I was traveling for business last year and had a tight window to make my connecting flight. My first flight was delayed, so I was worried I might miss my connection. But the airline had an agent waiting at the arrival gate with a board with my name on it; the agent whisked me through security and to my departure gate. I boarded the connecting flight just in time.

Being a frequent traveler, I had experienced the first part of this story many times. But all too often, the story ended with me running to the counter only to find out I had missed my flight. Then I had to deal with subsequent delays and added expenses.

What did the airline do right in this instance? They understood my personal context and attempted to satisfy my need in a human, authentic and empathetic way. Out of the 300 or so other passengers on the flight, I received a personalized experience when I needed it. And because of that, the airline earned a loyal customer.

While my experience is just one example, research shows there’s a link between personalization, customer loyalty and revenue. According to Harvard Business Review, loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5X as fast as their industry peers. McKinsey Research found that 71% of consumers expect personalization; 76% become frustrated when it doesn’t happen.

Recurring customer engagements and interactions create more data that brands can use to design ever-more relevant customer-centric experiences — creating a flywheel effect that generates strong, long-term customer lifetime value and loyalty.

Humans crave real connections. Customers expect the same attention and personalization they’re used to from “mom and pop” shops — no matter who they’re interacting with. But all companies (no matter their size or budget) can understand customer journeys; orchestrate personalized experiences; and ensure customers feel heard, understood and valued.

The Personalization Imperative

Enterprises need to deliver personalization and get it right, so it is critical to understand what true personalization is. Personalization isn’t segmentation, but it can be a starting point.

Customers who are in the same segment might have different intents or be at different points on their journeys. It’s not about selling the next best widget or new service to the customer. It’s based on empathy and putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Some key elements of personalization include the following:

  • Personalization is rooted in authenticity and should feel natural, not forced.
  • It’s suited to people’s context and situation.
  • Personalization means getting people what they need efficiently — before offering a new product. It’s not solely focused on new channels. It takes a channel-less approach in which the channel is only the vehicle — the outcome is more important.

To define what true personalization looks like, it’s helpful to understand the six levels of experience orchestration. The levels provide a common foundation for organizations to discuss their vision of the future and how experience orchestration will shape their systems, policies and processes going forward.

In the initial levels, the customer must explicitly ask for what they want, and the system interacts with them based on pre-defined rules. There might be some automation, but the experiences are not personalized.

True personalization starts to take shape from Level 3, where the system understands the customer’s context, manages the conversation and recommends next-best actions. The next higher levels are about generating new experiences that are driven by empathy and then finally orchestrating experiences across the front and back offices.

Personalization and the Employee Experience

While personalization clearly benefits customers and businesses, personalizing the employee experience is also valuable in keeping your workforce engaged and satisfied, which ultimately improves retention.

Pluxee is the No. 2 player in employee benefits and engagement, supporting contact centers in over 30 countries. The company has been focused on accelerating its digital transformation to address market transitions. Its goal is to create a personalized and sustainable employee experience at work — and beyond.

By moving to the Genesys Cloud™ platform, Pluxee improved agent productivity by 10% and customer satisfaction by 35%, while enabling fast deployment of digital channels and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that are closely tailored to the local needs.

Western Sydney University (WSU) needed a more effective solution with the capabilities needed to keep up with rising demand for its more than 47,000 students. The university had reached a point where the contact centers received more than a million calls a year. To not only help personalize the student experience but also enhance the employee experience for nearly 2,600 staff, WSU moved to Genesys Cloud.

The platform’s interface gave WSU contact center agents a consolidated view into multiple channels, streamlining the workflow and improving daily productivity by up to 30 minutes per agent. And this improved the student experience, too, with satisfaction scores reaching 90%.

How to Get Started with Personalization

Traditionally, enterprises would execute on personalization by setting up a program team to manage the planning, gain internal alignment and budget approval, identify resource needs, create a project plan, and then execute on it. Sometimes, this effort can take weeks to start and then several months before any outcomes are achieved.

One of the critical challenges in this approach has been the difficulty of sourcing data and bringing it together. Getting data from multiple data sources with different owners, and then cleaning and stitching it together becomes a massive data transformation project on its own.

With a cloud-based platform and AI-powered tools, existing customer data is relevant, high-quality and available in the moment. With this foundation in place, you can begin to reap the rewards of personalization more quickly.

Here are four steps to personalization in customer experience.

  1. Define goals: Define the key outcomes that you expect, such as increasing conversions, reducing handle time or improving customer satisfaction levels
  2. Identify use cases: Determine relevant use cases based on these goals set out in #1. These could include improving website conversions for a specific line of products, connecting customers to the right agent (and not a queue) or interacting with customers on their social channels.
  3. Implement: With an all-in-one customer experience (CX) platform, it’s easy to turn on new AI capabilities. In many cases, implementation is as simple as configuring a few parameters based on your goals and use cases. Then you can begin consuming AI.
  4. Measure and adapt: When you implement an all-in-one AI-based platform, the learning and adaptation is built-in. That means you can track performance and make improvements over time. Once you see the results you expect, you can extend to more use cases.

Making Progress with Personalization

Offering true personalization doesn’t require a massive CX transformation. With an AI-powered experience orchestration platform, you lay a strong foundation for improved customer experience and future success while creating positive employee experiences.

Ready to take the next steps in AI adoption? Use this framework-based approach to better understand where to start with AI in your contact center so you can enhance your customer and employee experiences — and improve your competitive advantage.