Personalizing the Customer Experience

It can be difficult to keep customers coming back to a brand. In most industries, the competition for consumer attention and loyalty is cutthroat and harsh. How do businesses find ways to stay above all the noise and continue to grow their customer base?

Here’s one thing to consider: how can a brand best personalize its customers’ experiences?

With the rise in artificial intelligence and predictive analysis in marketing, it seems that more and more of the customer experience is becoming automated. While this is beneficial from a productive and time cost standpoint, is it really benefiting the customer?

Customers Want Personal Attention

Think of the last positive interaction you had at a business. Chances are, that experience doesn’t include a robot or a kiosk. It likely involves a real human being who made a real difference in your experience.

So how do brands insert a bit more humanity into their marketing efforts while still keeping abreast of all of the technological advances and new, convenient shortcuts?

Personalizing the customer experience by the use of profiles and recommendations is one way to achieve this “extra touch”.

How Can A Brand Be More Personal?

First, determine whether or not the product or service offered by a company is a viable candidate for user profiles. Take the example of a company that offers a resale platform for gently used baby clothes and other supplies for early parenting.

Users must first sign up to use the service. This is an area where the company has an opportunity to create a layer of personalization. Ask each user to answer a few questions about their child and their preferences. Are they breastfeeding? What colors do they prefer? Does the child have any special needs? What would make their life, as a parent or caretaker, easier?

From there, the company can take that user information and create more customized recommendations for sellers to follow or products to add to their shopping list. Taking it a step further, the company can keep track of their baby’s age, offering up age-specific clothing and toy recommendations as the child grows.

Virtual Assistants

There has been an uptick in the use of virtual assistant type services such as chatbots. This comes in handy for offering assistance to online customers in a more tangible way than simply directing them to a generic help article.

While not every chat service is manned by a human, chatbots have been designed to mimic the personality of a human, which can add a bit more of a personal touch to the service.

It’s true that not every facet of customer service can or needs to be managed by a real, live human. But this does not mean that a business should automate everything beyond recognition. There are still ways to inject some life into each customer interaction, even with the use of artificial intelligence and technology.

Customer service makes a big difference when it comes to marketing and sales conversions. It’s tempting to hand everything over to technological advances, but there should still be a human touch in most facets of customer interactions. Sometimes, it’s perfectly fine to remain “old-fashioned”.

Discover more from Ronn Torossian

Ronn Torossian’s Professional Profile on Muck Rack
GuideStar Profile for Ronn Torossian Foundation
Ronn Torossian’s Articles on Entrepreneur
Ronn Torossian’s Blog Posts on Times of Israel
Ronn Torossian on SoundCloud