Experience has taken center stage over the last decade, and there is no sign of this changing.
TREND 02 PERSONALIZATION
Experience has taken center stage over the last decade, and there is no sign of this changing. Businesses must double down on how they provide customers with what they need where and when they need it.
Digital innovators like Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify have created an expectation for highly curated services that provide convenience for consumers, and they’ve achieved huge stickiness and revenue growth by doing so. In a world that’s saturated in demands for our attention, personalized experiences offer two key benefits:
The three aforementioned businesses have accomplished this by leveraging the data they collect on how customers interact with their services to create user-specific lists of recommended products - whether that product is a sitcom, song, or pair of shoes is irrelevant.
Every business with a digital presence has the ability to capture data about their audience. Data that reveals the nuance of a person’s interaction, such as time spent looking at a specific type of item or service, reveals the appetites, preferences, and queries of that individual.
Collected at scale, this data uncovers meaningful patterns that can help your business to anticipate the most relevant and useful information to target people with. Taking the Netflix example, this is how they’re able to apply a personal percentage score of how likely you’re going to enjoy a given show or movie, which nudges you to watch the content that’s most likely to keep you happy with and subscribed to the service.
Many businesses will enter the new decade without a developed data strategy or the necessary architecture for this kind of sophisticated application of big data. But those with the ambition to truly thrive will need to begin investing in their ability to better understand their customers so they can predict their needs and offer a brand and product experience that is both relevant and convenient.
Creating a hyper-relevant experience for each and every customer requires a laser focus on digital maturity and transformation. As with any transformative initiative, it requires buy-in from the top to succeed, cross-departmental collaboration, and investment in technology and skills to ensure the right processes can be crafted and followed.
Revenue operations, product, and customer service teams must work closely together with IT. The first three control the array of touchpoints across a customer’s journey that can deliver the contextual data needed for intelligent personalization. IT needs to design, implement, and maintain the architecture needed to create a centralized, and accessible database that provides the CX holy grail: a 360-degree view of the customer. ⬥
Armed with detailed customer insight, businesses can use personalization to give prospects and customers the kind of convenience that reduces churn, improves sales performance, shortens sales cycles, and increases average customer value. Just ask Netflix.
