Imagine a world devoid of personalized experiences. A world akin to a monochromatic painting with only shades of gray—dull, uninspiring and standardized. It is comparable to eating the same food every day, watching the same movies or listening to the same music that was chosen for someone without considering their interests or needs.
Think about all the small touches that can make customers feel special throughout their engagement with a brand. It could be anything from personalized recommendations and tailored advertisements to customized products and support. Without personalization, the experiences of customers would be generic, bland and forgettable.
This is the reason 91% of consumers today prefer personalized experiences, with brands consistently trying to meet this demand.
Delivering on customer expectations with data, technology and people
It's a fact that personalization is crucial for a brand’s survival. But offering personalized experiences to every customer, across every touchpoint, at all times, is a significant challenge.
From growing data volumes, customer communication channels and technology limitations to manual processes, limited budgets, resource crunches and privacy concerns, several hurdles stand in the way of offering a truly personalized experience. Overcoming them and driving personalized experiences at scale requires a synergy between data, technology and people.
Personalization at scale, when done effectively, can help deliver tailored, digital experiences to many customers simultaneously without significant costs or manual effort. The result? Higher revenue, conversions and retention, improved customer satisfaction, effective marketing campaigns and more. These are all benefits that bring a distinct competitive edge.
However, personalizing digital experiences at scale is often easier said than done. To truly scale up personalization, brands need access to a wealth of customer data that can come from a variety of sources, including customer interactions, browsing history and demographic information. This data deluge must be sieved carefully and managed effectively to ensure its accuracy, relevance, usability and accessibility. Brands can also lean into this data to find opportunities by factoring in behavioral, transactional and engagement trends.
While the processes involved in data collection, management and usage are crucial to personalizing experiences, they also expose an enterprise to privacy and security concerns. Without a well-balanced approach that prioritizes both privacy and security, customers might end up feeling "personalization fatigue", which could overwhelm and disengage them. A brand’s reputation might even be damaged from data breaches and compliance failures. In addition, finding the right balance between tailoring experiences to individual customers while ensuring a consistent and cohesive brand image is also something to pay close attention to.
Ensuring the right and best use of customer information requires technology that can analyze large data volumes, as well as make accurate predictions about customer preferences and behaviors. To stay ahead of the game, it has become essential to develop at scale content creation and use AI-driven decision-making to respond to customer signals in real-time. Leading brands should also establish a measurement process that tracks the impact of customer interventions and feed that information back to the systems and teams. This will ensure the delivery of the right content through the right channels at the right moments in a consumer’s journey. Without this, brands can’t scale personalization as the business and customer base grows.
It's not just about having the right tools and data. It's also about committing to an agile operating model by creating a dynamic cross-functional squad, that cuts across marketing, product, analytics and technology—where data scientists, marketers, customer experience specialists and other experts join forces to craft truly unforgettable experiences for customers. This might mean shaking things up a bit if a brand has a traditional operating model with different teams running marketing operations on different channels. But the payoff is immense—higher employee engagement, increased customer satisfaction and a brighter future for the business.
Bring personalization to life
The line between personalization and invasiveness can be thin and it's important to find the right balance. Here are some best practices that can help brands create beautiful, personalized experiences:
Shift focus from quantity to quality
Too much personalization might annoy customers and give them the impression that they are being monitored and tracked continuously. It becomes necessary to always maintain a professional boundary between the brand and customers, and put more emphasis on the quality of individual interactions, rather than the quantity. Some data, particularly real-time data, might enhance the experience. However, other information that doesn't contribute to experience should be ignored. It is essential to establish precise rules for how and why to utilize customer data, and always provide customers with the chance to opt out of data collection.
Make privacy a priority
Customers' browsing history, location and demographic information are valuable but also highly sensitive and personal. Before collecting or using customer data for personalization, it's crucial to be transparent about your data privacy policies and obtain clear consent from customers. Make an investment in a top-notch data management system that safeguards data and all its sources. Don't risk losing one of a business's most valuable assets—customer trust—by implementing a hastily designed customer data protection plan.
Tune in with customers
To make sure personalization efforts are successful, brands need to truly understand who their customers are and not make assumptions about them based on limited data. People can't be boiled down to single profiles based on age and gender, so you want to make sure any messages and content are tailored to them in a meaningful way. Collecting various demographic, geographic and behavioral data points will help get an in-depth look at who the customers are, allowing brands to deliver content that is both engaging and relevant.
Start your personalization journey with HCLTech
As a leading global technology service provider that has collaborated with customer experience stalwarts like Adobe, HCLTech can help enterprises personalize digital customer experiences at scale. With our expertise in emerging technologies, we equip firms with the right tools and processes to understand their customers better. Innovation and customer-centricity form the core of our solutions and we leverage them to help you build differentiated customer experiences across every touchpoint.
Contact us today to learn how HCLTech can unlock the full potential of your customer relationships through personalization at scale.
