Personalised Customer Experience – What is it ? Why and How should we achieve it?

Think of your own experiences as a customer of a brand. Don't you feel welcomed and special when you get exactly what you were looking for? Be it an offer, recommendations or products and services you have on your mind and it just comes up on your screen.

In this ever-evolving world, the real race is to fulfil consumers' expectations. Customers are gravitating towards business that satiates their need to be recognised and offer them a seamless experience. To meet those expectations, brands need to leverage personalisation techniques and offer them the personalised experience they are looking for. 

What is Personalised Customer Experience?

Have you ever been looking for something specific on a website, and then all of a sudden, there it was? That's personalisation in action.

Personalised Customer Experience is a way of understanding your customer's needs and delivering a product or service that meets them. It's about providing customers with the most relevant information at the right time, which makes it easier for them to make informed decisions.

Personalised customer experience is not just about using data to improve your marketing and sales efforts; it's also about improving customer satisfaction and loyalty by personalising interactions with customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It's important to note that personalisation goes beyond just knowing what they like or dislike; it's about understanding their behaviour, preferences, needs and wants – so you can help them achieve their goals.

With personalised experiences being at the heart of every interaction between brands and consumers, it's no surprise that organisations are looking for ways to optimise this process through technology.

Why is Personalisation Important?

Personalised marketing campaigns have the power to influence consumers and make them feel special. A study by the University of Liverpool found that personalised messages can increase the amount of time people spend interacting with brands online by up to 20%.

The same study also showed that when people feel that their needs are being met through a company’s offerings, they are more likely to recommend those services or products to others.

Personalising your business can help you stand out from the crowd, minimise churn and grow revenue. Here are some examples:

Personalised offers: Personalised offers can help turn prospects into customers by providing them with relevant content at the right time. They also help you upsell existing customers with products they might be interested in based on prior purchases or browsing history.

‍Personalised recommendations: Recommendations help convert more visitors into buyers by offering them products they're likely to purchase based on their previous behaviour. This can include a recommendation for new products based on what other people like them have bought or offers for complementary products that complement what they're currently viewing or purchasing and also. It also helps to push the relevant information to your customers. 

‍Personalised onboarding: Onboarding refers to how new users are welcomed onto your website or app, so they can get going straight away without having to fill in any details.

So, how do we collect the data required for personalisation?

All this sounds very simple in theory, but how do we get all this information about your customers?
There are two main routes that can be adopted:

1) Through direct interactions with them (e-mail, social media). When you contact someone directly, you ask for information such as age, gender or location so you can tailor your message more effectively.

2) Through indirect interactions (tracking). You can also collect user information by tracking their behaviour on your website or app. This will allow you to know what pages they visit most often and how many times they come back to your site after seeing it for the first time

CDP’s as a foundation for the personalization

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are a foundational technology for personalisation. CDPs are a way to collect, organise and analyse all the data about your customers in one place. They allow us to understand what our customers have done in the past, but they also help us predict what they might do in the future.

Why is that important? Because it allows us to personalise our interactions with them based on their unique needs and preferences.

We can use CDPs to: 

• Identify what customers want and need by tracking their behaviour over time; 
• Know when they will want something new so we can offer it before they ask; 
• Create individualised experiences for each customer by analysing their unique profiles; 
• Personalise marketing campaigns by targeting specific segments of customers with relevant messages and offers

Infoverse is one such customer data platform offered by Infomatics that combines all the pieces of your customer data, creating a single source of truth and a 360-degree view of your customer.

It’s pathbreaking features will help in the following:

• Maximise revenue with targeted and relevant marketing messages to customers
• Reduce customer irritations and further enrich customer conversations that lead to better engagements for your brand
• Increase profits by getting more out of existing customers rather than spending more on customer acquisition
• Information fed into the CRM system can be cross-checked with actual transaction behaviour
• Rationalise costs by cutting down on unwanted or duplicitous activities
• Sell more and sell deeper in our product penetration and usage

Takeaway: An excellent customer experience strategy should be implemented to guide successful personalisation initiatives. Personalised customer experience involves creating an optimal experience for every customer using your product or service. And can be achieved by collecting data, analysing it and using it to tailor products and services for each individual.