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:
“Use intelligent automation to help with tedious and analytical tasks so that customer service agents can provide customers with prompt and personal customer service. Businesses that do this will treat the customer as a whole person and gain lifelong loyalty.”
CX teams can lay the foundations for numerous hyper-personalization strategies by creating an omnichannel flow of customer context through a centralized CRM that enables such automation. Such strategies may include:
- Custom and relevant advertising
- Recommendation engine deployment
- Personalized pricing and discounts
- Pre-populated form-filling
- Proactive, personal product notifications
According to Deloitte research, hyper-personalization strategies such as this can maximize revenue, reduce costs, and elevate customer experience.
An Excellent Hyper-Personalization Use Case
Nuts.com – the healthy snack provider – is on a mission to understand the value of the person behind every order. Whether a customer has a favorite treat or a specific dietary restriction, Nuts.com wants to know about it before the customer connects with an agent, a “Customer Experience Nut.”
To seamlessly achieve this knowhow of customer preferences and needs, the company turned to Kustomer. Its CRM platform supports a people-first customer service approach, adding context to agent-customer conversations and improving operational efficiency.
How? Primarily through its Kustomer Timeline, which unifies customer data and presents the entire customer journey in a chronological view, telling agents everything that they need to know. Such information includes historical interactions, purchases, visits to the company website, and more – as highlighted in the video below.
With this deep customer knowledge, Nuts.com not only enhanced customer conversations but automated time-consuming, inefficient processes. In doing so, they reduced average handling time by 20 percent.
Yet, Erica Gutierrez, Customer Experience Manager at Nuts.com, was more excited about the solution’s benefits in delivering critical customer outcomes.
“We can now connect customers with agents who face the same dietary restrictions, building a connection that creates customers for life,” said Gutierrez.
While allowing agents to resolve customer conversations in a single workspace, the Kustomer Timeline Solution also enables advanced routing and proactive support strategies. Day by day, Nuts.com is developing the sophistication of these to meet new customer expectations and deliver hyper-personalized service.
Ready to kickstart a hyper-personalization strategy and reimagine customer service experiences? Get in touch with Kustomer’s friendly team today.
