How hyper-personalization can transform your business

The new normal, the era of disruption, the millisecond economy – however you want to label it, the past two years have been a huge catalyst for changing the way companies interact with their end customers. While most of this transformation has so far focused on the evolution of digital touchpoints, the real revolution has taken place behind the scenes. More and more companies are discovering that the difference between success and failure in this digital-first market is rooted in their ability to use data to inform their digital strategies

A streamlined interface and highly functional mobile app are not enough to impress customers in a crowded marketplace where every company has beautiful, utilitarian technology. Because 72% of all customer interactions are now digital, with technology that works has become the table game. Brands that want to stand out from the crowd and create memorable, engaging digital experiences need to go further. That means delivering highly personalized, intelligent digital solutions that can predict what customers want and serve it before they ask.

Tap data to unlock mass personalization

Until recently, it had been impossible to implement this type of mass personalization strategy on a large scale. Companies would try to create a handful of personas and adapt their strategy for each group. Relying on customer satisfaction surveys and net promoter scores, they could create generalized buckets of customer types. But the idea of ​​providing each individual customer with a fully customized digital experience for a customer base of thousands, hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of customers has always been considered impossible.

That changed with advances in AI-powered content extraction and cloud-based data integration. These technologies make it possible to analyze large amounts of unstructured customer data and process it at multiple points in the customer engagement journey. This allows companies to not only provide a more personalized customer experience, but also anticipate future customer behavior.

For example, in the e-commerce sector, which now accounts for approximately 20% of all retail sales worldwide, retailers are finding new ways to use hyper-personalization to engage individual customers by leveraging highly detailed data on everything from how a customer navigates. the website to previous payment histories.

The key to identifying what resonates and delivers this unique user experience is data that can provide a true 360-degree view of the customer. Fortunately, most retailers have more customer data than they know what to do with it. The challenge is to leverage it and trace it to specific behavioral patterns, such as where shoppers are drawn to a page, what they click on, the site flows that lead to transactions, and the flows that lead customers to click away.

This detailed, customer-specific approach is just as important on the payment side of the equation. As more retailers roll out buy now, pay later programs and other new forms of digital payments and loan offerings, the ability to make on-the-spot, real-time credit decisions has become a critical part of the overall customer experience of an online retailer. Relying on stats from credit bureaus is not enough. It requires detailed knowledge of customer behavior and the ability to tailor credit offers accordingly.

Likewise, when the conversation turns to collections, retailers and lenders are discovering that highly personalized, customer-specific interactions help them recover money faster, while preserving customer relationships.

The promise of data-driven customer intelligence

Such examples take place in almost every industry. Automakers collect voice-of-the-vehicle data, including billions of discrete touchpoints between drivers and their connected vehicles, consumer shopping behavior and customer experience data. FinTechs capture merchant-specific data such as customer purchase history, offer acceptance behavior, loyalty membership level, etc. that can help optimize acceptance and identity verification processes. Even live sports and entertainment franchises use things like regional mobility data, weather analytics and media preferences to fine-tune their fan experiences.

While the results of these data-driven analytics exercises often manifest themselves in a digital solution, the real magic that makes it all possible is in the data. By breaking the silos that limited access to that data and opening up the bandwidth needed to process it at scale, data leaders are discovering that it’s possible to truly get to know their customers individually, deliver tailor-made solutions through of hyper-personalization and serving products and services based on what they need today and will want tomorrow.

Rohit Kapoor is the Vice Chairman and CEO at EXL.