • Absence of real-time offers
  • Limiting to addressing customers by their names
  • Lack of persona insights
  • Device and platform preference
  • Cognitive load
  • Lack of intuitiveness
  • Performance
• Levelling-up with caution

Data managed right- what next? Personalization.

We’re now in an age where more than two-thirds of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. It’s not just about competitive advantage anymore. Companies that excel at CX drive nearly three times more revenue than companies with poor CX. No wonder, more and more businesses have made CX the focal point of their business strategy, especially in 2020 as the word moved to digital and customers explored more ways of engaging with brands. Speaking of CX, businesses that didn’t have a strategy before were compelled to have one and the ones that already had it in place shifted their focus to improving and scaling it further.

In our previous articles, we talked about how you can benefit from the importance of getting the omnichannel strategy right, considering that many businesses often deviate from expected goals due to lack of a strong foundation to base it upon. In another article, we talked about how bad data can be an impediment to your CX goals and how you can leverage clean data to deliver maximum value. This brings us to the next post in our Transforming CX series where we talk about personalization. Personalization is something every business is in pursuit of.

Top 10 mistakes to avoid in personalization strategy

While it can get overwhelming as you tread upon your personalization strategy and roadmap, keeping a few points in mind will help you avoid costly mistakes. This article will make it easy for you to keep track of them as we talk about 10 of the most important ones. Avoiding these will  ensure that the fundamentals of your personalization strategy are strong and error-free.

1. Inconsistent and broken omnichannel experience

   As we discussed earlier, omnichannel is not the same as multichannel. Despite basic personalization elements in place, you can put your customers off if their interaction with your brand is inconsistent and broken. No matter which channel they contact you from, they should get the experience that makes them believe you really know them and the conversation is being picked up from where it was left off earlier.  On the reverse side, nothing beats a seamless omnichannel experience. Let’s take an example of Starbucks here. Their mobile app seamlessly blends in-store and online ordering experience. You also get personalized recommendations based on the location and season and can pay in the store through your app to earn reward points.

   Speaking of omnichannel experience, we also have our in-house omnichannel, customer engagement and gaming platform, Upshot.ai, that helps enterprises influence their customer behavior and drive sustainable business outcomes. Find out how can achieve great results by leveraging upshot’s capabilities.

2. Data mismanagement

   Data is the key to crafting a personalized experience but the lack of clean, informative data and inability to extract useful insights is likely to topple your efforts. Many times the data is collected without any intent. This leads to irrelevant data piling up, without any productive results. Also, the inability to manage data can impede your ability to offer good customer experiences- be it in terms of lags in fetching response handling or context mismatch. Using data effectively can open up a stream of possibilities for your business and enable you to earn more revenue, too. Amazon, for example, collects information such as customer’s shopping patterns, prices on other websites, the demand for a product, items in the cart and more. This enables them to fine-tune their dynamic pricing algorithm as well as show better recommendations.

3. Lack of context and relevance

   No personalization would be better than failed personalization. In an attempt to “fit-in” companies often overdo personalization and lose context as well as relevance. For example, offers for two for someone who has a history of ordering food for a single person only, sending offers related to leather jackets and shoes to someone who has a history of purchasing vegan apparel, or showing recommendation of new phones to someone who recently purchased one. The context here goes beyond what they have recently searched for and related recommendations. It expands to parameters such as their location, preferred channel, time of day, previous brand interactions, reasons for purchase and more. Establishing relevance and context can be learned from the partnership between Taco Bell and the navigation app Waze. Whenever a Waze user is near Taco Bell, they get an ad for the restaurant in the app, mentioning the time and location where they can dine-in. Similarly, Tesla, while promoting their automobiles, talk to their consumers about living a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle, thereby establishing great context.

4. Absence of real-time offers

   We are now moving to hyper-personalization where historic data may not suffice to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Both historical and real-time data are required now. Having the right data at the right time along with the right tools and the technology, of course, will enable you to deliver personalized content, offerings, and overall experience in real-time. Travel portals often show a pop-up message alerting customers about the potential rise in airfares, nudging them to book instantly whenever they sense that customer may leave without booking.

5. Limiting to addressing customers by their names

   As CX competition advanced globally, the expectations of customers changed. Mentioning their names in email subjects and notifications have become a thing of the past, way past. As of today, customers expect brands to not just know them but hear and understand them- and accordingly show them what they’d like to see. That is what keeps them more engaged and prompts them to explore what your brand has to offer. This is again where we want to emphasize value centricity. A customer, on a subliminal level, would start trusting your brand with their time and your emails won’t go unread or your notifications won’t be just cleared from the notification bar. Netflix takes personalization to the next level when they announced that they have a strategy focused on artwork that subscribers see when they explore catalog since thumbnails constitute about 82% of a subscriber’s focus while browsing. This makes the subscribers confident about the recommendations they receive as they perceive that the brand really “understands” them.

6. Lack of persona insights

   While personalization is mostly understood to be something of an individual level, and fairly so, there’s a lot more to it. You must categorize different personas and see what appeals more to them. For example, you may classify your target group based on different strata such as socio-economic A, B and C. A study indicated that high-income groups don’t want personalized offers for themselves as much as they want them for people associated with them- also called CUG (close user group) extension. A person working in a senior position in a company may need recommendations and custom medical insurance offers for their family members and not for themselves.

7. Device and platform preference

   Your customer platform preference needs to be taken into consideration to offer a better experience. Identify what content would have a better viewing experience on which device. Which platform would they be more active on? You’d like to consider their device before giving them, say, a 3D view of the product catalog, for instance. Similarly, if they are more likely to connect with you through your app instead of the website, you may want to consider something like “app-only offers”.

8. Cognitive load

   Your personalization must be easy for your customers to absorb. Do they have to follow multiple links to avail an offer? Does it involve too much reading of terms and conditions? How easy or difficult is it for them to understand the value proposition from the headline itself? Similarly, you do not want to put them off by creating a complicated experience where you make them provide too many details about themselves without understanding where it’s going. Complicated sign-up forms, difficult navigation, prominent features not easily accessible, etc are some of the factors that contribute to cognitive load.

9. Lack of intuitiveness

   From onboarding to becoming a loyal user, the entire journey must be intuitive and seamless. A big no here is trying to collect too much information explicitly along the touchpoints without the customers having a clue why that’s relevant. The intuitiveness should come from the very first interaction they have with your brand. Before you dive deeper into offering personalized experiences to them, begin with a standard algorithm that identifies them based on segmentation or where they’re coming from, what they search for and gradually develop it along the way. This is again where real-time behavioral data comes into the picture.

10. Poor performance

    A very important aspect here that contributes to the overall CX experience is performance. Before collecting data and running complex algorithms, evaluate your data handling capabilities. Often, things such as slow response times, crashes and more would cause a user to abandon your product or service before you even get a chance to craft personal experiences. An example would be too much time taken by queries in fetching information from the database that results in high screen-load time and subsequent navigation. Additionally, too many crashes, high data consumption, screen freeze, battery consumption are some factors one should be looking at to improve performance.

Levelling-up with caution

We are now at that point in the digital era where to say that CX is important for businesses and emphasizing it would sound absolutely ludicrous. It is now expected that almost all businesses in some way have adopted CX strategy and paid attention to the element of personalization. What we are looking at right now is how to make it effective, competitive and profitable. With exciting ideas and innovative strategies available to implement, overwhelming decisions can be made. Therefore, the path must be navigated with caution. You must lay the foundation well and level-up after careful deliberation around your customer behavior, the market and your existing capabilities. As you scale up your personalization efforts, you’ll encounter ditches that you must avoid and that can happen only if you pay equal weightage to the things you must avoid as you do to things you must include in your strategy.

At [x]cube, we have helped global enterprises drive results with our robust CX strategies. From customer retention, lower cost of acquisition, faster conversions to improving brand perception, we leveraged a mix of technologies to enable enterprises to achieve it all. If you’re someone who is looking to achieve results by adopting, improvising or scaling CX strategy, you’re at the right place. Get in touch with us for everything CX!

The post Transforming CX: 10 Things to Avoid while Offering Personalized Experience appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What exactly is an omnichannel strategy?
• Why is an omnichannel customer strategy important?
• How can you get your omnichannel strategy right?
• Customer experience strategy isn’t built overnight- it develops from consistent efforts and multi-faceted strategic aspects

Introduction

Omnichannel has become an inevitable buzzword in every discussion centered around customer experience. And rightly so. The fact that most companies lag behind in their CX transformation only fuels the adoption of better engagement and experience strategies that’s where omnichannel experience comes into the picture, amidst more strategies, of course. But in the pursuit of excelling at it, businesses often get it wrong. Where exactly? To begin with, by assuming that omnichannel strategy is all about having multiple customer touchpoints with consistent branding elements.

What exactly is an omnichannel strategy?

Integration, not just consistency. An omnichannel strategy is a cross-channel strategy that gives a continuous and integrated experience to users across multiple channels. Simply put, if a user leaves off from one channel and switches to another, he should be able to pick up right from where he left off.

Most enterprises treat omnichannel the same as a multichannel strategy. It is important to understand the key differences between them before strategizing to get either or both of them right. Omnichannel businesses streamline all customer touchpoints under a single platform. That means from planning and purchasing to marketing and managing customer relationships, all your online and offline channels get updated together and are on the same page. Whereas, in a multichannel approach, each channel is managed individually with a unique strategy of its own.

Another interesting thing to note here is that omnichannel marketing is different from omnichannel customer experience. Omnichannel marketing is about consistency in messaging and branding is consistent across channels. The strategy side of it addresses the customers includes merging different channels together and offering seamless and uninterrupted experiences.

Why is an omnichannel customer strategy important?

Did you know? Your customers aren’t just open to embracing the omnichannel experiences by thinking of them as an additional value. They expect it as a necessity. Here are a few of innumerable reasons why an omnichannel strategy is important for every business:

• Delighted and engaged customers

  From a customer journey point of view, an omnichannel experience helps them interact with your brand smoothly, without the need for retaining or repeating information about the experience at the last touchpoint. This makes their interaction with your business smooth and intuitive.

• Resource optimization

  The number of times you need to interact with your customers through a dedicated resource comes down. Simply because you’ve already made their experience hassle-free. This significantly reduces the time and cost you would have incurred otherwise.

• Friction-free customer journey

  An omnichannel strategy helps you identify the various customer journey touchpoints clearly and understand what are the major points of friction that may cause customers to drop off. You can understand where they are able to navigate easily, where they face difficulty and how you can improve by tracking various touchpoints and using the insights to improve their journey.

• Brand reputation

  Your omnichannel strategy can serve as a long-term investment in building brand value. Happy customers are more likely to develop brand loyalty and recommend your brand to others as well. A better, stronger brand also means repeated purchase and competitive advantage- bringing you immediate monetary returns, too.

• Unprecedented CX

  Omnichannel strategy contributes to your overall CX. It helps keep your customers engaged and happy. At the same time, it benefits your internal operations too as it empowers your employees to work within a system that’s intelligent, flexible and effective, thereby saving them time and efforts in dealing with mundane queries and tasks.

How can you get your omnichannel strategy right?

We talked about omnichannel strategy and how it can benefit your business. The question that remains now is HOW to get it right. While there’s no definite single strategy that works for all businesses, we have listed the top and most common steps that apply to all businesses.

• Conduct thorough research on buyer personas: If your omnichannel strategy isn’t based on customer insights, it’s likely to take a hit sooner or later. It is important to understand your customer persona- their demographics, behaviors, and more. This will help you identify different segments and target your audience well. You can not only improve your value proposition with the needs of your customers but also go for more targeted offerings and ultimately, accelerated conversions.
• Improve customer touchpoints: It is important to understand customer sentiments at each stage of their buying journey. Once you get insights into how your customers are feeling at each touchpoint across different channels, you will be in a better position to offer better experiences by improving the preferred touchpoints and eliminating the points of friction.
• Map your customer’s journey: Even if it gets complex due to multiple channels involved, plot your customer journey map. Identify their first point of interaction with your brand and map the consecutive interactions and overall engagement up to final sales and beyond. You can leverage analytics tools to understand customer interactions better and bridge the gap between channels for a unified omnichannel experience.
• Choose the right tools for each channel: Augment your channel capabilities by using the right technology stack. Place chatbot where you receive routine queries, implement live chat support where you receive sales inquiries, provide smart engagement tools to guide customers where they are more likely to get stuck, etc.
• Collect customer feedback: Collect customer feedback and use it to develop an in-depth understanding of their preferences and behavior. Analyze it regularly to resolve friction and solve your customer’s specific challenges.

Customer experience strategy isn’t built overnight- it develops from consistent efforts and multi-faceted strategic aspects

A successful customer experience strategy isn’t a one-time thing. Nor is it something that can be built in one shot. It’s made from multiple aspects, each influencing your customer’s experience in a different way. An omnichannel strategy is one of them. You need to continuously evaluate your strategy, considering the dynamically changing customer preferences and ensure that your CX strategy is attuned to deliver the best experience. We have worked with clients all over the world and helped them improve customer retention, obtain faster conversions, lower the cost of customer acquisition, enhance brand perception and much more by simply working on their CX strategy. If you’re looking for help with anything CX, get in touch.

The post Transforming CX: Understanding Omnichannel Strategy and Getting It Right appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Most enterprises, we’ve observed, find launching digital initiatives and undertaking digital transformation in general to be a relatively easy and low-risk undertaking, at least from a cost perspective. Where enterprises typically spend in 7 digits for legacy technology initiatives, digital initiatives typically only require a 6 digit spend. At least from a budgeting and expenses perspective enterprises rarely hit a major roadblock when it comes to digital transformation.

If it’s not spend that holds enterprises back in delivering successful digital initiatives, then what other factors are at play? After all, time is running out! As detailed and analysed in this Forbes article, the majority of enterprises admit they have only a couple of years to transform or risk falling behind.

There are many reasons, of course, including experience and skills of the teams undertaking these initiatives, the organizational culture and the pace of adaptation to digital, and more. Another critical factor, and the one that’s the focus of this writeup, is: data. Where digital transformation initiatives falter, typically, pertains to the specifics: what precise initiative is planned, how the details are worked out, how the idea is validated, and more. Just as importantly, innovation efforts rarely see success immediately on launch, and need a patient and iterative approach before clear success can be seen.

Here’s Where Data Comes into Play

Enterprises need to leverage data carefully at the planning stage as well as at the execution and support stage. At the planning level, stage, data needs to guide what assumptions are made, what level of customer understanding drives the initiatives, and so on. And once the initiatives make contact with the real world, and are in the hands of real customers, enterprises need to take a patient, iterative approach that carefully leverages data to ensure that they see success over time.

While leveraging data effectively sounds simple enough in theory, it is actually far harder to manage in practice.

Case in Point

A prominent brick-and-mortar services organization that we worked with, was eager to undertake digital transformation, but they seemed to approach it as a checklist of initiatives, rather than as a business transformation effort where each technology initiative is tied into clear business metrics and CX transformation goals. When we recommended a comprehensive mobile strategy for them, their response was that they already had a mobile app. When we chose to dig deep into the mobile app however, we quickly discovered problems. The app lacked a certain amount of empathy, and failed to prioritise the way customers would want to use the app and the workflow they would prefer, and seemed to have too many friction points that customers found frustrating.

How could this have been avoided? The key of course, is to achieve a shift in perspective: enterprises need to switch from prioritising their own problems and seeking their own benefits, to prioritizing customer needs and customer perspective. This is of course very hard to do, which is why leveraging available data to deliver critical insights that help you plan your overall digital strategy as well as execute specific digital initiatives is critical.

That’s just what we did with this organization, and tossed in key terms like ‘Customer Experience’ and ‘Customer Centricity’ for good measure. Eventually, with the data we gathered from actual customers who provided extensive feedback, along with the insights we gleaned from the usage of their currently faltering mobile channel, the organisation came around and we worked with them to create a solution that has helped them achieve immense customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Perils of Presumption:

You could be spending endless hours testing your product, passing it around the organisation and beginning to think you have the hang of it, but reality could present itself as something else entirely. Out there in the world, it will be used by people from a wide range of geographical locations, cultures, professions and experiences with digital products. That kind of variety simply cannot be matched by the small sample within which you’d be testing before release. According to recent research by eTouchPoint, while 80% of companies believe they are providing great CX, only 8% of their customers agree.

And why should you be listening to your customers? Well:

• CX is projected to become the top brand differentiator by 2020, surpassing price and product
• Back in 2016, only 36% of the enterprises were competing on CX, the percentage today is 89 and the competition is primarily based on CX
• When it comes to choosing a brand, 88% of customers prefer one with a great customer service track record than one which flaunts innovative products
• 86% of US adults surveyed expressed their willingness to pay more for better customer experience

Therefore, what’s crucial is to figure out for whom the solution is. Is it for you? A specific target audience? Your distributors? Anyone and everyone? Once you’ve got that figured, how do you go about it? Simply put, the answer is build, learn and iterate till you perfect it. The learning being key as it helps you recognise pain points, eliminate them, release and learn more. The more data you collect and analyse, the more you know what is to be done to craft something your audience will really love. Also, the inferences will go a long way in helping you design the product to minimise bottlenecks and smoothen the customer journey.

We’ve been helping organisations multiply their businesses and elevate customer experience for a long time and have solved problems around meeting customer expectations and anticipating their needs in the feature planning stage. The key to all of this is effective collection and analysis of data. So what is data to be exact?

It is the comprehensive corpus of information on what your customers are doing at every stage of their journey through your solution. How are they interacting with it, at what times, at which points are they confused and dropping off, how many are actively using it on a daily basis, churn rates, how are they interacting with notifications, what’s the interaction like on offers and special sale events and much more. Once you augment your solution to send you information on each of them, you can draw up a strategy to fix the problems, push out rapid updates and improve your chances of success manifold.

A Transformation Story

We enabled Mann+Hummel to improve their filtering solutions with smart capabilities which gathered information on customer experience and based on that, added features which removed a bunch of manual tasks the customer had to perform. This delivered significant additional value to their customers, which naturally reflected in their revenues and reach. Their sales increased significantly and operational costs went down by a big margin. It all came back to using data to eliminate customer pain points as far as possible. Read all about it here.

Six Crucial Ways in which Data Benefits your Organisation:

• Provides Insights on Preferences: Data helps you understand usage patterns and customer preferences for you to deliver helpful tips and recommendations. Most customers prefer a digital solution that understands their needs and adapts itself to the various ways they use it. If you are in retail or running an online content platform, data enables you to recommend the right products, shows, books and so on. You could also leverage data to find out at what times the customers are active and run additional offers and promotions. Amid growing concerns over privacy, the only way to get customers to share data is to provide an experience which they enjoy as well as benefit from.
• Helps You Realise The Effectiveness of Your Solution: Speaking of digital properties, out of millions of apps in the market, less than 1% of them account for over 70% of use. Data shows you everything you are doing wrong as you analyse NPS (Net Promoter Scores), CES (Customer Effort Scores), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Scores) and others. Look at the specific journey points where you are losing customers and deep dive into what’s damaging their experience at these points. Get a fixed version out as soon as you can and you never know, that could make all the difference.
• Enables you to Interact Better: Customers appreciate an organisation that engages them in dialogue, listens and acts on their feedback and consults them for new features and products. For one of our digital solutions, we identified a large group of users who were the most active in our social media platforms and created an advisory group with them. It resulted in a lot of positivity as they felt special and rewarded. A bunch of useful ideas were discussed and implemented, plus our viral marketing efforts received a boost as this group of highly engaged users did a lot to spread the word, resulting in the product’s continued success.
• Empowers You to Create an Informed Pipeline: When you know your customers and understand their expectations, you can get a lot of clarity on what your product pipeline should be for your target audience, how they should be designed for the best experience and what problems should you be solving on priority.
• Greater Customisation: It enables you to understand what type of products each customer is interested in so you can recommend more of such when customers open and explore your digital channel. Not having to search for specifics lends added seamlessness to the journey and customers enjoy faster, simplified checkouts
• Improved Personalisation: Knowing customer preferences, usage habits and purchase times can help you personalise the solution for each customer. Showing them special offers at times they use the digital channels the most, festival content they might be interested in, a customised landing page where they can see their potential favorites at a glance, personal offers on their special days and much more. This conveys to customers the fact that each of them are special and the company truly cares about providing them the best possible experience.

Conclusion

As product heads or transformation leaders, you might be owning the solutions and often believe you know best, but you are building them for an audience and looking for wide acceptance and recognition. You will not achieve that unless your users get an absolutely stellar experience, for which the offering must be intuitive, personal and secure. The key to getting it right is knowing all you can about your customers, and data is crucial in that regard. Embrace data, follow where it leads and your customers will be right beside you on the journey.

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