Personalization! The one thing that sets a brand apart!!
Updated: Aug 24, 2021
I am a big fan of personalization! All things being alike, this is one BIG key differentiator of why I would buy a product from brand X and not from brand Y.
It’s almost like a relationship.... The more someone understands me, the more I warm up to them and make them my confidante’. That’s the way it works for me always! The more a brand understands my needs, the more I keep going back to them.
According to PwC, 32% of all customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad customer service experience. And nearly half of customers won’t even think about doing business with you unless you have high approval ratings. (Credit Forbes Article)
This makes providing a great Customer Experience, a top priority for organizations today.
A personalized experience is tailored to the individual’s consumer preferences and specific needs. There are many forms of Personalization: targeted advertising, tailored solutions, etc. For example, if I buy a keyboard from Amazon, the next time I log into the system, it will show me similar products that might interest me. That’s personalization!!
Of course, this raises a very important topic of personal privacy. And my first question is Am I being watched? There is a fine balance that needs to be managed between “check this out, is this what you’re looking for” and “we’re watching you”. If strategized properly, personalization can be a big asset to organizations trying to build their brand. But if overdone, it can tilt the balance and put customers off.As per a study conducted by Accenture, 75% of consumers prefer brands that not only recognize them by name, but also recommend options based of the past purchases and know their purchase history.
Technology is taking customer experience to the next level. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now being used in creating curated customer experiences. According to Accenture, 85% of all customer interactions will be managed with AI by 2021. AI technologies like NLP (natural language processing) and ML(machine learning) are being used extensively not just for analyzing customer feedback but also to make the analytics more actionable.
Most of your “why” questions can be answered by AI.
---Why is NPS® going up or down?
---Why are your customers turning away from you?
---Why is the retention of your customers so high/low?
The idea behind machine learning is to teach computers to learn from this data, continuously, and get smarter as they perform. Machine Learning technologies help you to move from diagnostic to predictive analytics:
*If I fix this issue in my customer experience, how much will my churn decrease?
*If we make a decision to invest less on customer service agents, how much will it decrease my customer satisfaction?
*Which physicians are most loyal and likely to refer patients to my hospital? *Which physicians are likely to split?
*What is the profile of my best customers? Who is likely to defect?
*What products are customers likely to buy, based on their previous purchase?
Innovations in the AI and ML space (e.g.BERT, natural language understanding [NLU], automatic speech recognition [Speech-to-Text], Dialogflow, and Text-to-Speech to name a few) have made it possible to not just recognize language but to deduce context and build relationships, improving the quality of the experience.
Speech recognition, neural networks, the changed voice landscape and other innovations in Conversational AI - is enabling more personalized and intuitive customer care. Our conversational experience is no longer frustrating and is considered to be nearly human thanks to fast, cheap, and reliable high-speed networks that have made it possible to offload processing to the cloud, enabling rapid “understanding” of peoples’ intents.During these unprecedented times, organizations that are investing in best-in-class AI tools to better scale with demand and provide that edge in the customer experience — are clearly emerging as the winners in providing a memorable personalized customer experience.
Having real-time conversations with Chatbots that give instant answers to my queries, smart recommendations, purchase fulfillments, has really simplified my life. Instead of having multiple conversations, I can have just one!
What’s your take on next level of Customer experience? What you like to see happen in the near future?
Read more on Customer experience and Conversational AI here:
