Why Do Personalized Customer Experiences Matter?

Personalization matters, full stop.

Why? Because it shows your customers that you care.

Personalization includes personalizing marketing materials, offering distinct product recommendations for each customer, and more. It does a lot to prove to customers that you think of them as distinct, worthwhile individuals. Most modern customers don’t want to feel like cogs in a business machine. They want to feel special, seen, and understood.

Personalized customer experiences matter greatly if you want to set your brand apart from the pack. When you personalize customer experience (the entire range of experiences and interactions a customer might have with your business), you prove:

• That your brand understands those customers better than any other.
• That your brand offers one-of-a-kind, unique experiences in addition to excellent products and services.
• That your brand is worth getting to know and develop loyalty for. This last benefit is especially important, as acquiring and keeping repeat customers is much more cost-effective than constantly getting new customers to combat turnover/churn.

If your brand wants to not only survive but thrive in its industry, you must offer personalized, customer-tailored CX to each client or lead.

Top 7 Ways To Personalize the Customer Experience

There’s good news: You can personalize CX in a variety of different ways depending on your budget, your preferences, and your brand’s industry.

Let’s break down some of those ways one by one:

1. Learn and Use Customers’ Names

One easy way to start personalizing your customers’ experiences is to simply learn and use their names. This simple touch can do more than you might initially think to make your brand stand out and to make your customers feel treasured and valued at your business.

There are many ways to learn your customers' names:

• Ask for them upfront.
• Collect customer data via CRM software when a customer makes a new purchase.
• Look at loyalty programs and email newsletter data.

Regardless, once you have your customers’ names on file, use them as often as possible. Inform your customer experience agents so they refer to customers by name as soon as they open up a conversation.

You can also use customer names and email marketing, product recommendations, discounts, special coupons, and much more. The sky’s the limit! Given the low cost of implementing this change, there’s no reason not to start practicing it now. Over here at Awesome CX by Transcom, we’re super passionate about customer experience strategies.

2. Develop Distinct Customer Profiles/Avatars

In keeping with the above, your brand should develop distinct customer profiles for target audience members. The better you know your customers, the better you’ll provide them with tailored, emotionally satisfying experiences.

You can do this by:

• Collecting customer purchase data over time. This will become easier as your brand grows and as you sell more products.
• Doing market research. Have done this before starting your brand, but continue to do so as the industry evolves.

As you develop these customer avatars, use them to create new marketing materials and to anticipate product needs among your most important audience base. In this way, you’ll personalize CX for your target customers without getting to know them as individuals. But if you have guessed their needs accurately, they will still feel like you’ve anticipated their desires.

3. Practice Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is vitally important for all brands these days. In short, customers want to feel like you really see them as people.

On the plus side, there are tons of smart ways in which you can practice personalized marketing that shouldn’t cost your business too much. A few examples include:

• Use customers’ first names in the situations described above.
• Give your customers special discounts or deals via email marketing offers.
• Give your customers product recommendations based on their past purchases or search history.

In a broad sense, you can also practice “personalized” marketing by understanding the above-mentioned consumer avatars. When you understand your target audience members, every advertisement or other marketing material you put out should answer a specific customer pain point. Potential customers should feel like you see them and understand what they need. If you develop your marketing campaign properly, it will all feel personalized, even if it isn’t in reality.

4. Refocus Your Brand Vision

Your brand's overall vision may require refocusing to emphasize personalization successfully in CX. For example, you might need to create new marketing campaigns from scratch, or you may need to rebuild your product and service catalog to better reflect a more personalized spread of offers.

In any case, you should contact knowledgeable CX improvement experts like Awesome CX. Our specialists can take a look at your brand, your overall processes, and procedures, and give you actionable advice so you can improve CX in many ways all at once.

5. Offer Choices and Self-Service Tools

For many customers, personalization means giving them extra control. Even better, providing your customers with more control and choice inherently improves their CX.

With this in mind, offer your customers extra choices in terms of customer support channels, as well as self-service tools. Self-service tools can include FAQ pages, knowledge bases, self-help portals, and refund/product return portals.

By giving your customers the tools they need to tackle important issues that come up all the time, they’ll feel better about interacting with your brand. As an added benefit, customers will also take care of all this extra labor, freeing up a customer support department and other workers to focus on other, more complex problems.

6. Emphasize Strong Customer Support

You’ll naturally need to emphasize very strong customer support in order to provide appropriate personalization through CX. You should have a well-staffed customer support department that is trained to offer kindness, empathy, and solutions to customers with complaints or concerns.

As noted earlier, train customer support agents to refer to customers by name. It’s also wise to use CRM or customer relationship management software. This software will give your CS agents the ability to reference past purchases, to understand customer histories with your brand and much more.

Strong customer support should focus on providing solutions to clients and leads, not necessarily sticking to the book. For example, if your customer support agent has to waive a shipping fee to keep a customer happy, allow it. It’s better to provide top-tier, satisfactory customer support experiences for long-term CX health.

7. Train Employees To Offer Empathy and Guidance

Train all employees, including customer experience agents, salespeople, support staff, and more, to offer empathy and guidance to your target customer base. Empathy, understanding, and support are necessary to ensure that each customer who walks in your store’s door or visits your brand website has a great time from start to finish.

In many ways, personalized CX is all about people instead of corporate processes. Well-trained staff members will inherently provide personalized customer experiences to a target audience. When interacting with target customers, your team recommends products, strikes up friendly conversations, and generates positive emotional responses.

All of that can make your brand stick in the minds of your target consumers. In the long run, your customers will develop major brand loyalty for your business, ensuring that they come back for repeat business many times in the future.

Personalize Your Customers’ Experiences with Awesome CX by Transcom

In the end, personalizing CX in your brand is a great way to cement your business as your target audience members’ favorite company. The more you personalize CX, the more likely your customers are to develop positive emotional relationships with your brand and the more likely they are to recommend your business to friends and family members.

Fortunately, you don’t have to attempt all the above strategies by yourself. You can rely on knowledgeable experts at Awesome CX; our trained specialists will help you practice each of these measures and more to improve your customer experiences. Send us a note today and let’s get started.

Sources:

Understanding Customer Experience | Harvard Business Review

Business benefits of a customer self-service strategy | TechTarget

Consumer Profile Basics: Defining Your Ideal Customer | LiveAbout

How Personalized Customer Experiences Help Brands Thrive in a Recession | CMSWire