Score a touchdown on the customer experience with personalization

Sports broadcasters often attribute a successful game to a deep-rooted trust between teammates. A quarterback sends out a long pass to a corner of the end zone because he knows the receiver will walk the designated route and hit the precise spot when the ball comes down. Trust breeds trust.

The analogy applies to marketers and CX professionals who use customer data to deliver personalized, omnichannel customer experiences. With complete confidence in the data, it’s much easier to score CX touchdowns. Instead of points on the leaderboard, the payout is a happy customer. Impressed by a “perfect” experience, a customer is also impressed by a brand’s deep understanding of them as a unique individual. A brand seems to know exactly where they are along the journey, delivering ubiquitous accuracy in the cadence of interactions, everywhere and in real time across all touchpoints.

Consider recent McKinsey Study in which 76% of consumers surveyed said they are more likely to buy from a brand that offers a personalized experience. In addition, 71% said they expect personalization, and 76% are frustrated when a brand cannot meet this expectation.

Meeting the expectation of a personalized experience depends on perfecting data and the complete confidence that data is accurate, timely and complete. Without trust, marketers and business users make conservative strategic decisions — akin to playing ball instead of passing — that can deliver incremental profits, but won’t deliver the exciting result of satisfied, loyal customers and the associated revenue gains.

Successful personalization: know everything known

When customers were somewhat tolerant of a mass marketing approach, organizations could get away with less than perfect data quality. The same is not true in today’s experience economy, where personal understanding is a prerequisite for achieving and sustaining results that are valued by both the customer and the company.

But targeting individual consumers has proven operationally complex, especially given the data and process silos embedded in most organizations that prevent brands from developing a unified view of the customer. Faced with these challenges, brands have resorted to organizing marketing campaigns around a channel or process rather than the customer. But without deploying the deepest and most up-to-date contextual understanding of a customer at every touchpoint, it’s impossible to consistently deliver the level of personalization customers expect.

Sophisticated data is more than collecting data from every source and eliminating data silos and latency. To stay on the cadence of an omnichannel customer journey, it is also essential that data quality processes are completed as new data becomes available across the enterprise.

Identity resolution within milliseconds of data ingestion plays a key role in delivering a hyper-personalized customer experience layered with context and meaning, one that resonates with a customer as highly relevant to their individual needs, wants and preferences.

Personalization and the “gold record”

The key to delivering unprecedented relevance to a customer is a single customer view, or gold record, that lets a brand know everything there is to know about a customer. A continuously updated gold record contains data of every type and source. Based on unique identity resolution capabilities, it combines every customer identifier — addresses, emails, devices, social contacts, phone numbers — with complete behavioral, intent, and transactional data to create the context that gives the individual customer view its value.

An important part of the gold record is accurate knowledge of a customer’s preferences for how data is collected, stored and used, and then – to the letter – a customer’s consents to guide all interactions with the brand. Extending accurate consent management extends the trust a brand has in the data to the trust between the brand and its customers.

Context is crucial and goes beyond understanding every single interaction in a customer’s journey. It is created through an analytically derived understanding of the relationship between the various interactions and decision points, which in turn creates testable predictions about future interactions and customer decisions. Thus, a contextually deep customer relationship is key to optimizing any engagement throughout the customer’s lifecycle, ensuring that a brand is always – always – in sync with the customer.

A continuous cycle of excellence

Just as a successful QB/wide receiver tandem comes from a successful partnership, customers with a highly relevant, omnichannel customer experience powered by effective personalization reward a brand by providing even more data about themselves, especially if the customer knows that the data will be used to enhance the experience. To keep their end of the bargain, brands must be completely transparent about how data is collected and used and respect all customer consents and preferences to the letter. In a Harris Poll Survey 201954% of consumers said they are willing to share more personal data with companies in exchange for a more personalized experience, with 74% saying it is either “very important” or “essential” for a brand to be transparent about how its data is handled. the consumer is used.

When a marketer or business user fully trusts that customer data is accurate, current, complete and authorized, they are encouraged to score the touchdowns of the customer experience by delivering highly relevant, accurate commands that reflect a deep understanding of the customer. Watch out when they connect. Customers appreciate the effort and dedication, and they will reward it in kind.

Dale Renner is founder and CEO of RedPoint Global, Inc.