Customer given, data driven

In this competitive climate, companies that cannot delight customers with intelligent experiences will suffer, warns Mona Champaneri, managing director for experience and product at Kin + Carta Americas. Next-day delivery and intelligent recommendations are ‘table stakes’ in the modern customer experience, she says, and buyers increasingly expect more personalisation and tailored experiences. 

With customers switching between brands and channels with ease, companies might wonder what happened to the notion of customer loyalty. But they need to put themselves in their customers’ shoes, says Champaneri. “Consumers know what they want. It’s up to companies to leverage data from purchase behaviours and product attributes to make intelligent experiences and offers.”

“Consumers know they have greater choice now and will switch unless brands can meet their expectations and anticipate their needs in those moments that make the difference between a one-time user and a brand advocate.” 

These ‘moments that matter’ are the critical touchpoints where a customer’s loyalty can be secured by signalling that you understand them and by making their life easier. Perfect these and customers will become advocates. “You build trust by saying ‘we know you’ and then adding value,” Champaneri explains. Building consumer loyalty through intelligent experiences can also help counteract competitive pressure to cut prices, making a clear case for investing in innovation.

But doing so requires a deeper understanding of your customers than simple demographic profiling. “You can only do this when you go beyond demographic data, such as gender, age or location,” says Champaneri. “You need to delve deeper, to learn their behaviour so you can anticipate their needs and meet them without having to be asked.”

These experiences all present an opportunity to win customer loyalty by anticipating their needs in the moments that matter and meeting them effortlessly.

Beyond loyalty lies the willingness of a customer to advocate for your brand. Achieving this, says Mark Collin, managing director of experience and product at Kin + Carta Europe, requires a detailed understanding of customers’ intent and their progression on the journey towards becoming a brand advocate.

 This requires that the most important customer interactions are recorded in the same place. “You need to start by building a customer data model,” says Collin, who was previously the global customer experience technology director at luxury online retailer YOOX Net-a-Porter Group.

“A lot of the time, customer attributes are lost because they’re distributed across different touchpoints, such as website activity, chatbot transcripts or in-store interactions.”

“You need to bring these together so you can look at the customer’s signals to work out where they are now and determine moments in which you can add value.”

Once this unified customer data model is in place, companies can begin to work on creating intelligent experiences. According to Champaneri, this starts with mapping out customer journeys to identify the roadblocks that cause people to quit before taking further action and the moments that lead to greater Engagement. 

This will reveal which message, notification or call to action would be the most impactful at each part of the customer journey, whether it is a timely prompt with some helpful information or a recommendation for a complementary product or service. It will also show where in the journey customers need help making the next move.

With constant improvement through experimentation at scale, businesses will be able to identify the messages and offers that have the most success in pushing customers through to the next stage of repeat business and then loyalty. 

This process is, of course, empowered by technology. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, for example, can provide customers with context- relevant recommendations, while human experience management systems allow businesses to experiment with moments that matter and measure their impact. 

But creating brand advocates takes more than technology. In many cases, creating a single view of the customer – and being able to act on it – requires businesses to tear down organisational siloes. In particular, says Collin, the “coalescing between marketing and digital teams” allows fragmented customer views to be joined up so that critical touchpoints can be identified, intelligent experiences delivered, and customers converted to advocates.

• Step it up. Customers’ expectations for online experiences have advanced during the pandemic and standard features will no longer make an impression. The onus is on brands to provide intelligent experiences that anticipate an individual’s needs in real-time, offering them the help they need, when they need it. 
  
  
• Identify the moments that matter. Customer experiences are made up of hundreds of brief moments, each of which has the potential to earn a customer’s loyalty. Anticipating and perfecting these moments signals that you understand and care about customers’ needs. 
  
  
• Connect the dots. These moments cannot be identified, let alone transformed, if customer interactions are scattered across systems and organisational siloes. Unifying customer data into a single view can reveal to marketing, customer experience and service design teams where helpful interactions can be added to the customer journey.

This article originally appeared in Thread, Edition 3. Thread is Kin + Carta’s quarterly magazine that cuts through the complexity of digital transformation. Making sustainable change real, achievable and attainable.