Customer experience is more dynamic than ever before, and the bar for it has been set high as it's the main differentiating factor for brands. Nowadays, customers expect businesses to tailor experiences to their individual needs.
The most successful brands understand the importance of personalizing the customer experience. Taking the time to tailor your customer experience can positively impact your business in the long run.
What is a personalized customer experience, and why is it important?
Research from Epsilon shows that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product or service when a brand offers a personalized experience. But what does a personalized experience mean?
A personalized CX is more than just adding a customer’s name to an email. It’s when you cater to a customer’s individual preferences and anticipate their needs according to their behaviors, such as their shopping habits or the content they interact with, to create a better experience.
Personalizing an experience makes customers feel special because businesses take the time to understand their individual needs. When customers feel special, it creates brand loyalty, driving retention and revenue through repeat purchases.
Four ways to create a personalized customer experience
1. Define the ideal customer experience for your product or service
Before creating a personalized customer experience, ask yourself what you think your ideal customer experience should look like for your product or service. Your idea doesn’t have to be perfect — it’s just a starting point to help you start the process.
From there, you can create a simple version of that customer buyer journey to test out and gather valuable data. That will allow you to improve the process by revamping, refining, and prioritizing different aspects of your customer journey over time. Instead of perfecting everything, focus on what you can do best, and keep in mind that optimizing your CX is an ongoing process.
2. Track and review customer data
You need to understand your customer’s behaviors to anticipate their needs to provide a unique customer experience. Collecting and analyzing customer data helps you know what your customer wants, and tracking your customer behavior can help you create a more personalized experience.
There are numerous ways to collect customer data, but some ways you can follow customer behavior include:
- Online tracking
- Surveys
- Marketing research
- Transaction history
- Social media
- Form fills
- Third-party
But no matter how you collect your data, make sure your customers understand how you’ll use it. Studies show that 83 percent of consumers are more likely to share their personal information if companies are transparent about what they will do with the data.
As a pro tip, using an omnichannel experience to collect data can give you a more accurate understanding of your customers.
3. Optimize the customer buyer journey
Customers expect you to use their data to personalize their experience. Once you understand your customer behaviors, you can apply it to their buyer journey to optimize the process and help them seamlessly flow through each stage.
How you optimize each part of the buyer journey will vary and take time. Remember that optimization is an ongoing process that doesn’t end or happen overnight.
4. Provide multiple communication channels to fulfill customer needs
Communication is the core of the customer experience, and each customer will have a different preference for what communication channel they want to use to engage with your company.
By offering support on multiple channels, you give consumers the option to choose how they want to communicate with you, a form of personalization.
Some of the most popular communication channels include phone, email, business texting, social media, and live chat. Out of these, texting is the most popular communication channel worldwide because texting is convenient and quick.
The bottom line
Developing a more personal CX is a worthwhile investment. You’re gaining a loyal customer base in return for the time and money you invest in their experience. A loyal customer is more likely to repeat purchases, which earns you more revenue in the end.
Textline is a Gorgias app partner that offers two-way texting for fast and friendly support & sales. Learn more about how you can text with Gorgias & Textline here.
