Real-Time Personalization Helps Brands Win
According to a recent report from MyCustomer, “The 10 Marketing Priorities of Customer-Centric Brands: Insight Report 2016,” multichannel customer engagement—customer journeys that span mobile, voice call, web-based, in-person and other interactions—is no longer the exception, but a “new normal” for today’s customer experience. For the customer, each of these interactions is but one component of their single journey, and the expectation is that brands will provide coherent, efficient service using comprehensive knowledge of that experience. In a nutshell, customers don’t want to waste their time repeating themselves.
However, as this report notes, the gap between acknowledging this reality and fulfilling its demands is considerable in the following ways:
- Despite 95% of marketers agreeing that some form of multichannel strategy is important for their organization, only 39% felt they had the ability to recognize where a prospect was on the customer journey.
-
27% of marketers claimed to lack confidence in their ability to deliver “the right message, at the right time, to the right prospect.”
Don’t waste your employees’ time (and your money), either
Another recent report from Aberdeen Group,
“Customer Intelligence: Using Data to Drive Loyalty and Advocacy,” lays bare the cost of not empowering frontline employees with the multichannel customer data they need to provide a seamless experience, from an internal efficiency perspective:
11% of employee time is spent looking for information across enterprise systems. Assuming that a business has 200 employees, costing $50,000 annually in labor costs, the 11% unproductive time would equal $1.1 million annually in unnecessary costs (200 times $50,000 times 11%).
For a brand with 200 employees, $1.1 million is a not-insignificant sum. But what about a brand with (closer to) 200 thousand employees?
Come away with me—on your own terms
One NICE client, a leading U.S.-based hospitality brand, manages data for roughly 150 million customers across its various systems. Its offerings are highly varied, spanning from budget-minded to high-end, accommodating a diverse customer base. In its efforts to optimize the customer experience, the company had been frustrated by a lack of understanding of each individual’s journey to book activities across digital and physical channels.
The organization chose to implement an application for real-time personalization, which utilizes both online and offline interaction data to generate a comprehensive profile of each customer—a coherent, readily available view of the customer journey.
The technology integrated with 10 cross-channel data feeds, enabling dynamic models to predict which lodging, dining options and activities should be recommended for each customer, through all phases of their research and purchase cycle. Via integration with digital and call center properties, frontline employees have next best action recommendations in real time.
As a result of this undertaking, the brand has gained a newly connected understanding of each guest’s journey across all channels, and can point to a double-digit improvement in key metrics such as booking conversion rate and revenue per booking—an ROI of millions upon millions of dollars annually.
Money in the bank
Real-time personalization technology offers considerable value for optimizing the customer journey, even when there’s no actual “journey” involved. Consider another NICE client, a leading U.S.-based provider of hosted digital banking solutions to 1,200 financial institutions nationwide serving 12 million end-users. In their case, the organization was experiencing inefficient up-sell and cross-sell campaigns due to a lack of connected customer understanding.
The client implemented real-time personalization solutions, connecting customer data sources across web-based applications, mobile, financial transactions and demographics. Integrating with their internal systems for desktop web, mobile and email channel campaigns, the technology enabled dynamic models to predict the next best offer across multiple up-sell and cross-sell offerings (credit cards, savings, mortgages, mobile banking, etc.)
As a result of the implementation, the business can now claim 75 million optimized decisions per month, across 6,000 individual campaigns. More importantly, conversion rates for these campaigns have risen by 10-20%. That’s more money in the bank.
Customers will be more receptive to your offerings, and more likely to reward your business with their loyalty, when you have a complete understanding of their journeys, and are prepared to give them what they want, when they want it. Learn about real-time personalization, and other real-time technologies that empower organizations to do just that.
Watch our on-demand webinar, “Know Thy Customer: Transforming Insight into Effective CX Strategy,” and learn how you can use customer insights to ensure long-term success from your customer experience program.