How Customer Experience can be Improved through Personalization
To improve the customer experience effectively, knowing the customer is key. Knowing the customer helps in connecting your customer experience to business results.
An excellent customer experience delivers better business and marketing outcomes but its objectives are not primarily anchored in typical marketing measures. Customer experience impact awareness, website traffic and conversion rate but its main goal is to get customers to buy more, increase brand reputation and thus loyalty. Getting the customer experience right requires fresh and innovative thinking through data analysis, collaborative and cross functional approach.
Customer experience investments payoff too. According to research from Sitecore and Avanade, the ROI on customer experience investments is 19%1.
Businesses tend to associate customer experience to solely improving customer service. Customer experience is a lot more than customer service. While Customer service is limited to each interaction, customer experience is never about a single purchase process. Customer experience is about the bigger picture: It includes all the interactions with the customer including the experience before and after the interactions. It is about building customer loyalty by truly engaging with your customer, understanding them and empowering your site to do it through personalization.
For instance, a health insurance company that operated in New York only, used a simplified plan design and consumer tools to personalize. Within one year they got 16,0002 consumers in New York to choose from the company’s various insurance plans.
Here are the 5 steps to building a personalized customer experience on your ecommerce site
Customer Research
It is the process of identifying/ finding the preferences, motivations and buying behaviour of the targeted customer.
Data Analysis
During the data analysis process, the data got can be analysed with the use of mathematics for interesting data readings to clearly emerge, making them easier for the researcher to see. Data analysis can be represented in the form of charts, graphs or tables.
Mental Modeling
Mental modelling is a hypothesized representation of what happens in the real world, the intuitive relationship between cognition, reasoning and decision making. It also helps to take into account distinct demographic biases and preference which can be harnessed to personalize accordingly their customer experience.
Customer Experience Strategy
Here we define and outline what kind of customer experience we want our customers to have across all channels of interaction to improve business prospects.
Experience Design
Finally, while designing for the the customer experience, all relevant factors should be considered including products, services, content, channels, touchpoints, pricing, reach, sales etc.
A key approach to design and manage customer experience is to do it continuously. The continuous process of customer research and the data analysis gives deeper insights for better customer experience. The customer’s interaction through the various omnichannels is documented, gaps are identified, so also the opportunities to improve the experience.
We, at Zyxware Technologies provide strategic digital marketing solutions integrated with Drupal to provide a 360 degree customer experience for partner firms worldwide. To learn more about how we can help you, please get in touch with us!
1. Research by Avanade and Sitecore. May 2016. Customer Experiences and Your Bottom Line. Accessed June 2017.
2. Linda Ireland.’ 4 Inspiring Customer Experience Examples’. Blog . Published October 2014. Customer Think . Accessed June 2017.
