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Transforming The Customer Experience: Personalization

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Dale Renner

Twenty years ago, nearly all companies considered the use of broad segmentation, demographic data and batch outbound marketing as the keys to delivering personalized customer experiences. Ten years ago, Amazon began introducing product personalization into an online experience. Now, as vast amounts of data become readily available to marketers and businesses, they are charging forward to compete on customer experience using personalization on a granular scale not seen before.

Though the technology has advanced leaps and bounds -- even in just the past few years -- companies have only begun to crack the surface of personalization capabilities. In Forrester’s Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer report, only 9% of responding companies indicated they had implemented digital transformation to a degree that they felt gave them an advantage among their competitors. For companies looking to create a personalized experience regardless of where, when or how a customer chooses to engage, it is essential that they leverage new technology to create an enduring relationship between the brand and the customer.

The Evolution Of The Customer Journey

As technology advances, the customer journey has become more granular. What began as large-scale blanket advertisement has moved toward specific, targeted and strategic advertisement. This trend echoes in other aspects of a brand’s relationship with the customer. Direct mail became more personalized as the content catered to whichever segment profile the customer most closely aligned with; interaction and engagement moved to new mediums as customers embraced smartphone technology.

Personalized content can now be delivered through whichever touch point the customer prefers. However, customer experience still often relies on asynchronous or batch-and-blast communications. Without knowing all that is knowable about a customer and having that knowledge available in real time across the enterprise, the content then merely caters to the segment a customer “belongs” to without knowing if the content is relevant at that point in their customer journey.

Today, we live in a world of instant gratification, and customers’ expectations have mirrored that. A frictionless customer experience can only be enabled through real-time engagement that spans touch points and multistage journeys. Using digital channels, mobile apps, social media, SMS and IoT, there are countless ways to build out a completely personalized customer journey for a segment of one. Companies need to embrace new technologies such as machine learning to keep up with the proliferation of touch points and the explosion of data, and to create a scalable process in which machines detect intention and then seamlessly prescribe the optimal path to purchase for each customer.

A Personalized Experience For The Omnipresent Consumer

The customer is now in control of their relationship with a brand. In a commoditized space, product and service are a given. Therefore, companies can no longer solely rely on their product or service as their main competitive differentiator; they must compete on the basis of delivering a superior experience.

So how can companies leverage digital transformation to compete? They need the freshest, most complete understanding of a person (i.e., their behaviors, preferences, interests and intents). What is the best way to engage with them? What's the best way to notify them? What will they logically want to purchase next? This information needs to be complete, immediate and accurate.

Marketers then need to make the right decision based on the context of that relationship. This can be a message, alert or offer. This is then orchestrated through all touch points that are relevant to that consumer, creating a highly relevant and consistent experience regardless of touch point or journey stage.

As the CEO of a company that specializes in customer engagement technology, I've seen firsthand that while the technology certainly exists to facilitate these interactions, there are a significant number of companies that have yet to fully embrace digital transformation for customer experience. The main reason why this has not materialized for companies comes down to a gap between their strategy to create these experiences and their ability to execute that strategy.

A consistent issue at the forefront of this gap is a lack of clarity regarding who should own and drive these strategies. Forrester respondents also paint a muddled picture of which senior leaders should be held responsible, with 48% indicating it should be the CEO, and 27% suggesting that the CIO should drive digital vision and strategy. Without a clear picture of who is in control, it is no wonder so few companies have implemented digital transformation to a degree that would give them an advantage over competitors.

Furthermore, transformation of customer experience is challenging for any enterprise, but success can only come about through top-down leadership. Entrenched functional silos optimized around narrowly defined, internally focused processes, measures and rewards must give way to a clear mandate that delivering superior customer experience is an enterprise-level prerogative and must be ubiquitous across the all customer touch points.

Additionally, for companies to successfully execute digital customer experience strategies, they must embrace an open-ecosystem mentality with a single point of control over customer data, decisions, and orchestration if they hope to effectively build and maintain a frictionless and profitable relationship between the brand and customer.

The Future Of Personalization

The future of personalization and customer experience will see the death of inefficient practices. For example, printed receipts, which can seem to stretch feet in length with coupons often irrelevant to the customer, will be replaced with digital options delivered directly to the customer through their preferred digital channel, intelligently generated based on previous purchase history, shopping habits and intent. As technology continues to advance, the customer experience will become even more personalized, driven by machine learning and enhanced decisioning.

Technology will ultimately drive personalization at scale for companies of all sizes. Once a company achieves a single point of control over data, decisions and interactions, it will have developed the technological framework to establish a fruitful relationship with its customers and the ability to scale a frictionless customer experience as the company evolves. Only then can a company be in a position to deliver superior customer experiences.

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