Breaking Down Customer Data Silos to Enable Real-Time Personalization
It’s no secret that customer experience has evolved in recent years from an oft-overlooked end of the business equation to a hot-button area of focus for the world’s top brands. But how big a difference does customer experience truly make?
Research indicates quite a lot. A Walker study predicts that by the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. At the same time, four out of five leaders in customer experience anticipate that their brands will compete completely or near completely on the basis of customer experience in the near-term. But how can today’s enterprises overcome the challenges related to quickly enhancing and expediting their customer engagement strategies?
To start, enterprises must assess ways in which they currently collect and analyze customer-specific inputs and feedback. It’s at this stage that problems often begin to emerge. Enterprises recognize that their customer data inputs are siloed or only available in aggregate pools rather than by an individual person. Mass personalization is not enough to fulfill customers’ growing expectations for 1:1 engagement with their favorite brands. Enterprises need a 360° view of each customer, from their past buying habits (channels used, loyalty points earned, etc.) to their current location (the place, the weather, the time) to their future intent (for example, booked trips or unpurchased products in online shopping carts) in order to provide them with messaging and offers that resonate in-the-moment. That means they need a customer data platform (CDP) or data lake solution that not only unifies data from multiple sources into a single customer profile, but that is also intelligent enough to interpret the customer’s real-time actions and environment to optimize relevancy of the messages and offers they receive.
Here are three examples of new opportunities that brands can unlock through the power of real-time personalization:
Opportunity #1: Securing the Sale
Shannon enjoys online browsing through her local department store’s website. Oftentimes, she will place items in her cart, but usually only makes final purchases after trying an item on in the store. Last week while shopping for new summer outfits, she placed a Brand Y maxi dress in her cart, but hasn’t been back to finish the purchase. By leveraging an intelligent CDP to achieve 1:1 customer engagement, a retailer is able to recognize her behavioral trends and leverage real-time personalization to increase the likelihood of completing the sale. Today when Shannon enters the store to pick out a new T-shirt for her son, her customer loyalty app pushes her a personalized message:
“Shannon, summer is here! Still interested in the Brand Y maxi dress? We have your size in stock! Click here for directions to the Women’s Dresses department.”
Opportunity #2: Upselling at Every Order
Every Friday night, Jack places an online order for him and his wife from their local sandwich shop. He always purchases two subs but rarely purchases drinks. With a platform for real-time personalization, the restaurant is able to identify these purchasing patterns to upsell Jack at his next order. Next time Jack logs on to place an order, he is served up an offer that reads:
“Jack, thanks for your loyalty! Treat yourself to a drink, and get the second on us.”
Opportunity #3: Making Every Customer Interaction Seamless
On Saturday, Jeffrey purchased a gift and paid for 2-day shipping so it makes it on time for a party he is attending that Friday. When Wednesday rolls around and his package is nowhere to be found, he logs onto the e-commerce site’s live chat to speak to a representative. The package appears to be lost, and so the chatbot agent sets up a new overnight shipment. The next morning, Jeffery wants to confirm that his package has shipped, but doesn’t’ want to go through the hassle of re-explaining his issue to a new agent. By leveraging a CDP to achieve 1:1 customer engagement, the e-commerce site is able to immediately recognize Jeffery when he logs on and anticipate his question. When he opens the live chat, he is greeted by a message that says:
“Jeffery, your order has shipped! Click here to track your package.”
Real-time personalization enables enterprises to authentically engage every customer based on their unique preferences, environment, and intent and unlocks big opportunities for enterprises to strengthen loyalty as well as sales. To do so effectively requires a platform that can capture, process, and act on customer data as it is generated to rapidly orchestrate the most meaningful customer experience possible.
ZineOne’s Intelligent Customer Engagement (ICE) platform performs AI-powered stream processing to rapidly assess events, contextualize them, and deliver personalized interactions in real time, while they are most relevant to the customer. It integrates with existing systems of record to rapidly become the single hub for customer data. Our quick time-to-implementation gets enterprises up-and-running far sooner than an internally constructed solution, and delivers real-time personalization to customers at every encounter, leading to memorable, differentiated experiences every time. Find out more about how our ICE platform can optimize 1:1 data engagement in your organization.
