- Trine Smedheim
Customer Experience and Omnichannel could be a competitive advantage
Until now it has been the big tech brands that has been driving the evolution of customers experiences; Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Spotify. Customers have really embraced these experiences as they deliver seamless, omnichannel and personal experiences. In the beginning customers were surprised by these experiences, but now they expect it! And especially the new generation, our digital native generation. I think every brand need to step up their game.
“All of us are competing with the best customer experiences our customers have ever had with any brand across any industry”
Customer Experience and omnichannel personalisation could be the competitive advantage for most companies. Every brand has goals to increase customer satisfaction, create loyal customer and prevent customers from churning. To actually avoid churn, the brands need to deliver excellent customer experiences and manage the customers touchpoint with the brand, in an excellent manner.
Retaining existing customers should be much easier and more profitable than acquiring new ones. This is proven many times within customer lifetime value calculations. Anyway, the best way to retain customers is to first understand customer behaviour by listen to every signal they leave behind, remove frictions and then managing the customer experience in real time when that is needed.
“It is a fact, brands who want to survive in the future, must provide a customer experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations”
Avaliable tech jobs in DNB
Illustration of a Customer Life Cycle in financial industry
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a strategy where the brand design and oversees the customer experiences end2end in a holistic and seamless way.
Customer Experience Management involves understanding the customer life cycle and identifying opportunities to improve the customer experience at each stage and touchpoint with a brand. To succeed with a CXM strategy, it is essential to deliver in both small and big moments. If a brand fails in the small moments, then there is a chance that customers will neither give you another chance nor choose you for the big moments either.
The goal of CXM is to create positive, seamless and extrarordinary experiences that leave customers satisfied and loyal to the brand. Delivering extraordinary customer experiences means engaging customers....
- ... in the right way
- ...with the right message
- ...in the right channel
- ...and at the right time
To deliver great customers experiences, the brands need to identify key customer situations within their industry or marketplace, and make sure these experiences are seamless and friction free. The silos need to be removed, and brands need to change from product focus to customer centricity thinking where the customer needs always comes first.
Illustration of Key Financial Situations in the financial industry
What is Personalization?
Personalization is about providing personalized experiences to customers based on their individual needs, preferences, behaviour, and past interactions with the brand. This can be done through tailoring products, services, recommendations, and targeted content.
Personalization can be achieved through different techniques such as recommendations or prediction modelling, which suggest products or content that are likely to be of interest to the user based on their past interactions, activities, and customer insight.
Event-triggered techniques and architecture give brands new opportunities, to actually act on signals customers give the brand. This could be a customer visiting a shopping cart or a process, and then you can act on these triggers based on your decision rule strategy.
An important aspect of personalization is also about anticipating customer needs and delivering them thoughtfully no matter when, where, and how a customer engages with a brand.
What are the building blocks you need to deliver on personalization
High level there is 4 building blocks for personalization;
- A Customer Profile ( Quality offline/ digital data and prediction models)
- Content Library (Content Management System)
- Decisions rules for what, to who, when and where (Real time rule engine)
- Analytical insight (Tools for analysis and measurement)
Data about the customer is essential and the key driver to be able to deliver personalised experiences and to identify who are actually interacting with the brand. You need to build a Customer Profile 360 view, where you combine both online and offline attributes such as preferences, interest, needs and demographic. The combination of offline and online data is powerful.
Illustration of how a customer 360 profile could look like
To scale personalization you need a great Content Management System (CMS) and asset repository to support the need of tailored content. You need to think of personalization as an automated process and where you need a factory production mindset. To be relevant you need to act on signals real time and combine this with insight you already have about the customer. There will be many different and smaller segments than you are used to, and therefore you need a lot more tailored content upfront. You need more pre-built content.
When brands start personalizing, you automatically need more content and then suddenly you need to prioritize between what you will show to a customer and orchestrate between channels. What are we showing where, why and when. Then a need for a decision or rule engine comes into the picture. A decision engine's role is to have a place where you can do the orchestration and decide prioritization. Decide between different rules set you have registered. Scaled personalisation is about automation of communication and more real time processes. Potentially there will be many signals from the same customers at the same time, and then you need to have business rules that prioritze between signals based the strategy you have decided i.e., mortgage before savings if collision, or show service messages before sales etc. A rule engine is helping you to keep an overview of what is most important to show, weighted between customer needs and the brand needs.
If you want to scale personalisation, then you need to remove rules that are either channel specific or system specific. The rules for communication needs to be gathered and structure in one common place. Examples of rules set can be legal, product, strategic areas and risk rules.
To be short and sweet, personalization is about automated processes behind the scenes which deliver content and experiences based on signals and insight you have about the customers. Customers do not have the same need at the same time, and therefore you need to prepare content and decide what to be delivered whenever an event or signals occurs.
What is Omnichannel Personalization?
That is when the personalized experience start in one channel and continue in the next channel the customer enters. Often this is called "the Netflix & Amazon feeling" due to the fact that they were one of first brands delivering this experience to customers. The customer chooses the channel and since they are not always completing their process in one channel, you need to offer the experience in the next or every channel they enter.
Let's say customers have viewed something in one channel, but did not click or dismiss. You do not really know how well the customer has perceived your message or content you have presented. You need to continuously analyse to get these answers, learn and test towards customers. It is a never-ending story. You have the option to present a message such as; " You showed interest for product X in channel Y, and are you still interested or not? Click yes if your are interested or dismiss it you are not?" If you are asking customers to take action, then you should be able to remove it and also make sure to update other channels too, based on the customer response.
In omnichannel personalization there will be a lot more dilemmas and need for prioritizing due to the fact that there will be many messages queuing to reach the customers. Then you need pause, stop and update messages more on continuous basis. These prioritizing dilemmas are probably less in web or in manned channels, since these channels often have more space for different messages. But maybe in mobile channel these considerations will be different, and you need to prioritize between different placements.
It is a fact that sometimes there will be messages that need to be paused because another more important one needs to be sent. This is all about considerations and business rules you decide as a brand. An aspect in relation to this, is to decide how many messages should you as a brand present to a customer pr day. Do you need a cap or not. Probably you need more analysis and measurement to support you on such decisions.
And last, but not least. Omnichannel personalization need a unified customer ID across all devices and channels, together with a 360 customer profile. If you are going to be relevant and personal, then you need to share the same data about the customer across all channels. No more data silos.
Customer centricity, Personalization and Customer Experience Management are closely related
Hopefully, these buzzwords make more sense now. To summarize it all, brands need to avoid one-size-fits-all customer experiences if you want your brand to be future proof. The future is about beeing customer centric and to make sure brand experiences fits your customer needs wherever the customers are in their life cycle. Brands must be able to create as many sophisticated, multi-step journeys as required to suit customers’ unique behaviour and preferences. The whole transition towards omnichannel personalization and Customer Experience Management, are about capabilities, data, people and processes. It is not a easy walk in the park, but you need to do it, both for your brand's survival and for your customers.
The brands that will succeed, need to have a strategy and a customer experience vision. You can not separate personalization, omnichannel and great experiences going forward since the are closely related and dependent on each other. And if your brand have both physical and digital channels, then you always need to take holistically approach. Customer do tend to use these in combination, because most brand's are not able to solve every situation digitally yet.
Omnichannel personalization and experience is the future. No doubt. Customers expect it and will love it. Every brand needs to figure out their own path in how they will solve this, but everyone needs to learn how to crawl, walk and run. Those who have had succeed so far, has established agile working methods, working across functional teams and are continuously learning together.
In DNB we have started on this journey. We have carved out a great vision and are working hard to deliver on it. As a Product Manager for Personalization and Experimentation in DNB, I am really exicited to be a part of this journey towards omnichannel and scaled personalized experiences. Because our customers deserve it and our potential is great!