Never break the chain: Use customer profiles to drive consistent CX

Customer profiles are the bedrock of stellar customer service and superior customer experience. How do you stand out in an increasingly competitive and saturated market? By delivering great experiences over, and over, and over again using your unique customer profile strategy.

The key is consistency. And it’s easier to achieve with an effective customer profile strategy built on the insight that informs tactics to meet your goals.

Basics of customer profile management and customer service you should know

Customer profiles: You’re only as strong as your weakest link. Imagine your customer experience as a chain, each link representing an interaction between your customer and your brand. Every good interaction adds another solid link and makes the chain stronger. But it just takes one bad experience – one rusted, cracked link – to break it.

Nearly 75% of consumers will leave a brand after just three or fewer bad experiences.

Now imagine your chain lined up next to countless others as far as the eye can see, hoping to be picked by the same customer.

Customers don’t choose based on which has the best single link, but which is the best whole chain. So when it comes to driving repeat business, consistency is key. You’re the gatekeeper when it comes to preserving the chain.

As customer journeys become more complex, and the landscape more competitive, the relationship between consumers and brands becomes more nuanced. And as with any relationship, the best are built on trust, and trust is built on consistency. Customer profile strategy puts customer experience and brand responsiveness on the map.

Clients and customers need to know that you, as a brand, will deliver on your promises every time they engage with you – no matter what channel they use, or how long they’ve been a customer.

They want to know that you’re not all talk. They want to know what to expect from any given interaction, and that they can count on you to come through.

Even the best experiences can’t make up for an inconsistent relationship.

How to create a better customer experience (CX) with a suitable management system

Inconsistency is a sign that expectations don’t match reality. For brands, that usually shows up in one of three areas: over time, across channels, and customer to customer.

Consistency over time means delivering the same caliber experience year after year. The particulars – campaigns, technology, trends – will, of course, evolve over time. But the level of service and the quality of your engagement should stay steadfast.

Consistency across channels means customers receive the same quality experience whether they’re in-store, on your website, engaging over social, or anywhere in between. It also means that if they switch channels, they don’t have to re-introduce themselves or their situation all over again.

Consistency from customer to customer means you don’t flagrantly play favorites. Of course, loyalty should have special perks, but every customer – whether they’re brand new, or a long-time account – should still be able to expect the same baseline experience.

Customer profiles built on cross-channel data platforms help close the gap between expectation and reality. They make sense of customer data and make it easier for companies to manage their overall experience with confidence.

Benefits of customer profiles: Excellent CX, great insights, effective automation

Customer profile management is an effective way to create relevant, targeted brand engagements. It’s also extremely useful for making those engagements seamless and consistent.

Here are 3 ways customer profiles make it easier to deliver consistent experiences:

1. Democratizing customer data
2. Providing dynamic customer context
3. Enabling more effective automation

Democratize your data

Part of why it’s so difficult to deliver a consistent end-to-end experience is because a brand is made up of a lot of people. So, when a customer engages, there’s a good chance it’s with a different team member each time.

Customer profiles collect data from the whole customer journey and bring them into a single platform, accessible to everyone at the company. When everyone has access to the same information, the customer is much more likely to get the same level of service and engagement every time.

Get dynamic customer context

You’re able to show up time and time again for the people in your life because you know them. You have a shared history that provides unconscious context clues every time you talk. When they share a story, you can recall past experiences to understand their perspective.

Of course, we don’t think about it when we do this – it happens behind the scenes.

Profiles let companies do this for their customers. Adding the context of past interactions and preferences makes it easier to show up time and time again for them, with a personal touch.

Automate to reduce human error

One of the powerhouse features of customer profile management is its ability to make audience segmentation even more effective. When you know your customers better, you can segment based on their actual preferences and priorities, or where they are on their journey now.

When it comes to delivering a consistent experience, automation is great because it minimizes the risk of human error.

So every time a customer abandons their shopping cart, you send them a personalized retargeting email. Or every time a customer downloads a white paper, it sends them a personalized follow-up one week later. By automating these predictable interactions, you ensure that you’re hitting your mark, and you free your team up to manage the more complex ones.

Strengthen your CX chain with customer profiles

Remember that customers today are always paying attention, and their expectations are higher than ever.

The pandemic forced a lot of companies to embrace digital, omnichannel strategies and now customers aren’t going to go back. To keep them engaged and loyal, you need to show up at every touchpoint, and deliver consistently great experiences every time.