Connected and personalised, how Organisations are moving from Segmentation to individualise Customer Experience?

Kristi Mansfield, Director CX Strategy & Transformation, Oracle

Kristi Mansfield, Director CX Strategy & Transformation, Oracle

Digital and data has heralded a new era of ultra-personalisation and given brands the ability to understand what each of their customers need and want. Data is a critical asset for organisations to move beyond customer segmentation to offering individualised experience.

Yet, it’s not easy for more traditional businesses. In fact, it’s really hard. There’s too much data. It sits in silos across the business. And often there’s confusion about which part of the business should take the next action with the customer. Put into the mix data governance and security requirements and many brands are putting off until tomorrow what they need to be doing today.

The competition, disruptive data-born businesses, can more easily put the customer at the centre. After all, the disruptors were once start-ups searching for new business models or ways of doing things that improved the customer experience. As a result, after all the learning and iterations, data-born businesses are simply better at understanding what customers need and how data can be used to build engagement and loyalty through personalised experiences. They also know through trial and error what not to do.

With this in mind, Oracle teamed up with Fifth Quadrant and spoke with more than 280 CX decision makers to understand how they are investing in technology to improve the Customer Experience. 97 percent of organisations who are CX Leaders say they are delivering a more predictive and personalised customer experience. This is quite a shift from even 18 months ago. Why is this so important? We all know customer expectations have accelerated exponentially and this is not slowing down. To compete for the heart and minds of the customer, businesses need to engage meaningfully with people in the channels where they are, not where they want them to be.

Moving from segmenting customers to treating them as individuals is possible by aggregating multiple data sources, being responsive to the previous behaviour of customers and taking action in the moment at the right time.

Businesses on the journey to personalisation should get the foundations right, and then from there, work out the use cases that mean the most to customers. Smarter CX technologies like machine learning based chatbots or Adaptive Intelligent applications can help businesses use data in the most effective way to engage and even create emotional connections with customers.

Customer Experience – how mature are organisations when it comes to customer experience?

The research conducted by Oracle shows the market segments into three groups: CX Leaders (22 percent), CX Followers (52 percent) and CX Laggards (26 percent). Those businesses that are more advanced on the CX Maturity scale are also more able to achieve above average revenue (62 percent of Leaders vs 26 percent of Laggards).

The research findings uncover how CX leaders have created emotional connections with their customers through personalisation and are unlocking the value of connected devices to create better experiences.

The Journey to Personalisation

CX leaders are out performing their counterparts on delivering a more predictive and personalised customer experience by combining data from multiple sources to create individual profiles for each customer and take immediate action on what customers want.

Businesses on the journey to personalisation should get the foundations right, and then from there, work out the use cases that mean the most to customers.

Conversely, CX laggards are struggling to centralise various data sources and hence are less able to deliver seamless, personalised experiences.

CX Leaders place a higher level of importance on customer feedback streams, demonstrating they are more actively and immediately embedding feedback, not just behavioural data when creating individual “360 degree” customer profiles.

CX Leaders businesses are most likely to acknowledge the difficulty of compiling customer feedback streams to build individual 360 degree customer profiles, whereas Laggards struggle to get grip with the basics of building profiles around CRM and customer transaction data.

Technology investment is driving disruption across many aspects of organisations. While customer engagement is a key focus, technology is recognised as an enabler of cultural change, skillsets, sales, marketing and innovation. CX Leaders differentiate in how they use technology to increase agility and overcome competitive threats and leverage this advantage to drive acquisition. In contrast, Laggards are more focused on using technology to optimise self-service to improve the experience and retain customers.

The Journey to the Connected and Mobile Customer

With an estimated 20 million connected devices in use by 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is an opportunity that companies can’t afford to ignore.

Over a third (36 percent) of CX Leaders acknowledge the potential of connected devices and artificial intelligence to enable new customer experiences. They are also advanced in their trial and implementation of these emerging technologies (34 percent already trialled or implemented IoT) and hence are likely to recognise the benefits.

Finally, CX Leaders place a much higher level of importance on device optimisation in the success of their CX strategy.

Creating Emotional Connections with Customers

The investment that organisations are making in CX technology is expected to deliver a number of operational benefits such as a more seamless and integrated experience and speeding up product delivery. However, it is the less tangible outcomes where CX Leaders differentiate. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of leaders are expecting their technology to help create an emotional connection with their customers, compared with only 1 percent of Laggards.

Getting started is important. Here are the 5 Practical Personalisation Must Dos for organisations wanted to be closer and more personal with customers in their marketing acquisition, retention and digital channels.

1 - Marketing automation basics

• Move away from batch and blast.

• Conduct nurturing campaigns but automate them.

2 - Increase your understanding of your audience

• Gather digital footprint of an individual.

• Make content more relevant through dynamic content and customer segmentation.

3 - Connect Customer Experience across connect Martech and Adtech

• There is spend on customer data and transactions, yet it’s not connected to advertising.

• Connect Martech and Adtech.

4 - Single customer view is critical – connect data from within the business and take action on it in the moment

• Use the known data across the organisation to ‘know the customer’ and make communications relevant.

• Leaders are orchestrating the entire customer journey to make it relevant including past purchase information with past browsing and past card abandonment.

5 - for B2B organisations

• Use insights from marketing for sales funnel management.

• Ensure a seamless process, which is fully embedded in the organisation.

• Build for change management and process definition is a key to success.

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