With consumers more demanding, brands must differentiate themselves through personalized experiences.  

A personalized customer experience manages, defines and communicates a company’s commitment to its clients, compelling them to continue purchasing. And as more customers consider their experience with a brand to be just as important as its products and services, traditional differentiation approaches are becoming less relevant to success. Today, it is imperative that businesses create individualized experiences across the customer journey through consumers’ preferred channels such as SMS, voice, email and social messaging.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Mark Cattini, CEO at Acoustic

Customer Journey Mapping and Data Utilization  

It’s helpful to map out the customer journey to optimize it for individual consumers. This visual representation of touchpoints where consumers interact with a brand – through social channels, email, live chat, etc. – allows businesses to refine conversion points and uncover any challenges before they become significant issues. Of course, the mapping will differ substantially based on the industry, but the focus is to outline key moments of interaction.

Likewise, it’s critical to leverage customer data to prevent siloed journeys. Data is a powerful tool – without it, companies wouldn’t understand the unique preferences that separate the people in their target audience. Plus, customer data helps businesses connect their product or service and the value or benefit they bring to the customer’s challenge, causing the consumer to associate the brand with the resolution.

Companies also need to discover the marketing channels their customers prefer based on peoples’ responses to surveys, voice recordings and other methods. Whether they enjoy the ease of SMS or the directness of phone calls, the customer journey must support the channel the consumer favors.

Crafting the Customer Journey and Experience  

The customer journey must be convenient and provide accessibility; for example, a caller should get routed seamlessly to the agent or department they require. Similarly, business communication must remember the client’s particular case or past inquiries. When a customer calls a company, like a tax relief firm, the experience must allow the client to immediately resume whatever application or form they began during the previous interaction.

Brands can also build a more tailored and useful customer experience by providing self-service capabilities, such as AI-powered automation for live chat, chatbots and virtual agents. Giving customers access to multiple options to solve their problems fosters a sense of freedom and allows them to personalize interactions with a company through their own choices.

Premium access – if accompanied by additional, tailored incentives – is also an effective way to encourage customers to remain loyal and recommend friends and family. A great example is Amazon’s Prime Try Before You Buy, where Prime members can try eligible items before buying them.

Using CPaaS to Actualize Personalized Experiences 

While personalization will be a staple of the future customer experience, 67% of retailers admit that they do not have the adequate tools to realize it at scale. However, with leading CPaaS solutions, companies can eliminate the hassle of recruiting an army of developers to build customized customer journeys.

These platforms allow businesses to deploy highly complicated, developer-heavy solutions in minutes via pre-built, low-code and no-code applications. Moreover, CPaaS helps organizations modernize how they communicate with their customers by building intuitive workflows without the time and effort of a typical development cycle.

Personalized Customer Journey – More Than a Gimmick  

A tailored customer journey creates more positive experiences leading to satisfied people who purchase and recommend a business’s products and services. These individualized experiences, enabled by data, are also difficult for competitors to imitate, giving brands a strong competitive advantage. And, in a future dictated by expediency, efficiency and personalization, it’s critical that companies implement the necessary technology today to prepare for a rapidly evolving consumer base.

Marketing Technology News: The Role Automation Plays in the Future of Ad Monetization