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Modern digital experiences have changed expectations. Customers expect you to know about their needs and preferences — and personalize interactions and experiences based on that knowledge.
Unfortunately, many businesses underdeliver. They can’t integrate data across business functions and touchpoints. And that results in irrelevant and inconsistent customer experiences.
Without an end-to-end view of the customer journey and all its touchpoints, businesses have no insights into the overall customer experience.
These data and organizational silos are the primary obstacles in orchestrating personalized actions for each customer at scale. Integrating customer interaction behavioral data from each database, system or touchpoint is complex and time-consuming. Often, companies use limited information to personalize interactions.
Traditional approaches to personalization often require managing complex personalization logic across multiple systems. The amount of time and effort necessary to maintain rule-based workflows is excessive and ineffective.
These workflows function separately for each channel and don’t consider other concurrent journeys. As a result, the interactions that customers have across multiple channels don’t reflect their current context. And customer-facing employees don’t have access to the right knowledge and data to help them.
71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.
76% become frustrated when it’s lacking.
What is personalization?, McKinsey, 2023
This is where the art of experience orchestration comes into play. By gaining a deeper understanding of their customers’ journeys and deploying the right technology at the right time, businesses are making major advances in personalization. This boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty and drives revenue.
This blog post examines the impact of personalization as part of an experience orchestration strategy. Let’s look at these concepts in more detail.
Personalization shows customers that you understand their needs and value them. It creates a sense of loyalty and connection. And that makes customers more likely to repeat purchases and recommend your business to others.
For example, tailoring product recommendations and offers to individuals encourages them to make larger purchases, which increases their average order value. When customers feel valued and understood, they’ll likely have more interactions with your brand and continue doing business with you. And that reduces churn rates.
Personalized customer experiences have the power to transform the customer journey, improve customer loyalty and positively impact business outcomes.
Contextual support is crucial in personalizing customer interactions and experiences. By using customer journey mapping data combined with interaction context, you can offer timely, relevant and personalized support across different customer touchpoints and channels. This can also include live chat, social media and/or email.
As such, you can address customer queries, recommend relevant products and services or content, and resolve issues effectively. For example, a customer reaching out via live chat can benefit from real-time personalized support when the customer support team has access to purchase history, preferences and previous interactions.
Companies can also use social media channels to engage customers with personalized content. Then they can make recommendations based on their buyer persona, interests, and current and past behaviors.
Segmentation is a crucial step in personalizing customer experiences. The better you segment your customer journey data, the more closely you can analyze it to enhance the customer experience and meet business goals.
It enables you to tailor marketing campaigns, product recommendations and customer support interactions to the specific needs and preferences of each segment.
By understanding the unique characteristics of different customer segments, you can also identify patterns, trends and new areas of opportunity. For example, certain segments may prefer to only speak to a live agent, while others prefer to engage across self-service channels.
Aligning personalization efforts with customer segmentation lets you maximize the effectiveness of your strategies. Then you can deliver consistent personalized experiences that resonate with customers.
The right technology can streamline the personalization process so you can deliver tailored experiences at scale. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions that include conversational, generative and predictive AI capabilities can analyze customer feedback and data in real time, identify patterns, and generate personalized product recommendations, for example.
You can apply this level of personalization to any channel. This includes mobile apps, which are an integral touchpoint as they provide valuable data and an opportunity for personalization.
These types of engines give you an edge in collecting data on customer behavior, preferences and purchase history. And that allows you to ensure the personalized experiences you’re creating will seamlessly integrate with the mobile experience.
Personalization enables businesses to interact with customers based on their unique journey context, not just their most recent interaction in a siloed touchpoint. That pays dividends.
Experience orchestration is the dynamic real-time, automated coordination of people, systems and data to ensure meaningful and ideal outcomes for customer experience, employee experience and business operations.
By taking all the information that’s been gathered about a customer, experience orchestration enables you to create a customer journey across all channels of engagement. From this, you can build deeper, personalized relationships as part of a guided process for consistent service.
This enables proactive decision-making and allows you to take action when it’s most impactful and appropriate. You can prioritize journeys for improvement and then optimize stages of the customer journey that matter — orchestrating actions based on each customer’s overall experience.
Let’s use “Rebecca” as an example of how a customer benefits from experience orchestration.
Rebecca flies a lot on one airline in particular, earning her “Gold Status” as a loyal customer. She needs to travel for work and visits the airline website to book a business class flight departing in one month.
During the next few weeks, she interacts with the airline on various channels — social media, online chat, chatbots and email — for upgrade options, plans for a personal vacation and more. She interacts with several departments, including sales and customer support.
On the day of her flight, the airline sends her automated SMS messages about a gate change. Bad weather in another city has severely delayed her flight, putting her at risk of missing an important meeting. So she calls customer support to assist.
If this airline had been using legacy technology, the agent would likely have to ask Rebecca many questions about who she is, listen to her explanation and then ask about the flight information. It might also require her to speak with multiple agents before reaching the right person.
No single agent would have access to all relevant personal and flight data or context on why Rebecca was calling. And they’re not guaranteed to have training for serving Gold Status customers with urgent problems. That’s a bad user experience for the customer and the agent.
In the end, Rebecca grows frustrated and the agents are stressed. For Rebecca’s next trip, she might switch carriers.
But today is a good day: The airline has invested in experience orchestration technology.
All the interaction data from Rebecca’s previous interactions on the website, social media and SMS are combined with her personal data. This includes her frequent flyer status, ticketing information and the real-time updates about her delayed flight. All of that customer data is fed into an orchestration engine.
That engine uses AI to route her to a premier service agent who knows Rebecca and understands her current situation. This is because AI quickly serves up the correct information needed for the agent to help Rebecca and book her on the appropriate flight.
By using all of this customer context and knowing the availability and skills set of the agent, the airline creates a superior experience. And it keeps a loyal customer.
The digital era has empowered customers in a way that wasn’t possible only a few years ago. Now, it’s easy to switch vendors, find better prices and do so very quickly.
This has driven many advances in customer service, especially in personalizing customer experiences. Personalization is more than delivering the next best offer. It’s a factor that drives performance and better customer outcomes.
With an experience orchestration strategy, customer-centric organizations can focus on optimizing each customer’s full experience — not just their most recent interaction.
Learn more about experience orchestration and how it can help personalize the experiences you deliver to your customers.
Ian Felder
Ian Felder, Product Marketing Director at Genesys, has deep knowledge and experience working in customer experience, specifically around customer journeys. In addition to leading the go-to-market efforts for the Genesys...
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