How personalization can improve your customers’ experiences

Have you ever experienced a hectic shopping season that drove you into a website or an app that you’ve never been to? It’s not the usual shopping app/website experience that you are used to. Everything looks new and unfamiliar. You don’t know where to find what and you can’t see any recommendations according to your taste and style.

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What happened next? Did you continue exploring until you found what you wanted? Did you leave and go back to the app/website that you normally shop from? If you experienced this situation even just once then you know the frustration. That is exactly why you need to change it for your customers. Here is why!

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You expect personalization!

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Personalization is one of the hottest topics in e-commerce currently. And for good reasons! Personalization is all about understanding your customers, your own services and how your customers use them. To understand that, it requires that your business focuses on putting their customers and their needs first.

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Personalization is only really valuable when you have nailed the understanding of who your customer is, what they want, and how you can serve them. Preferably in the easiest and most accessible way possible.

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Modifying and adjusting your interactions with your customer in order to make their experiences personalized is how you reach higher customer satisfaction. There are different ways to personalize and each company needs to find their own approach towards it.  However, one thing will always be the main factor. Understanding your customers and putting their needs first.

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Why you need to personalize your experiences

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To understand this better let’s look at some well-known companies that have applied personalization at scale. For instance, Amazon.com has already been personalizing books and many different products for its users.

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If you’ve been shopping on Amazon you know whenever you go back to the app, it suggests many relevant items according to your previous shopping and interests. Netflix has also lined up many recommendations for each specific user according to their previous watch history.

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There’s a saying which calls a good service a more personalized service. Meaning the friendlier the service the higher appreciation it receives by customers.

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The importance of personalisation becomes so apparent when you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look through their eyes. Do you like the fact that each time you open Zalando’s app you see all the relevant items that you like and that they even recommend everything in your exact size? Exactly!

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Your customers expect the same from you. Why? Because it’s convenient, saves time, makes the shopping process more pleasant, saves costs, faster decision making and most importantly leads to loyalty and customer satisfaction.

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Personalization leads to loyalty

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If we put personalization in the middle, we can surrender it by loyalty, customer satisfaction, trust and communication.  When there’s good communication, there’s a good personalized relationship.

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If communication is done right then you can expect loyalty. This is where you learn all about your customers. If you know how to make them feel positive about your service then you’re on the right track. The track towards building trust.

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Trust is about you living up to your promises by providing the expected personalized service. It is about delivering it to your final customers to show them that you have their best interest.

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Let’s look more deeply into loyalty and customer satisfaction. Loyalty goes perfectly along with customer satisfaction, trust and communication. It is what all firms are looking for. You want your customers to come back, to repeat their purchase and to be committed. That is why you cannot ignore the importance of loyalty.

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Through personalization, you will have your customers emotionally involved. You collect their data and create a unique service that has only been adjusted for the specific individual. This is a way to show you care and your customer will express their willingness to maintain their relationship with you.

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Loyalty means less costs

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Do you want to know why? Because it is not only costly for you as a company to attract new customers. It is also costly and time consuming for customers to train a new company about themselves, who they are and what they like.

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Switching cost is a concern for both sides. It is the reason why your customer would stay with you even though there’s a better offering or promotion at the next door unless you are not offering what they expect.

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On the other hand, there is customer satisfaction that directly influences customer loyalty. As you know, just because your customer is satisfied with the service they received, it doesn’t mean they will come back.

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This is where personalization shows up to help you create loyalty. It eventually leads to a satisfactory and long-term relationship. Personalized service is considered to be a better service as they collect each customer’s needs and desires before they recommend anything.

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Customer satisfaction is all about the quality of the relationship between you and your customers. For your customers, it means psychological comfort from peace to anxiety relief. It means there’s a support system that keeps saying “ we got you”.

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How can a CDP help your personalization?

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You need to have the insights required to provide a proper personalized customer experience. You need to have access to software that allows you as a business to fully understand your customers. You need to have knowledge on a 1:1 level, in order to truly understand and create a personalized customer experience for each and every one of your customers.

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One way of doing this is having a Customer Data Platform. It allows you to collect, consolidate and analyse all your customer data in one platform.

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Doing this gives you an overview of each of your individual customers, their behaviour, preferences, and recommendations for their favourite products, sizes and colors. This is how you achieve hyper personalization by definition

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A CDP can do this by collecting data from many different sources into one platform where you can act on it.

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If you have access to understand and use the insights from your customer data, you can make sure that you create that awesome experience for them every time, on every channel, for every customer!

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If you want to know more about how your business can use a CDP to help create those amazing customer experiences, you can sign up for a free demo and see it in action.

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