Hyper-Personalization in CX Explained

Hyper-personalization is the practice of using customer data, AI/machine learning, and advanced customer support practices. The aim is to provide even more personalized experiences to your customers. It’s contrasted with “standard” personalization, going above and beyond to make every customer feel special and paid attention to.

Let’s define some key terms:

CX or Customer Experience

Think of the CX as everything your business does in order to deliver a superior experience to your customers. It's not just your products and their quality — it's how your customer navigates through your website, your customer experience interactions, your marketing, and much more.

Personalization

This is the practice of providing individually tailored experiences to each customer (as much as possible). For example, you might provide a customer with personalized ads based on cookies or other digital tracking technology.

Or you might send specific product recommendations, discounts, and relevant content to that customer’s email inbox based on their previous purchases. You could also time push notifications so that they’re sent to the potential customer at the most opportune time.

What Is Hyper-Personalization in e-commerce and How To Do It

Hyper personalization in CX is the evolution of standard personalization. It involves doubling down on making remarkable, one-of-a-kind experiences for every potential customer at your store. Hyper personalization means using real-time data collection and artificial intelligence algorithms. It’s targeted messaging to anticipate customer needs and maximize customer engagement.

It involves leveraging behavioral data. Data could include purchase history and email marketing preferences in marketing campaigns, and social media interactions. These data points will help with customer retention, predictive analytics, and omnichannel marketing. Basically, you want to hit all major metrics for your business.

If done properly, hyper-personalized marketing can lead to many important benefits for your brand, including:

• • Bolstered brand loyalty. Customers who experience personalized shopping adventures feel more inclined to stick with that brand over a competitor, even if the competitor in question has slightly better prices.

• • Better revenue for your business. The more customers like shopping at your brand, the more money they will spend and the more money you will make.

• • Improved targeting data and customer understanding. This long-term benefit can help you better grasp the motivations and needs of your target audience, enabling you to deliver better experiences in perpetuity.

In the long run, hyper-personalization will help you build and keep a loyal customer base for many years in the future.

How Is a Hyper-Personalization Strategy Different Compared to Personalization?

Before we break down how to do hyper-personalization in CX, let’s take a look at some differences between this CX philosophy and standard personalization.

The main differences between hyper-personalization and personalization include:

How You Use Big Data

Standard personalization only uses basic demographic info like name, gender, and/or location in order to segment customers into distinct groups. With hyper-personalization, you assess individuals’ behavior proactively to enhance CX across the board.

The Complexity of Your Marketing Strategy

With hyper-personalization, you target cohorts of one person at a time rather than configuring your marketing or personalization rules for entire segments or larger groups.

Customer Effort

With hyper-personalization, you tailor each customer’s journey to their specific needs. This requires you to spend more effort on each prospect by nature.

Technology Requirements

Hyper personalization usually requires more advanced machine learning tools and analytics platforms compared to personalization strategies, which can be implemented with basic automation tools and customer segmentation platforms.

The Point of Hyper-Personalization

In many ways, hyper-personalization requires you to upgrade your standard personalization practices and technology to make it more customer-centric. Luckily, you can use your existing practices, people, and tech stack to start implementing hyper-personalization at your organization ASAP.

8 Ways To Practice Hyper-Personalization in CX

Now let’s dive deeper and break down eight ways to practice hyper-personalization in customer experience.

1. Gather Customer Data & Segment Customers

In order to practice hyper-personalization effectively, you need to have a wealth of customer data. The more data you gather, the more information you know about your prospects — and the better an experience you can give each and every one of them when they visit your store.

Still, gathering data isn't enough. You also need to practice effective customer segmentation. Segmenting your customers means dividing your target market into several smaller groups of potential customers, usually based on their needs, behaviors, and stated preferences.

For example, suppose you offer both a one-month subscription product and a yearly subscription product. In that case, you might segment your customers into groups containing those likely to purchase one or the other.

In any case, segment your customer group or target audience as minutely as possible by creating individualized customer personas. The more segments you have, the better. That way, you can get started crafting individual journey strategies and marketing techniques for each segment of your target audience overall.

2. Target Segments and Tweak Customer Journeys

The next step is to target those segments you created and tweak your customer journeys accordingly. The customer journey is every instance in which a customer interacts with your brand, starting from when they view an advertisement or are made aware of your organization all the way until they make a purchase.

Based on the information you know about your customer segments, you can adjust your customer journey as needed.

Say that you discover that one of your segments is composed of prospects who shop exclusively online, who don’t usually spend more than $100, and who love discounts.

Armed with that information, you can adjust your customer journey for those target customers by:

• • Sending them discounts or special offers for products under $100

• • Sending them marketing emails instead of paper mail ads

• • And so on

In a broad sense, targeting the segments and tweaking your customer journeys accordingly goes a long way toward personalizing the experiences for all your customers. Each customer will feel tailored to and truly understood, even if they’ve never made a purchase at your store before!

3. Use Intelligent Routing

Intelligent routing is another effective way to offer a high level of personalization in CX. In a nutshell, intelligent routing means using AI and machine learning technology to predict customer problems or issues when they contact your customer experience team.

For example, you might use a chatbot programmed to notice certain keywords. Then the chatbot can route the disgruntled customer to the perfect CS agents to take care of their needs. In this way, your customers get any complaints they have handled quickly and easily. They don’t have to spend a lot of time repeating their problem to multiple customer support agents again and again.

On your end, intelligent routing is beneficial since it frees up valuable manpower and allows you to focus your efforts on providing solutions and positive experiences to your customers. Awesome CX can assist with this by offering call center and back-office support services, enabling even smaller businesses to provide top-tier customer support to their target audience members.

4. Use Predictive Personalization Technology

Then there’s predictive personalization technology. Again, this leverages modern AI and machine learning tools to maximum effect.

Predictive personalization technology uses previous customer behavior and purchases in order to showcase new advertisements for products to certain individual customers. For instance, a customer might make an initial purchase from your store.

When they visit your store another time, you should use predictive personalization technology to immediately kick a similar or complementary product to the front page. This uses the customer’s past behavior to refer them to other products that they might enjoy or need.

You can also use similar technology for up-selling or cross-selling products:

For example, a customer might put something in their shopping cart. Right before the checkout page, your website can suggest related or useful products with their primary purchase, giving the customer a chance to make another few purchases before they finish checking out.

Done right, predictive personalization technology can make your customers feel like you know their inner needs and desires. This can build a positive, emotionally resonating connection between them in your brand, helping to boost brand loyalty and customer lifetime value over time.

5. Ditch the Script — Provide Conversational Support

When practicing hyper-personalization, it's often helpful to ditch any customer experience scripts you might have. Instead, train your customer support agents to provide one-on-one, individualized conversational support.

This takes extra time and effort on your part (and the part of your CS agents), of course, but it's very worthwhile, especially because positive CS experiences will lead your customers to spread positive word-of-mouth about your business.

Furthermore, a few simple tweaks or adjustments to your customer support conversations can go a long way toward maximizing your customers’ CX. For example:

• • Have your CS agents speak to customers and mention their names.

• • Maintain records and files of previous customer complaints or issues so that your CS agents have a good idea of what to expect and how to help the customer in question.

• • Infuse support and customer satisfaction into your customer experience training from the outset. Focus on providing human, empathetic experiences above rushing to a solution or product upsell.

People these days are highly aware of the automated, robotic nature of larger corporations. Show that your brand is different, and your customers won’t hesitate to contact your CS team when needed.

6. Keep Track of Customer Preferences

Similarly, you should try to keep track of customer preferences using CRM/customer relationship management software whenever possible.

By keeping track of customer preferences, like what they purchase, how long they spend on your site and the kind of customer support

they prefer, you can individually tailor their experiences down to the letter. This is especially important for big spenders at your organization, such as those who spend thousands of dollars or who make many purchases each month.

Not only will this improve the CX for your customers, but it will also help your sales staff and customer experience personnel complete their tasks quickly and capably.

7. Take and Implement Customer Feedback

Your customers can and will give you feedback from time to time. It would be foolish not to take that feedback and incorporate it into your hyper-personalization efforts.

Offer your customers surveys, especially at the end of customer assistance interactions or purchases, and take that feedback into account when developing new customer journeys or processes. Your customers are best equipped to tell you what does and doesn’t work in your CX. Listen to them!

8. Continually Measure and Iterate

Above all else, remember to continually measure the results of your customer journeys and personalization efforts. As you gather data, iterate on your journeys and experiences to provide even better CXs for your target audience members over time.

A/B testing is just one way in which you can do this. For instance, you might have two very similar versions of a checkout page.

Test both of them, then measure which version of the checkout page performed better or resulted in more completed purchases. Once you have this information, simply use the higher-performing page forever until you decide to run another test.

Contact Awesome CX Today

Ultimately, hyper-personalization will help your brand stand out from the competition. By offering your target audience members hyper-personalized experiences and services, they’ll be more likely to make not just initial purchases but repeat purchases for years to come. Hyper personalization is the best way to build and maintain a strong customer base.

Plus, you can get started offering hyper-personalized experiences by partnering with brands like Awesome CX. At Awesome CX, we provide a wide range of back-office and support services, ranging from call center services to up-selling services to VIP white glove services and more.

Send us a message today to discover how our CX approach can make your brand stand head and shoulders above its competitors.

Sources:

Getting Started In Hyper Personalization | Forbes

Customer Experience | Tech Target

Hyper-Personalization in Digital Marketing | WGU