Beyond Personalization, Individualization is Next for Customer Experience

By Kristi Mansfield, Director, CX Strategy and Transformation, Oracle APAC

Kristi Mansfield, Director, CX Strategy and Transformation, Oracle APAC

We are now squarely in the age of customer empowerment. Customers are clearly in charge and as a result, businesses that understand what their customers need and want, are winning. Some of the winners are new entrants, the disrupters, while the others are more traditional organisations that have been fast to understand the changing customer-led landscape.

The empowered customer has extremely high expectations. They want companies that do business with to know them, to communicate with them in their channel of choice and to provide them with a highly personalised experience. And those expectations vary from one generation to another.

Customer Experience is the new competitive battlefield . The huge, almost daunting, challenge for traditional enterprises is to become customer-native, or ‘Customer-In’ as opposed to ‘Customer-out’. Successful organisations understand that personalization is a priority, but they also realize their customer’s expectations are moving faster than they can keep up. Those at the forefront of customer experience are now looking beyond personalization to offer an individualized customer experience.

Individualization is achieved when customer intention is anticipated, under stood and actioned in the moment. This means giving the customer the experience they want and desire to a segment of one.

Individualization is achieved when customer intention is anticipated, understood and actioned in the moment.

This has been talked about for some time, but true individualization occurs at a level of CX maturity that very few organizations have been able to achieve.

Individualization is possible when you bring together multiple data sources, both structured and unstructured data from inside and outside the business. These sources include the CRM platform, usage and operational data, social media, web analytics and customer contact. These sources of data are fed into a single data platform that can be ‘fished’ for customer insights and automatically accessed predictive analytics models and machine learning to deliver customers an individualized experience. This means it’s possible to deliver individuals a total experience - their preferred product, service and price, through their preferred channel in this moment, at the right time.

How to make the move from Personalisation to Individualisation?

Forrester reports, Individualised experiences are part of a broader shift taking place in customer experience design. Experiences are transforming from tools that help customers accomplish tasks into intelligent systems that anticipate needs and adapt to behaviours. To create individualised experiences, CX leaders must:

Improve Customer Journeys with Real Time Data & Insights: To do this, CX leaders need to identify the journeys their customers take, the data that indicates a customer is on a journey, how they are progressing and the content and functionality they need to move closer to their goal.

Ask How Customer Data Can Inform Each Interaction: Don’t start individualisation efforts by trying to come up with uses for available customer data. CX leaders should start by asking how a specific interaction can be individualised for the customer. After articulating how the interaction can be improved, ask what customer data is required to make it happen.

Get Agile: Individualised experiences are an emerging category of experiences. As a result, best practices and design patterns are still being defined. This means that CX leaders interested in creating individualised experiences need to take an agile approach that focuses on rapid prototyping, failing fast, and quick release cycles rather than strung-out processes.