Knowing how to start your journey to providing a superior customer experience (CX) can be difficult. While it would be nice to have unlimited resources, most organizations don’t, so you need to understand where to focus resources to achieve the most return. Here are five key steps that our enterprise clients typically follow when making real-time personalization part of their customer engagement strategy.
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Define Your CX Objectives
Think about what your customers actually want and need, otherwise decisions become too internally driven or limited by infrastructure. Always consider the experience from the customer’s perspective and determine what you’re trying to achieve. Are you looking for a cohesive experience that works across all channels and platforms? Do you want to provide a personalized brand experience at the individual level? Or are you aiming for the ultimate goal - leveraging all available data to customize every touchpoint in-the-moment and ensure you deliver the best interaction, perfectly timed, every time?
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Understand Your Data Requirements
Legacy data systems often rely on batch data to identify patterns and predict future behavior trends. Being able to interact at the right moment of engagement, in a way that’s non-intrusive and delivers value, requires real-time data feeds and low-latency connectivity (i.e. “in the blink of an eye”) with your decisioning and analytics systems. This will then enable you to deliver the best offers to your customers in-the-moment and across any digital touch point.
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Document Technical Systems
Data capture is only one aspect of building the CX. It’s important to fully understand the legacy systems in play as well as the decisioning and marketing technology (MarTech) systems that will be responsible for the execution of targeted efforts. Most enterprises have a myriad of solutions, products, and vendors. What they lack is a single view of what they’re using, on which digital assets, and why. When mapping out technology and MarTech stacks, don’t just focus on the specifications - include what’s being enabled (how data is collected, shared, used, and stored between systems and platforms), and what value these systems add. This step removes potential duplication, irons out inefficiencies, and flags any data, process, and organizational gaps.
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Define And Address Gaps
Once a clearly defined CX framework is in place, you can begin architecting and developing solutions to capture the required data. At this stage, you also need to look at your technical systems (outlined in point 3) to make sure you’re filling the data gaps. Access to detailed digital data is normally the missing ingredient. While it may exist, it’s often siloed, fragmented, and hard to integrate. It may be poor quality, ‘dirty’, or prone to anomalies which make personalized experiences ineffective. Close gaps with a CX data solution that includes built-in tools to help unify, clean, and optimize your data. In addition, not all the information you need will exist within your business. With connected platforms and APIs, third-party data can also be used to build market, trend-led, and behavioral context. The better the data, the better the experience.
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Outline a Transformation Plan
Having defined the art of the possible and what’s required to get there, create a roadmap that assembles the missing pieces of the puzzle along with detailed timelines. Include all the resources you need to succeed – including people, data, and technology. Be sure to factor in progressive evolution and service development to accommodate future growth and market changes. Where possible, look to simplify the integration path, shrink timeframes, and go to market faster with solutions that don’t require tons of manual configuration, coding, or setup to launch. This will improve your time-to-value.
