Stop Focusing On Great User Experience! They Need It Personalized.

Customers have come to expect a level of personal service from companies that is the digital version of a 24/7 concierge. Think Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, all companies that have set the bar for personalized, instantaneously responsive, and increasingly predictive real-time service across all points of contact with companies.

Why is this degree of personalization so crucial for companies? In giving customers what they want, when they want it, on a consistent and meaningful basis, companies can build deep, long-lasting, and mutually beneficial relationships. It is these enduring relationships that enable companies to withstand the pressures of a hyper-competitive, ever-evolving world.

According to the Stratus Innovation Group, these shifts in customers’ expectations are accelerating quickly — and customers are demanding that companies keep up. This is evident in the findings of an IBM report from the Institute for Business Value, which showed:

• 76% of consumers expect organizations to understand their individual needs
• 81% of consumers demand improved response time
• 68% anticipate that organizations will harmonize consumer experiences

Companies that get personalization right stand to benefit significantly. Segment, a company that helps organizations create customer and employee experiences, surveyed more than 1 000 consumers and found that customers are willing to spend more money with companies that make an effort to deliver a personalized experience. Personalization also results in increased revenue for companies and achieves the holy grail, customer loyalty.

To reap the benefits of personalization, however, companies need to make sure all parts of the organization are doing their bit toward creating a consistent, coherent, and meaningful omnichannel customer experience. They can only do this by developing a comprehensive understanding of their customers’ needs, desires and expectations and, in so doing, create a 360-degree customer experience that consistently surprises and delights them in all their interactions with the company.

To achieve this ideal, Geoffrey Schwartz, director of strategy at Frog, a global design and strategy firm, suggests companies map out all the interactions they have with clients at all points and across all mediums. This gives the company a holistic view of how customers are engaging with the company, he says. This is important because customer experience is about the cumulative experiences of customers over time.

By developing a detailed picture of the journey the customer travels, each engagement they have with the company becomes a potential opportunity for the organization to deepen their relationship with the client.

“With more ways to engage than ever before, companies need to ensure the apps, websites, physical products, in-person service interactions are consistent and meaningful.”

Creating a cohesive omnichannel experience

Some companies have gone as far as co-creating customer experiences with the customers themselves. This forward-thinking approach not only makes customers feel they are an integral part of the relationship-building process but it also ensures that the way the company delivers its products and services is truly designed with the customer, not the company, in mind.

In the financial services industry, the gap between the customer experience leaders and the customer experience laggards is particularly wide, with smaller, digitally based fintech companies eating into business traditionally the exclusive preserve of the banks and insurance companies.

According to Evergage, customers are experiencing personalization from companies in other industries and are beginning to demand those same types of experiences from financial institutions. Two in five millennials feel that the offers they receive from their banks are not personalized, and 40% of consumers say that personalized service would change their loyalty to their bank.

While aware of the threat to their existing businesses, Evergage found that 79% of financial institutions consider it “very” or ”extremely” important to deliver guidance to clients in real time, 40% of them consider themselves “static” because they offer no personalizations.

With this in mind, the financial services sector is most likely to be subject to ongoing disruption, as smaller, more agile contenders make getting to know their customers’ needs and aspirations. These will include events they need to save for, assets they wish to acquire and plans they want to make for retirement.

Why are they not moving faster on the journey towards customer personalization? One significant reason is that a sophisticated real-time, personalized customer experience is only possible if the business’s products and services are based on a technological infrastructure that is flexible, agile and highly responsive to changes in customer needs and demands. The system also needs to be able to incorporate and harness the ever-evolving capabilities offered by emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and predictive data analytics.