How do you personalize your customer experience without sacrificing consistency?

Creating relationships via virtual connections. We shifted from in-person support sessions for data migrations and software debuts, to online sessions. Our university utilized Microsoft Teams, and invited units and departments to our live support. The new approach allowed us to meet customers on their personal journeys. The asynchronous Teams chat allowed us to reduce barriers and created useful feedback loops, shaping FAQs, tackling issues, and aligning expectations. These interactions were transformative to our customer service. For example, during a change from one file storage-sharing system to another, we used templated communications but adapted our solutions based on what customer's shared in our support sessions and chats.

Personalization is key to deliver a great customer experience but it’s not a simple task! You can only create a personalized journey if you have a clear understanding of customer needs and wants! You need to understand behavior, necessity and expectations otherwise won’t be possible to deliver a unique journey. The challenge is to organize all that data and create automation to deliver different journeys based on clients needs! The CX program needs to be very mature and organized in order to deliver. The best way to start is understanding customer journey, collect and understand clients feedback, make correlation between experience data e operational data, create segmentation and have a great technology stack to automate everything.

Behavior data (i.e. high intent web activity) combined with CRM data gives you the best segments. Imagine you have a store, and one person walks in to check a sofa. He comes back the next day, and the next day. 3 days in a row! But he hasn't purchased it yet. Well the same thing happens online and is more common that you think. - 3 visits without purchase is a great segment to use. - irregular customers - returning members - members with unused bonus points Behavior + CRM data is always the most effective.

Customer segmentation, driven by data on demographics, behaviors, feedback, and loyalty, is pivotal for enriched Customer Experience (CX) and marketing. This approach aids in understanding diverse customer groups, enabling businesses to tailor communications and offers consistently while maintaining the brand's essence. Simultaneously, it encourages a balance between personalization and brand values. Continuous engagement and feedback iteration shape effective strategies. Properly instituted, segmentation not only intensifies personalized outreach but also boosts customer loyalty, making it a crucial tool in the customer-brand relationship.

Segmentation is the key for consistent personalisation. With personalisation,we aim to not only give a wow factor to customers but also try to solve for a hassle free online buying experience.

The customer segmentation needs to be thought through. It has to be a combination of persona types, customer trades (if B2B), buying behaviors, at least some major themes which could cluster a good majority of customers. Add to that a deep understanding of all the customer journeys. Then combine this with the digital stack which puts these streams into one common theme for the customers. and if the channels can utilize this "personalized information" at every possible interaction with the customers - customer going through the website, Customer service talking to customers and then this would give us just the right balance between consistency and personalization.

The content journey is bounded to the customer journey. I will not use dynamic content for every customer journey. Overwelm the customer with content can be a pain point and a decision-making process stopper. In the case of mass-market e-commerce BToC, yes, the dynamic content is relevant.

In terms of Customer Experience (CX) and marketing precision, the use of dynamic content and automation is central. Dynamic content, which adapts based on customer context and behaviour such as location, device, browsing or purchase history, allows for a personalization that maintains consistency of experiences... By displaying context-relevant products, recommendations, or testimonials to customers on your platforms, you're offering a more tailored experience. Automation furthers this by enabling the delivery of personalized messages and responses right on time, through channels i.e., chatbots, email campaigns, or SMS notifications. Such tools assist in creating a unified, engaging CX that adheres to a consistent logic and workflow.

Create a “triage” plan for your frontline. It can be as simple as a stoplight method. Greens are issues your frontline can easily solve themselves, speeding up your organization’s time to resolution—a metric that helps you understand how well your team can handle requests. Give your team things to help with this; FAQ documentation, scripts, etc. Yellows are inquiries that haven’t been handled before. The goal here is to triage with someone who is a product knowledge expert. Yellows never stay yellow - they become green or red. The frontline can’t handle reds without help. Refunds, exchanges, account information (like passwords) usually make up this group. Know which issues go where in your org to solve issues quickly.

Happy Empployees = Happy Customers Making each customer feel special while keeping things steady is also about giving power to your frontline team. These are the folks who talk to customers directly and can really affect how they feel. By teaching them about different customer types and journeys, and by showing them how to be caring and creative, you can offer personal service. Also, let them solve problems, give deals, or add value to customers – as long as it matches your brand's values. This way, customers get a great experience that's still in line with what your brand stands for.

I advocate for the disruptive potential of empowering frontline staff in shaping personalized and consistent Customer Experience (CX). By arming them with insights into customer segments, personas, and journeys, and fostering their decision-making abilities, we create room for truly tailored service. It's pivotal, however, to align such freedom with the brand ethos to maintain consistency. This innovative perspective unlocks a fresh outlook on personalized CX.

The front-line staff satisfaction needs to be one crucial KPI of the customer journey. Studies prove that front-line satisfaction has a direct impact on customer service satisfaction. Nevertheless, staff satisfaction is very bounded to their immediate environment: do not run generic staff satisfaction surveys.

The crowdsourcing tool has proven to be an excellent platform for empowering your frontline staff and enhancing the customer experience. Crowdsourcing is akin to harnessing the diverse perspectives and insights of your team members who are directly engaged with customers. Their on-the-ground experience equips them with a unique understanding of the challenges and friction points that customers encounter. By providing them with a platform to contribute ideas, you're not only valuing their input but also fostering a sense of ownership. This tool has the potential to unlock a wealth of innovative solutions, improving the customer journey by identifying pain points and proposing creative fixes. I am happy to share more about this tool.

Don’t collect feedback if you don’t have the structure to act on it! If you ask clients feedback and don’t do anything of it the customer will be even more frustrated because he wasted his time for nothing! So make sure if you will send a survey, ask for feedback you need to create an action plan e turn all that information into better experience and process.

Feedback needs to be part of the Customer Journey KPI. KPI needs to be bridged with the customer-centricity transformation plan. It's essential to leverage the feedback to improve the service. Remember to be able to follow up with the customer on his input if he wants to do it. We can change a detractor to a promotor by acting and following up on his feedback.

One thing that I utilize in my current position is my created beginning script in all written communication. "Thank you for calling/writing _____. I hope you are having a wonderful day! How can I help you today?" Although such a simple gesture just letting customers know you hope their day is going well can set the entire tone for the conversation. It is so simple to implement and is easily integrated into every conversation. It is also easy to memorize and use in every single communication with customers. Also, taking that little extra step can produce some well deserved praise from your boss!

You will sacrifice consistency, and that is fine. You do not need to choose between personalization and consistency, nor do you need to balance them. You need to navigate them since they are a polarity. A polarity is a dynamic tension between two opposing forces or interdependent and complementary perspectives. It is a natural aspect of life that manifests in various domains, such as nature, culture, and human psychology. This means you are doing both: sometimes you can be more consistent, and sometimes you personalize more. If you want to be exceptional, you can only do it sometimes because you will make a new standard by doing it all the time. Don't choose but navigate. But don't balance. Make a deliberate choice to make a difference.

Personalizar a experiência n?o quer dizer, necessariamente, proporcionar uma Jornada diferente para cada tipo de cliente. Acredito que o ponto alto da personaliza??o esteja nos detalhes e na maneira que a organiza??o possa oferecer isso de maneira escalável e consistente.

Personalized customer experiences all start with customer research to inform the creation of a handful of customer personas that capture MOST, but probably not all, all of the variation in customer wants, needs, behaviors and expectations. Using those personas to inspire your customer journey and the prioritization and execution of the experience improvement projects surfaced in its creation is key! Personas help you achieve scale in your personalization and while it may not lead to perfect individualization, it can help you actually achieve the most important variations from a single experience to delight as many customers as profitably possible.