4 steps for addressing Personalisation challenges in Customer Experience

"For the lover, a beautiful woman is an object of desire;
 for the hermit, a distraction; 
 for the wolf, a good meal" -Canonical buddhist verse quoted

I love the quote above which, in the context of customer experience, highlights both the importance of getting personalisation right and dangers of generalisation.

My definition of Personalisation is 'truly' understanding your customer and adjusting/changing your service/content/interactions with the customer's context and needs in mind. This is not an easy task especially in a consumer facing situation - this is borne out by the high failure rates of the proliferation of startups in the online space (Check out this article on reasons for the failure).

Why is Personalisation Important?

There are a number of reasons for getting personalisation right related to customer loyalty which can be summed up as follows:

• Build a deeper emotional connect with customer The key ingredient for building loyalty and trust with your customer is by having an emotional connect - the feelings your every interaction with the customer (be it in an online context or in person or any other channel) will drive the customer lifetime value.
• Drive Top line Growth According to a July 2018 Mckinsey article Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15 percent revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors.
• Develop a Strategic Advantage Emotional connect with your customers → better understanding of customers → insights on the direction your product/service → Strategic Advantage. 

Types of Personalisation

So what're the different levels of personalisation any organisation can offer, irrespective of whether you're a B2B (business to business) or a B2C (business to consumer) organisation? Although there are other tiers you can define based on industry and maturity of your customer data/understanding, I like to think of it in the following terms (obviously technology, organisational maturity and data play a huge role in progressing from one level to the next):

• Basic This is the basic level where some generic aspect of a customer is used to differ the experience e.g. a country/region specific page is displayed for a user based on his/her location
• Demographic or Interaction based Here some of the basic data the customer has shared or product he/she is looking at is used to tailor the customer experience (again it is basic level - age, gender etc.) - this is also where online data based insights like 'people who bought this, also looked at' etc come into play
• Self-service Personalisation In addition to the previous two level, here the customer is given an opportunity to control his/her experience by tailoring (e.g. how the page components are displayed in a news website or nickname used in Online shopping etc.)
• Deep Personalisation Combining all the power of the previous 3 levels, deep personalisation uses all the statistics from customer's interaction with your organisation across channels to deliver a tailored and continuously evolving experience. This is a Big-Data enabled personalisation.

A word of caution here is that it may not be necessary to aim to move to deep personalisation for all industries or all organisations. The regulatory environment, product/service features, channel of interaction and company value proposition may necessitate just the basic personalisation in some cases.

4 Step Personalisation Transformation 

Getting personalisation right is not easy, takes time and is a continuous process. I believe the following four steps, from my experience of working with customers and learning from the experts in the field, will help organisations make the journey to optimal personalisation with their customers. 

Step 1: Make customers an ally in your transformation

Customer trust is a linchpin of any successful customer experience transformation. It is important to get existing customer excited and bought into any customer experience transformation you have planned - you need honest feedback and desire to make things better for both themselves and others. Open, honest relationship along with a superior product or service is key. A structured program to recruit pilot customers who are representative of your wider customer base is necessary if you're trying to experiment different personalisation approaches.

Step 2: Become a Customer Data Focused Organisation

All organisation collect a lot of data but most lack focus in their collection and usage of data. In the journey to being an organisation further along the personalisation maturity, the data strategy needs to have 

Step 3: Connect all your sales, service, marketing and other channels

Once you've nailed your data strategy with a customer experience improvement focus, the biggest impact on your overall customer experience is by being consistent across every interaction point. This should be right from the first marketing message to sale to customer onboarding to ongoing service to even an exit scenario. With the right data strategy coupled with building and providing a holistic picture of your customer at all touch points, consistency across all interactions is possible. Consistency also means that the ability to use data from previous interactions (both positive and negative) becomes extremely important - for instance, your call centre agents having access to the same customer data as someone in a retail center (This has been the promise of omni-channel software).

Step 4: Tweak your customer experiences, continuously

With Steps 1-3 accomplished, the next step is about agility in your customer interaction channels. The ability to do A/B testing on your changes to understand customer responses is critical as well.Your personalisation approaches should be able to change based on changing customer habits, better technology availability and individual customer's preferences. It is also about realising that, like any other transformation initiative, there is no 'end-state' in a personalisation transformation journey. Personalisation is a continuous improvement initiative which needs to be constantly adjusted for it to remain relevant for your customers.

 Although I have used these steps in the context of personalisation transformation, it is generic enough to be applied to other areas of customer/employee experience transformations as well.