Brands that hyper-personalize will win the next decade

When people reach out to customer service, they’re seeking more than a solution to their immediate problem. They want empathy and understanding. What they’re often met with is a queue.

Nothing frustrates people more than calling customer support and getting stuck in a loop. According to a study by Vonage, 61% of consumers feel interactive voice response (IVR) actively poisons the customer experience — and only 13% found it more helpful than calling a human directly.

Like many solutions, IVR falls short in personalizing the customer experience (CX). A customer calls in for a specific task like paying a bill and instead cycles through a one-size-fits-all menu that in reality fits nobody. Experiences like this clearly indicate to customers a brand doesn’t care about them as a person, only as a case number.

Personalizing the experience is a start, but this isn’t the end. Customers will expect a one-on-one interaction the moment they enter your customer service channel. To make that happen, AI and analytics are creating scalable opportunities to show your customers how much they matter to you. Brands taking advantage of that opportunity can create unrivaled CX that sets them far ahead of their competition.

The personalization buzzword

Personalization has become a popular buzzword in recent years, but true personalization is much harder to attain than many companies realize. That was the case in 2016 when companies first hopped on the chat bandwagon. The potential for a new communication method was there, but the one-size-fits-all approach companies took in developing their interaction platforms created more problems for customers than it solved.

What they missed is how to create digital experiences in which customers converse with automation that adapts based on user context. Information like their product or service history and preferences should be pulled up the moment a customer engages. Data on disposition, tone, sentiment and stated intent should influence how the customer moves through the system and reaches their desired end goal. That navigation should be effortless and go well beyond text-based communications, including immersive UX options like maps, surveys, carousel selections and more — all in a spirit of lowering the cognitive weight for the customer.

Service leaders within companies are beginning to understand this: Recent Gartner research indicated 68% of service leaders see technology’s importance increasing in the near future. And the investment quickly starts paying for itself. When implemented well, AI and automation can reduce customer service costs by 90%. Companies that embrace the future by effectively investing in back-end API integrations and allowing CX solutions to seamlessly pull user data will create the kinds of personalized experiences that earn distinction amid all the noise today around new digital products.

To do this, companies must ensure these integrations are driven by CX initiatives instead of IT priorities. A major failure point in the early chat wave was that companies directed IT teams to design and implement customer experiences. IT obsessed over the technological components like natural language understanding (NLU) and missed the larger purpose of tying CX back to solving business problems like customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. Starting with the business goals and divesting power to the CX team will help keep the personalized experience the focal point of AI and automation deployments.

What consumers want from hyper-personalization

As competition gets fiercer, business goals like customer retention shift from nice-to-have to a prerequisite for growth. That makes CX a differentiating factor akin to pricing. Customers want an interaction that feels targeted and unique, and legacy-minded brands behind in prioritizing this will go extinct.

For example, in the insurance space, Lemonade turned heads with its creative approaches to policyholder engagement using AI-driven messaging for sign-ups and claims management. But other, larger insurers have realized the value proposition AI-powered CX can deliver and are applying their economies of scale toward fully reimagined digital experiences. They’ve recognized that hyper-personalized solutions are part of the critical path toward maintaining brand relevance, and that the AI and automation behind these experiences can no longer be dismissed as science projects or relegated to sandboxes as technical playthings. The successful design of personalized experiences will directly correlate with the market share insurance behemoths maintain in the years ahead.

Smart companies will take personalization to the one-on-one level and make every experience unique, especially as four out of five (81%) of consumers are willing to share basic personal information for personalization and 79% of consumers agree that the more personalization tactics a brand uses, the more loyal they are to that brand. But this hyper-personalization isn’t about adding a customer name field when they open a messaging interface. It’s about empowering the customer to drive every engagement, not the other way around.

This presents new challenges for call centers. Imagine trying to manage a thousand incoming calls when customers can put your agents on hold for a few hours and return when they’re ready. Synchronous communication methods like phone calls or live chat aren’t built to handle the increased attention hyper-personalization requires.

Instead, asynchronous communication allows consumers to choose their own adventure and start and stop when convenient. They choose how they engage — through text, pictures, emojis — and automation handles an “always-on” interaction tailored to the individual.

Operationalize AI for hyper-personalized experiences

AI can create powerful personalization solutions, but this won’t make call centers obsolete tomorrow; it will be a journey. In the interim, brands need to operationalize AI and automation to handle the bulk of the work but with the ability to transition seamlessly to live agents and include maximum user context to carry personalization throughout the engagement.

Fully executed NLU helps operationalize a hyper-personalized customer journey, decoding the language customers use to convey their intent, or why they’re contacting a support team. Semantic search capabilities let AI look beyond the black-and-white intent and assemble an understanding of a customer’s overall meaning to better serve them. Paired with powerful analytics, systems can parse out meaning through sentiment, tone and even emoji to adapt and respond appropriately to a customer.

For example, a frustrated customer is typically looking for a company to solve a problem as swiftly as possible. On the other hand, a happy customer might be willing to spend more time in a conversation and could be interested in upsell offers. Effectively trained NLU needs to be able to make that distinction and adjust on the fly. With this flexibility, you don’t have to sacrifice an empathetic brand to deliver an automated experience.

Paired with thorough testing, this approach can empower AI to automatically handle most customer support requests in a predictable, low-risk fashion. Agents are then free to focus on more complex support requests that require a human touch. Thanks to automated integrations, agents can access user context like past support experiences alongside AI-generated analytical data. The agent can get right to work assisting the customer and do so with the confidence born from deep customer knowledge.

All told, you end up with asynchronous, “always-on” communication channels to solve a customer’s needs at their pace while making them feel like they’re the only one who matters. Plus, when your agents need to revert to synchronous communication, you have a speedier, more accurate method to resolve issues. This level of detail in CX helps you exceed customer expectations while creating a buzz-worthy experience.

Soon, this sophistication will become table stakes, and traditional one-size-fits-all approaches to customer service like IVRs and FAQ web pages will go from inconvenient to unacceptable. Amid trends like 5G, telemedicine and so many other digital developments that grant consumers a new level of immediacy, a canyon is emerging between brands that “get it” when it comes to CX, and brands that don’t.

Hyper-personalization will create a new type of allure for brands. One which not only builds magnetic customer loyalty, but draws new investor attention and top talent. When it works, it produces a visual representation of how a company can crack the code of CX and create an intimate connection with the customer — a connection that inspires trust. It’s no small feat, and the rewards are enormous; the brands that master both the art and the science behind hyper-personalization will win the decade.