The art of personalization

A story about fish, innovation and empathy

In the caves of lower Rio Grande, the blind Mexican Tetra fish thrives by adapting to its dark environment. Originally sighted, the species evolved over time, sacrificing eyesight to enhance energy for survival. Living in darkness with little oxygen, efficiency became vital for finding food and evading danger. By losing their sight, the fish gained 15% more energy compared to sighted fish. Their evolution highlights the importance of adapting to challenging environments. The blind cave fish exemplifies the significance of evolving, embracing change, and simplicity in ensuring survival in a changing world.

It is no different for the businesses we create and run. Keeping up with constant technological advances and the complexity and disruption they come with is no small task. We are blind to the future and unprepared for it. Unlike the Mexican Tetra, humans are hardwired to resist evolution. We fight change. We want to stay safe and cozy. We want to imagine that we do not need to change in order to continue to thrive. The reality is, nature is working against us. Our bodies have a complex internal system that purposefully creates inertia—resistance to change—to maintain a state of equilibrium known as homeostasis.

Have you felt the powerful shift in the universe between businesses and customers? For decades, companies were able to succeed even when they treated customers badly. But things change. Riding the coattails of legacy and status quo no longer works. Entire industries have been uprooted by newcomers using AI, IoT, big data and cloud computing that ride in and simply fill in the gaps. Companies that will thrive tomorrow are willing to disrupt themselves. They are honest about where their experiences fall short, and willing to address those issues today. We live in an amazing time, where innovation trumps yesterday’s status quo.

The only constant in life is change. Heraclitus of Ephesus

When you talk about efficiencies in the past, you might read about W. Edwards Deming. Seventy years later and we are no longer talking about Total Quality Management, Six Sigma or LEAN. But we are still talking about creating efficiencies and appreciation for a system. The world got much more complicated than it was when Deming was writing.

As we shift increasingly toward a technology-powered society, efficiency today is about clear insights into improving the business. Efficiency is innovation, and finding better ways to work. It is about being real.

Efficiency today is primarily baked in empathy for customers’ objectives.

Buyers undertake many paths in pursuit of large and small life goals and in response to various opportunities, obstacles, and challenges. Their journeys may anticipate purchase experiences, when they take steps to choose products, brands, or technologies, engage in online or offline retail experiences, and use products and services. However, customers take other journeys that don’t have a purchase as their goal but nonetheless implicate brands, technologies, products, and services.

For example, a cancer patient and family members undertake a traumatic emotional journey that involves a complex network of healthcare brands, technologies, and services as patients and their families move from diagnosis, through treatment, to recovery, remission, or end-of-life care.

This common example highlights the importance of understanding the context of the customer’s overall journey. Understanding what customers are trying to accomplish both before and after interacting with a brand can help brands increase the value they provide to their customers. Such a perspective recognizes that “markets, customers, resources and contexts are constantly changing.” Without this broader perspective, companies can become so consumed with improving a specific touchpoint or maximizing choice of an option that they lose sight of the customer’s overall goal.

At the center of Customer Experience beats a human heart

Despite the rise of automation and self-service, customers still crave a human connection: 59 percent feel companies have lost touch with the human element.

One challenge is it's often difficult to connect with a live person, as anyone who has found themselves repeatedly yelling "Human! Human!" into a phone can attest to. Self-service is often welcome, but it's a best practice to make a live person easily accessible.

The biggest problem is the problem you don’t know you have

Instead of leveraging technology to make customer experiences better, many companies have used half-baked clunky technologies to put a wall between themselves and their customers.

The new term coined by HBR is called “engineered insincerity,” meaning using automation to mimic human interest without actual meaningful and personal relevancy. Engineered insincerity manifest itself in various ways, such as a constant flow of emails from a retailer that bear no relevance to your current situation, chatbots that use slang and informal language to make them appear human, and daily text messages that force you to unfollow and disengage.

A Gartner study found that only 14% of customers had a digital interaction with a brand that led them to do something differently.

While AI and machine learning hold immense potential for improving customer service and online interactions, some poorly designed or implemented chatbots and engines can leave users frustrated, disappointed or worse, create potentially dangerous situations.

We have the technology to actually improve so much of what our customers hate about the experiences we provide them: the way we communicate with them, the way we anticipate their needs, and provide relevant, meaningful and tailored experiences. We have the ability to provide our employees better technology, which has a palpable impact on the customer and provide operational efficiency as a by-product.

However, technology is only one part of the story.

Unfortunately, some organizations have it backwards: They start with the technology, they get stuck in IT optimization and never get to deep customer understanding. Their unending quest for operational efficiency is prioritizing automation over customer empathy – and that is a problem.

Poor digital transformation is causing digital disengagement. Most companies do not have a good understanding on what a compelling digital experience actually means to their customers. They focus their investments on “what customers think of us” vs. “what customers think of themselves,” which is an overlooked opportunity, leading to unremarkable experiences.

The best digital experiences are built with a holistic understanding of the customer: who they are, what they want, what job they have to do, and even how they feel about themselves.

Balancing this understanding with technology will provide companies strategic insights on how to support what customers are trying to achieve in the first place.

What can differentiate brands is to reframe their approach to focus on how they can help to elevate their customers’ sense of self, instead of simply elevating customers’ perception of their products and services alone. It is less about shiny, new technology and automation, and more about using customer understanding and empathy to create experiences that help them develop a greater sense of control and self-confidence in a way that they couldn’t have alone.

The customer engagement challenge

Segmentation and personas allows marketers to set the strategy and policies for their marketing activities, but when we’re looking at executing engagement, segmentation becomes contra-productive and the opposite of relevant tailored engagement. Once a brand has achieved the right technology stack, engaging based on segmentation and personas is not fit for purpose any longer.

Many brands have fallen into a survivorship bias trap of focusing customer marketing on desired business outcomes rather than the unique needs of their customers. Too often, companies view their customers as another audience to sell new products or services to, without taking a holistic picture of their current needs and future aspirations.

Gartner refers to the current state of engagement as an ’empathy vacuum’ — the void created by the engineered insincerity of the customer management industrial complex.

AI and Machine learning algorithms can identify the individual’s unique profile and match offers and content to them in a way no human can, allowing marketing teams to overcome the known engagement limitations of segment-based marketing and to edge closer to the promise of one-to-one marketing, or put another way, segment-of-one marketing.

Customer empathy is a key element of a successful customer engagement strategy that balances a deep understanding of a customer’s situation, interest and intent with an organization’s goals. This is not easy, especially when that deep customer understanding is not present.

Trying to encapsulate each customer’s life into a pre-defined journey is a mistake — rather, it’s crucial for brands to consider the customer relationship through the lens of an omni-channel lifecycle rather than a journey.

The trust dilemma

Today’s customers are wiser, more skeptical, more prepared, less patient, and less trusting than ever, and they come armed with an overload of information that can zap any ill-prepared salesperson and marketer into irrelevancy. Because they are armed with excessive amounts of information accessible instantly, they are more distrustful of established experts. In fact, some of them may even consider themselves experts as well, as graduates of "Google search university". Who knows, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but to paraphrase the Notorious B.I.G., mo’ Google, mo’ problems.

We are entering an era of customer disengagement and a total erosion of consumer trust.

Partially to blame is the lack of technology focused on building actual relationships rather than subjecting customers to a never-ending stream of ‘campaigns’. But to point the finger at technology alone doesn’t address the underlying issue: cross-departmental collaboration is also needed to improve the customer relationship gap. Customers want to feel known and appreciated, and rising to their needs requires both technological and organizational change.

Can this problem be solved?

Brands need to reframe how they’re prioritizing existing customers. Simply stated: The cost of a disengaged customer is significantly greater than the value of a newly acquired one. To determine their relationship with existing customers, technology, sales, service and marketing teams must partner to assess their current outreach tools and strategies, and ask themselves the following:

• Does the customer feel as though interactions with our company enhance their life?
• What is the ratio between outreach and engagement (a nice way of asking ‘are we inadvertently spamming our customers?’)?
• Are we engaging appropriately, based on where customers are in their relationship with our brand?
• How do we continue to earn each customer’s trust?
• When a customer does meaningfully engage, what is the next mutually beneficial experience we can offer them?
• Are we organized in a way so that we can deliver a meaningful omnichannel experience for our customers?

The way companies approach these questions is fundamental for keeping customers meaningfully engaged. As customer needs continue to morph over time, the cracks in the ways that companies are maintaining customer relationships are being exposed – what can we do, then, to enhance customer loyalty?

Nearly three-quarters of consumers want their digital experiences to feel personal — meaningful, relevant, and timely, rather than ‘mass personalized’.

This presents a huge opportunity for brands to take a one-to-one lifecycle approach towards communications and marketing, rather than broadcasting a series of transactional campaigns to customers that ‘nurture’ them at various points along some pre-defined ‘journey’.

1. Recognize that not all digital experiences are meant to be frictionless.

Depending on a customers’ goal, a better experience can create some friction enabling customers to reflect on their choices by providing a learning path. By learning path, I mean a sequence of interactions that deepens their understanding of how to accomplish their goals. A Gartner study found that B2B and B2C customers agreed that if they “realized something new about their needs or their own goals” they were 1.73 times more likely to buy more.

2. Think value over volume.

Catalytic brand experiences are unique and emotional and have a personal impact on customers’ lives. In doing so, it change customers’ understanding of their own needs, becoming part of how they see themselves and make them feel more confident moving in a new direction. These experiences have nearly double the impact on brand commitment when compared to conventional approaches such as driving brand distinctiveness, familiarity or authenticity.

3. Think beyond the digital purchase experience.

Demonstrate to your customers how they can maximize the value of your products and services that they already own. Gartner research shows customers who are on the receiving end of this type of value-enhancing reaction are significantly more likely to not only stick around but also buy more.

Figuring out how to scale the very human art of personalization is difficult, but I believe that it is also the key to building a lasting connection with customers for the long term.

Creating internal efficiencies for your employees is an important step for creating better customer experiences. One of the reasons I love the topic of “efficiency” as much as I do is I believe it’s important to make life better for people. What makes the human race great is our pursuit of happiness, our commitment to creating a better world. If we can create more efficiencies, life will be less stressful for employees in their jobs, and for customers who would prefer to be with their loved ones rather than stuck in broken products and services. Experience is the thing that, as human beings, lights our eyes up or makes our blood boil. So how can we take this commonsense principle and apply it to our businesses?

Making customers feel good requires time, resources, and thought into how we run our companies. It’s both the big decisions and the small decisions we make every day. We must start with the intention, adopt the mindset, and be willing to die trying. As we learned about the blind cave fish at the beginning of this article, today requires a willingness to evolve, and adapt to our new environment.