Using hyper-personalisation to improve CX

As more and more companies enter the digital era, using digital-first strategies to captivate digitally enabled customers, the competitive standards within the services industry have been elevated dramatically. Now, if a business wishes to stand out from its competitors, it must use the technological resources available to offer highly personalised, unique services that will leave a strong impression on the consumer and guarantee their return. In fact, Mendix’s report on 2022’s seven customer experience trends reveals that hyper-personalisation can contribute to increase of revenue, with 49% of buyers making quicker purchases after experiencing personalised services.

While trying to drive customer loyalty is no new strategy for marketing and sales teams, the difference lies in all the new capabilities brought by digitisation. Shifting the business attitude from reactive to proactive, enterprises now use the hyper-personalisation approach to anticipate the specific needs of their customers and instantly address them. Technology has given organisations the power to create a diverse, inclusive and distinct feeling of their products. But in the ever-changing technological landscape, leaders must use hyper-personalisation intelligently if they want to create a sustainable path for their businesses.

Creating outstanding customer experiences

As the name suggests, hyper-personalisation is the next step in the scale of personalisation. Using a combination of real-time data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and predictive analytics, this technique consists of leveraging all existing data from an audience (or a specific user) to generate insights and give the business a more intimate understanding of their consumers’ needs and goals. The result is that enterprises are able to design solutions before their customers even need them, creating exceptional and seamless customer experiences.

According to research from Deloitte, virtually every business leader (97%) agrees that brands have to harness data, analytics and AI to create hyper-personalised experiences. However, a Gartner study revealed that by 2025 only 50% of enterprises will have pulled together all of their engagement channels to deliver a seamless, contextually relevant experience — despite the fact that the resources needed to orchestrate hyper-personalised experiences are already available today. It’s clear that the enterprises that include hyper-personalisation strategies in their business models will enjoy a distinct advantage over the other 50%.

The three pillars of hyper-personalisation

We can say that hyper-personalisation is the smarter, more context-aware and proactive version of basic personalisation. It has the power to address the specific user individually on a variety of levels by leveraging three key trends.

The first is the growing volume of data available within enterprises. All this data, however, is often siloed within the enterprise, so waving it together into a data fabric is crucial for gaining clearer visibility and driving hyper-personalisation strategies. Cue the second trend, artificial intelligence. With AI, companies can easily sort through the data to pull insights and make informed decisions. In order to streamline this entire operation, business leaders will leverage the third trend: automation. By automating data-gathering, analysis and decision-making, they can save time on processes and focus their energy on strategy, planning actions that will ultimately benefit the user.

Despite the clear advantages of designing hyper-personalised solutions, there are moments when the communication can mirror user in-depth insights that transmit the wrong message. According to a Gartner survey, more than a third of customers will respond to perceived creepiness by stopping their engagement with the brand completely. Additionally, outdated, off-the-mark or irrelevant personalisation can also hurt a business’s reputation. So how can companies find the sweet spot of hyper-personalisation?

There’s a lot of value in using AI solutions for creating successful hyper-personalised relationships. Artificial intelligence has the power to identify sensitive information, spot any issues that customers experience during their user journey through a website or app, and sift through interactions in detail to identify what is important for the user in that particular context without having to ask them. It just makes the entire process less error-prone, offering human teams the necessary insights to drive effective action.

The roadmap to hyper-personalisation

As most strategies that focus on solving user problems, the path to hyper-personalisation starts with asking the right questions. It’s difficult to cut through the noise of all emerging technologies to identify what will actually give your business the right competitive edge, but some questions can help bring a strategic mindset to this challenge.

In the case of finding a hyper-personalisation solution, it’s all about a customer-first approach. Instead of asking what advantages can any other technology bring to your business, ask: what user needs can hyper-personalisation solve? What information will help the user in this particular moment of their journey? What will the user need or want next, based on their previous actions? What challenges might they encounter in their interaction with us, and how can we solve them or at least smooth them out? How can we surprise and delight the users? Asking these questions will shift the focus from the business to the customer, generating solutions that are customer-centric.

The next step is assembling a cross-functional team, bringing all necessary levels of expertise to the conversation. Ideally, this team will include business specialists for domain expertise, IT for building the solution, customer service for understanding the relationship and privacy/security experts to consult on customer data security and legal compliance.

The third and, in my opinion, most fun step is gathering all the pieces of the solution and iterating on it as needed, using event triggers, automations and feedback loops. The cross-functional team still plays a key role in this step, as they must work with different stakeholders to guarantee the functionality of every step of the user journey.

Finally, the organisation is ready to build and launch the solution, testing it with real users, learning from feedback, iterating and repeating the entire process when necessary.

The services and products industry has never been as customer-centric as it is now. With hyper-personalisation, data becomes even more valuable to drive instant response, which is crucial in a digital-driven world to keep customers happy. Hyper-personalisation is an opportunity for businesses to gain market distinction while adding value to their customers’ experience.

Image credit: iStock.com/Natali_Mis