Is Hyper-Personalization a Good or a Bad Tactic for Customer Experience?
A report says that employers expect nearly 2 in 5 employees to work remotely at the end of 2021. While this may be a ray of hope for employees going back to the physical workspace, the reality on the ground does not favour this view.
When the world was thinking that the battle against coronavirus is being won, new variants such as the Delta and Omicron are emerging. What this portends is that we may still have to continue with remote work and conduct business transactions online.
It’s a fact that before the outbreak of coronavirus, eCommerce was fast becoming the means of purchasing products by the majority of people; websites virtually became the first point of contact for a lot of consumers.
Businesses have realized that the only thing that will continue to give them relevance is a good customer experience; this is in tandem with the report that 60% of consumers across the U.S. and U.K. have indicated that they will stop buying from a brand after a poor customer service experience.
Two important factors are featuring very strongly in ensuring that businesses attract customers to their websites and also enhance better customer experience.
The factors are content optimization and hyper-personalization; it’s not enough to make customers visit your website, the ultimate goal is to convert such customers and ensure they constantly return to make purchases.
Content optimization
The information you give to your customers about your product or service will be irrelevant if it does not reach the largest possible target audience; while you produce content for your readers, content optimization ensures that search engines rank your content highly. This process involves making use of the right keywords, adding the title and meta tags, and making sure you include relevant links.
The content on your website goes a long way to tell your customers what you do and what they should expect, however, content optimization enhances that search engines tell your story to the world. Before this happens, your content must have all the necessary attributes that will ensure search algorithms rank it highly.
While you post content on your websites and try to optimize it, is the content useful to your target audience? Can your target audience identify with the content?
You must know your customer to create content that is extremely relevant to their needs. How do you go about this if you don’t have the right data? If you decide to use data from similar segments, there are chances it won’t work.
You also don’t leverage data from purchasing history alone, you need to understand the extent of their digital interactions with your organization and find out what their goals are. You can then compare what you have with other segments to come up with content that is timely and relevant to them.
This is why hyper-personalization becomes very necessary.
Hyper-personalization
Personalization is not a novelty; businesses have been using personalization to send targeted messages to their customers. The basic way of sending personalized messages is to send emails to a named individual.
This entails that you must have some data concerning your customers. Mostly, the data you will have for personalization will be on the demographics and geographic location.
Is that enough to improve customer experience? The answer is an emphatic no; personalization tactics must be more creative and progressive. You need something more than just ordinary personalization; you need hyper-personalization.
In a recent expert panel held by CXBuzz on Hyper-Personalization its Effects on CX, Michael Creal, Market Unit Leader, CE&X NA CX Customer Success – Emerging Segment, SAP America Inc. says, “Hyper-personalization is a clear CX multiplier and data-driven answer to minimizing abandon carts.”
Customers now more than ever before want you to see and treat them as individuals rather than as numbers. They want you to understand that they are human beings who have challenges, such as we are seeing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
How much do you truly know about your customers?
Is it just their names, gender, and locations?
They want to relate with you based on the strength of knowledge you have about them. They want you to associate with what they go through daily; they want you to see that their lives, reality, and needs are changing constantly.
When you deploy hyper-personalization as your marketing strategy to improve customer experience, you leverage data, predictive analytics, and AI for the insights and capabilities you require to enhance your understanding of the realities your customers go through daily. You will also come up with actionable plans to relate with them in all spheres of their lives and in real-time too.
This is what customers expect from you today, and this is what will ensure an improved customer experience. You don’t need to see the provision of superior customer experience as a favor to your customers, you must understand that it gives you a competitive advantage in the ever-increasing global village the world is turning into.
What does it take from you to convert new customers, reduce churn, and form brand ambassadors? Hyper-personalization is the tonic and the magic wand you now need for customer experience since your customers have choices and alternatives they can recourse to.
What gives you relevance in the global market is any strategy that ensures you have a loyal and long-lasting customer base. Hyper-personalization is the strategy that ensures you meet and even exceed your customers’ expectations; this you can do by leveraging data, AI, and predictive analytics.
Nothing beats the power of in-depth interactions between your brand and your customers, and you can only do this if you truly know your customers.
