Proactive customer experience: How a CDP can help end bad CX
Creating better, proactive customer experience is the next phase of customer data management as brands connect CDPs to back-office ERP systems.
The best digital commerce experiences don’t just put products or services within reach. They guide you to things you didn’t even know existed—and yet on first sight, fit you perfectly.
These personalized e-commerce experiences intuit your tipping point for making a purchase, whether it be an irresistible color, pattern, feature, discount or a particular day of the year. They quench your needs and make you feel known and recognized as an individual.
This kind of immediate, intuitive engagement has powerful value for brands that get it right: 69% of consumers in a Deloitte Digital survey said they’re more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences.
In fact, brands with leading personalization capabilities saw a 1.5x greater increase in revenue per customer and loyalty metrics compared to brands with low personalization maturity.
How brands are delivering personalized e-commerce
Personalized e-commerce experiences require a tightly connected mix of capabilities— both human and machine—working from a strong foundation of data, processes and technologies.
Here are key actions that are helping companies make personalized e-commerce happen:
- Take control of customer data. A customer data platform (CDP) connects everything you know about each customer— including marketing, in-store, online, sales and service interactions—to help you predict the right places, spaces, messages and offers to engage individuals based on their unique wants and needs.
- Create more, smaller customer cohorts. Winning brands are harnessing customer data to create hypersegmented cohorts of people with similar preferences and behavioral patterns; and then serving up experiences that make those customers feel seen and understood. Over time, this intuitive engagement helps build trust that drives greater customer lifetime value.
- Test and learn. Controlled testing across a range of e-commerce experience parameters—from the way a product is described in your app to the color of buttons on your website—is key to success. But it’s important to focus on the right questions. Start by strategizing what to test, identifying who to test it on and determining how success should be measured.
- Automate decisioning and delivery. Machine learning and AI help you respond personally and instinctively, at scale. By tapping data in the moment, decisioning technologies spot patterns and can recognize, for instance, when a 10% discount will make all the difference to a customer who’s returned three times to look at a product. By delivering the right message at the right time, you’re able to drive impact to the bottom line—automatically.
The best personalization is consistent, connected
The capabilities, technologies and data brands use to personalize e-commerce can help drive richer customer experiences even in isolation. But the next, more powerful move on the path is to make sure those experiences feel consistent and connected.
After all, a personalized offer for a seasonal sweater sent via email isn’t so special if a customer has to hunt for the sweater on your website or app. Similarly, trust built over the course of a sequence of purchases with your brand will be shaken or even broken if the customer’s history appears to be forgotten the next time that customer comes shopping.
Connected teams, systems, processes and governance are essential to producing connected experiences. That means thinking holistically about all of the customer’s touch points with your brand over time.
It also means working to ensure processes are in place to leverage the insights, messages and offers that help make those individual experiences feel intuitive—like relevant episodes in an ongoing, coherent story between you and your customers.
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Eyes on the prize
In the midst of these efforts, never lose sight of the most basic and important goals of personalization: customer trust and loyalty.
Decisions about the data you collect and the personalized e-commerce experiences you orchestrate, as well as the options you provide to customers for transparency and control, should be rooted first and foremost in what you learn from the signals your customers send you.
Their data, after all, isn’t just bits and bytes. It can reveal much about both broad preferences and individual idiosyncrasies, evolving expectations, and be key to growing (or eroding) trust.
Connect those insights and experiences, and the sales are likely to follow.
