This article explores the benefits of introducing personalization to CX, not only to customers but to employees as well.
Personalized experiences are rapidly becoming part of these customer expectations. Research by Instapage has revealed that 74 percent of customers are ‘frustrated’ by website content that is not personalized. In a similar vein, consultant management company McKinsey found companies that focus on CX personalization can increase their revenue by five to 15 percent.
This means companies that do not offer personalized CX risk losing both customers and revenue.
What is personalization?
Personalized CX refers to companies delivering messages, offers and products that are tailored to each customer. By offering a customized experience businesses can demonstrate that they know and understand customer preferences, leading to increased engagement with their brand, a higher lifetime value and an increase in customer loyalty and advocacy.
Personalization is also beneficial for increasing customer loyalty as it allows companies to better connect with their customers on an emotional level.
K V Dipu, senior president at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, explains that companies can leverage the customer data they have to create this emotional engagement.
“A credit card company can highlight how a particular lunch expense was a birthday celebration event and convert a simple transaction into an emotional engagement opportunity via personalization,” he remarks.
This emotionally engaged personalization allows companies to create meaningful experiences for their customers, making them feel valued and ultimately building brand loyalty.
What is hyper-personalization?
Personalization can be enhanced through pairing it with other digital CX solutions, like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation. By combining personalization with customer data, analytics, AI and automation, companies can introduce hyper-personalization to their CX offerings.
This hyper-personalized service allows automated solutions like chatbots to react in real time to customers by tracking customer interactions across multiple digital touchpoints and offering them a relevant, streamlined CX.
Hyper-personalization uses real-time signals and data to react and respond to a customer in the moment, allowing automated solutions like conversational AI to understand customer tone and sentiment. This understanding enables chatbots to proactively engage with customers to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
These tools can help streamline customer service through automation, allowing agents to be more efficient. This ultimately boosts customer satisfaction, as customer queries are resolved faster, freeing up agents to dedicate more time to more complex or urgent enquiries.
Joseph Vassie, head of insight and analytics at ASOS.com, notes that by prioritizing the channel customers used most frequently – the site’s live chat feature – and introducing a virtual assistant helped empower front-line advisors to resolve a higher proportion of customer issues. The result of this change was an improvement in resolution rates, a reduction in waiting times and ultimately more than a 50-point gain in NPS.
Related content: CX personalization in APAC report 2022
How Virgin Media increased sales using personalization
Virgin Media implemented a number of chatbots in early 2022. This included Discover Bot, which helped assist with capturing accurate customer requirements, a T&C bot that relayed the terms and conditions of sales and a VMP Bot which helped gauge specific insurance needs.
Chris Huggins, senior conversational manager at Virgin Media, says: “Bots are designed for accuracy and speed; humans are masters of empathy and instinct – neither can replace the other. Together they generate synergy that ultimately drives unmatched business outcomes, CSAT and agent job satisfaction.”
Following the introduction of its chatbots, Virgin Media was able to increase its streamline its customer service process and increase sales. Within weeks of implementation, the company reported a 35 percent reduction in handling time and increased sales revenue.
Discover more about personalization by downloading CX Network’s
CX personalization in APAC report 2022.