Using Automation to Provide a Personalized Customer Experience
MHC Team 
April 30th, 2020
When you’ve applied personalization on a wide company scale, you can start experiencing an increase in revenue growth between 5 and 15%.
There are very few business strategies that can provide that range of growth. Yet, when we truly look at personalization, we understand that the whole concept starts (and ends) with the customer experience.
If your customers feel understood, appreciated, and valued, then no wonder they keep coming back to your services.
This is why figuring out how to create an automated personalized customer experience can truly transform your business.
Keep on reading for a deep dive into the meaning of CX personalization. We’ll break down the two main avenues where you can implement automation.
What is Personalization in Customer Experience?
Personalization is also known as one-to-one marketing. As you may infer from these two names, personalization is where your brand turns away from scatter-gun methods and instead, focus on giving what your target audience wants.
In terms of customer experience, personalization is designing or tailoring your services and communications to meet every single customer’s individual preferences and requirements.
This means really digging into market research and making use of any data you gather on your prospects and customers. After all, you can’t really perform personalization if you aren’t able to put yourself in their shoes.
For instance, we’re all becoming rather familiar with personalized marketing greetings. Whenever you open an email that starts with your first name, that’s CX personalization in action.
Furthermore, you’re running a business in our current day and age of empowered customers. Empowered customers tend to leave businesses that don’t have high personalization levels behind.
As it were, 33% of customers abandoned a business relationship because they deemed it lacking in personalization efforts. It’s no surprise that personalization is one of the core trends in communication in 2022.
This sheds light on not only the importance of personalization for business growth but also the dangers of having none (or too little) of it in your business strategies.
Where Does Automation Come in?
Trying to personalize every single correspondence to your customers on an individual basis would be out of the realm of possibilities if you’re doing so manually.
After all, there are not enough hours in the day for you to deal with thousands of customers’ information daily. This is where the automation of customer experience personalization comes in.
In the simplest of terms, customer experience automation (CXA) is the technology that aids businesses in managing their processes and channels automatically.
For example, email marketing and customer service have been great beneficiaries of automation. Workflows can be automated by using pre-set templates, and customer service requests can be automatically sorted and sent to the appropriate employees to handle.
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1. The Automation of Personalized Customer Service
Customer service is now expected to be as fast as a New York minute. Customer service agents must always be on 24/7, and ready to solve any problems that might pop up for customers. CS plays a major role in a personalized customer experience.
Considering the impossibility of providing that level of care and attention to your customers on a constant basis, automation can carry the burden of the consistency issue.
Having an automated customer support system, like ticketing or chatbots, can take the brunt of providing instantaneous responses to your customers that are personalized in nature. The automation will give a bit of breathing room for your human customer service agents to tackle complex problems when they arise.
Find out the customer’s view on personalized CX in our Customer Service Statistics Infographic
2. Faster Support Handling to the Right Channels
In addition to decreasing the number of emails flooding your customer service agents’ inboxes, having an automated customer service system can ensure that the right types of problems go to their designated spots.
They can be sent in the right direction as quickly as possible, which helps tremendously cut down on wasted time.
Therefore, instead of having a ticket just waiting for the right human eyes look, you can have automation set up.
This system can apply different processes, all at the same time.
A variety of triggers can identify high-value accounts, specific requests based on keywords, as well as the frequency of requests that come in from a certain region or talk about the same problem.
Regardless, all these requests can be assigned, then escalated accordingly. All of which help improve your resolution rates and speed.
3. Email Marketing Personalization and Automation
Our second category of personalizing the customer experience is email marketing and its automation.
Now, we’re not saying you should take the time and effort to write and send emails to every prospect and customer on your email list. Instead, you should take advantage of customer experience automation.
For instance, you can have several emails ready. Then, when a person enters your email list, these emails are sent out to them depending on where they are in the customer lifecycle. This can be based on their marked preferences and certain actions they take that’ll trigger the right emails at the right times.
In addition, don’t forget to use things like personalization tokens. These allow you to use coding that’ll do things like automatically render the recipient’s full name in the email body so it’s much more personal.
AUTOMATED WELCOME MESSAGES
There is nothing that can create an immediate boost in your content engagement than triggered welcome emails.
The main goal behind a welcome email is a personalized acknowledgment of your new customer. It’s a great method of providing a unique and personalized customer experience, as well as setting up a good first impression.
In addition, it helps with setting expectations on the nature and tone of their customer experience as they continue to interact with your brand.
PERSONALIZED OFFERS
With an automated process in place for your marketing personalization efforts, you can have personalized offers sent to your customers based on their purchase history and their preferences.
The same level of CX personalization can be applied with tailor-made content based on your customers’ rates of time spent on specific pieces of content.
However, all the CX personalization efforts you’d like to implement can’t be created in the first place without a solid list segmentation.
For example, you can set up triggers in your automation software that would identify some key points in the customer profile and interaction.
Some of the common customer segmentation can be done using demographical data, as well as industry information and buyer personas.
Find out more about Automated E-mail Campaigns
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4. Personalize your website
Personalizing the customer experience starts with your website.
Now, you might think you can only have one home page that everyone ends up on. But, you can create different ones depending on how they’ve discovered and interacted with your brand.
For example, new prospects may be served a banner that offers them 10% off for being a new customer. If you have that as the same homepage for previous customers, that may alienate them, as they may feel like they’re not being rewarded for their loyalty. This can cause them to switch to your competitors.
What you can do is serve prior customers with a banner that offers a loyalty discount. That way, you can show them that you appreciate their patronage. This small gesture can go a long way with retention.
Find out more about Personalized Communications
5. Creative surveys and offers
Customers often feel like they aren’t heard by brands. And when that happens, they can become irritated and look elsewhere for a business that values their opinions.
What you can do to show that you care about your clients is to create surveys. Offer a small incentive, such as 5% off their next purchase.
What’s important is that you do something with this treasure trove of data. You’re hearing exactly what your clients want directly from them. This data should be the backbone of your customer experience personalization strategy. Give your customers what they want!
When they see you’ve implemented what they’ve asked for, this can significantly improve their experience with your brand and keep them coming back for more.
6. Offer them personalized recommendations
The customer journey is a continuous one, even if they’ve already gone through the whole cycle from awareness to decision (purchase). Many people believe a customer journey is for the entire life of a customer, which means you need to try keeping their attention on you instead of a competitor.
One great way to continually delight your clients is to offer them personalized recommendations. This can be anything from something informative (such as an ebook or whitepaper that can give them more information about their industry) to another product that’ll complement what they already have.
Personalize their customer experience by using the customer data you have.
For instance, when you can see that the person browsing is a C-level executive of an airline, you can recommend your travel whitepapers and maybe some relevant articles from trusted and notable sources.
Or when you see that a customer has bought your IT solution, you can recommend supplemental services that go along great with it.
When clients can see that you care about addressing their pain points past the purchase phase, they’ll remain loyal. Considering customer retention costs 5 times less than acquisition, this is well worth the effort.
Find out more about Customer Journey Mapping
7. Predict Future Actions
Remember how we said customers are very savvy nowadays? They don’t like to be marketed to, especially if what they see is irrelevant. They also like to take control of their customer journeys, not to be led.
Because of this, you need to change your marketing approach. Instead of being in the consumers’ faces about your services and products, you need to ensure you’re there for them when they’re ready.
To achieve this level of personalization in the customer experience, you need to be able to predict both prospects’ and customers’ future actions. This can be done through machine learning or AI, as this technology considers the actions of similar customers and maps out the most likely actions they’ll take in the future.
When you show your clients you know what they want and when they need it, you’ll display personalization on an impressive level that’ll make it hard for them to turn to your competitors.
Personalizing the Customer Experience Enhances Your Client Reach
Understanding where personalization and automation come together in terms of customer experience is the first segway into boosting your business growth rates.
Moreover, our deep dive into the intricacies of customer experience personalization can help immensely in the planning phase of a CX project.
Alter your marketing campaigns to better serve your clients. Once you can connect with them at a more meaningful level, then you can start on creating longer-lasting relationships with them.
Whether you’re thinking of rebooting your email marketing strategy or your customer service protocols, make sure you keep both personalization and automation in mind.
Do you need help with your approach to customer experience? Then get in touch with us now.
