Customer Service Glossary
What Is Customer Personalization Strategy?
A customer personalization strategy is a marketing, sales, and customer service tactic that brands use to offer tailored, customized experiences for users. Customer personalization strategies are typically highly strategic. Further, brands must develop robust personalization methods to keep customers engaged and earn a competitive advantage in an overwhelmed marketplace.
Even so, the end result is more than worth the effort. Customers prefer personalized experiences and are willing to pay for a customized, human approach to marketing, service, and sales. With this in mind, brands can leverage consumer data to garner a better understanding of their customer, ensuring that clients feel seen, valued, and known by their favorite businesses.
Customer personalization places products, services, and web content into users’ lives in a way that resonates with the consumer. When done well, customer personalization strategies extend beyond the customer’s email inbox and into advertising campaigns, website experiences, brand messages, and more to create a cohesive, streamlined approach to the customer-retailer relationship.
Why Is Customer Personalization Strategy Important for Customer Service?
Most companies understand why customer personalization strategies are critical for marketing, sales, and communications teams. However, personalization can fall to the wayside in customer service unless businesses develop a deliberate plan to incorporate consumer data into their support offerings.
Fortunately, customer relationship management (CRM) software makes it easier to develop a customer personalization strategy. CRM tools compile user data from social media platforms, websites, mobile apps, and physical retail stores to create detailed profiles on new leads and existing customers.
As a result of the information hub, customer service agents can provide real-time, relevant assistance to customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Other benefits of a personalized customer service strategy include:
1. Improved Customer Loyalty
Studies show that 56% of consumers remain loyal to brands that understand their needs, desires, preferences, and priorities. Customer service departments can enhance customer loyalty by using the data found in a CRM system. After reviewing each client’s profile, they can provide insight into past purchases or make personalized recommendations to suit their needs.
2. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Customers want to feel seen, understood, and valued. They want to believe that brands appreciate their investment in products or services and view each user as more than a line item on a balance sheet. Personalization strategies enable companies to do just that.
When customer service representatives greet clients by name, provide timely solutions, or make recommendations and inquire about past orders, customers feel more satisfied – and less likely to return or regret a purchase.
What to Consider When Developing a Customer Personalization Strategy
Developing a customer personalization strategy requires a substantial amount of time, analysis, and testing. Companies can begin the process by considering the three following factors.
User Personas
User personas act as archetypes of customer groups. These personas feature specific characteristics that apply to a brand’s audience, including:
- Age
- Location
- Marital status
- Occupation
- Income
- Personal goals
- Professional ambitions
User personas represent the customer as they initiate and navigate the purchasing process. Brands can then build personalization strategies around the wants, needs, and goals of each user persona.
Segment Impact
Audience, or demographic, segmentation is one of the most effective tools businesses can develop customer personalization strategies. That said, segments will only benefit a personalizations strategy if they are actionable, relevant, and impactful to the overall strategy.
To increase actionability, consider how well a segment represents the audience as a whole and how much impact a precise, targeted message would have on the group.
3. Organizational Goals
Finally, consider the overall goals of the organization before developing a personalization strategy. Customer personalization strategies can range from limited to robust to suit the needs of customer service, marketing, or sales efforts.
Improving Customer Satisfaction Through Customer Personalization Strategies
Customer service departments play a pivotal role in an organizational customer personalization strategy. The customer-facing role allows agents to deliver real-time, customized experiences to users while drawing from detailed user profiles and user personas. As such, customer service departments can increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention ratings.