Brands have become increasingly keen on how they can provide the best customer experience to their clients. It’s because personalized customer experiences are now the key to making customers satisfied and happy.
It has been observed that modern customers now place high value on how brands emotionally connect to them. Businesses that always respond well to customers and those who make them feel good are often the ones who enjoy high brand loyalty and brand love.
Salesforce’s VP of Industry Strategy and Insights for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Rob Garf and Accenture Interactive’s Managing Director David Brown clue businesses in on how they can provide personalized customer experiences to their clients.
Discerning Why Customers Want Personalized Services
Customers want that feeling of recognition and value as an individual. They do not like to be treated as if they are mere buyers who bring in profits for a company.
The typical personalization strategy prevalent in businesses is predicting the possible products a person will buy based on his former purchases. But personalization is now shifting to knowing the reason why a person buys a certain product. Customers feel that you are genuinely helping them through your products if you actively seek their needs and offer them choices that target those needs.
Focusing on the “Moments That Matter”
According to Accenture Research, there are four moments that highly impact a customer’s satisfaction and happiness about a certain brand:
- Bills payment
- Resolution of service or technical queries
- Resolution of billing problems
- Service/device change or upgrade
Businesses must focus not just on the check-out process, but also on these four “Moments That Matter” to ensure a personalized experience for their customers.
Creating Seamless Shopping Experiences
Brands must make sure that they offer consistent and continuous processes to make customer’s shopping as seamless as possible. Some ideas to improve online shopping systems include:
- A simple yet efficient online catalogue
- Chat/video chat support for any product or billing queries
- Adding product recommendations using AI tools and customer data
These basic practices will help address “Moments That Matter” and improve customer experience in the long run.
Building and Fostering Digital Trust
A brand that loses digital trust from their customers won’t be able to extract valuable information that can help them in product development and customer service. Hence, gaining customer trust is crucial.
Businesses must inform their customers on how they handle data they glean from online transactions and frequent activities. They should disclose to each of their customers how they protect online information, what a customer gets from giving their personal data, and why they should put their trust on the brand’s protection systems.
In a Nutshell
Salesforce and Accenture teamed up to determine how personalized customer experiences can be achieved by modern-day businesses. They advise companies to:
- Discover the reasons behind a customer’s brand choice
- Focus on four key customer moments
- Create a seamless shopping atmosphere
- Protect customer data and be transparent about it
These tips, coupled with AI and other smart technologies, will greatly help brands foster lasting personalized relationships with their customers.