3 Steps to Create a Personalized Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience (CX) goes beyond customer service. The customer experience is the impressions your customers have about your brand throughout their customer journey.

It encompasses all customer touchpoints and their impact on brand perception.

For instance, did the product or service exceed their expectations? Were they delighted by the customer service rep who helped solve an issue for them? Was the social media post they stumbled upon informative and helpful?

The customer experience is essential for any business because customers are willing to pay more for a superior and personalized customer experience, as explored in our last blog post.

Here are 3 steps to create a personalized customer experience:

1. Know your customer persona

A customer persona is a fictional character representing your target market’s ideal customer. Defining your persona is essential in understanding your customers’ behaviours and purchasing patterns.

Businesses could have one, two or even three personas, and it is crucial to delve deep into their expectations, pain points and motivations for using your product or service.

Once you have a clear idea of your persona, you can develop a customer experience that resonates with their specific needs and values rather than with a broad audience.

The overarching goal is to serve them better and to create a customer experience designed specifically for them.

2. Determine the experience that you would like your customers to have

If defining your brand seems frivolous, try thinking of it as expressing your customer experience.

According to Salesforce’s State of the Customer Report, 88% of customers consider the experience provided by a company to be as important as its products and services.

Taking the time to define the desired customer experience clearly can help you effectively convey your passion through your communications and ensure that every team member is aligned.

In addition, defining the experience helps your employees understand how their actions can positively impact the global customer experience.

Below is an exercise that you can follow to help define your desired customer experience:

1. Define your guiding principles: How do you want your customers to feel after doing business with you? Name three to five of these desired principles, for example, ease of doing business, great communication, respect for timelines, transparency and flexibility of offer.
2. Spot the friction points in your customer journey that may negatively impact those guiding principles.
3. Create a simple action plan addressing the guiding principles and friction points. For instance, what actions can we take to ensure we meet those principles?

3. Personalize, personalize, personalize

A one-size-fits-all experience is increasingly not well received in today’s world. According to Accenture, 81% of consumers expect brands to have a deep understanding of their preferences and to approach them at the right time.

Personalization adapts the customer experience to what we know about the customer and uses that information to smooth the customer journey and offer a tailored experience.

Have you ever received an email adapted to your historical purchasing patterns?

Have you ever noticed personalized content on a website based on your profile preferences?

A positive response to either of these questions means that you have benefitted from the advantages of personalization.

Here are some additional ways to provide a personalized customer experience:

1. Offer personalized product demonstrations;
2. Personalize offers by collecting customer data using surveys or questionnaires. For example, beauty brands increasingly use this method to recommend products completely aligned with the customer’s needs and preferences;
3. Give customers options. For instance, offer multiple ways to contact you at their convenience such as live chat, phone or AI assistance.

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