Delivering stellar customer experiences is more important than ever. The key to achieving this goal in an increasingly competitive marketplace is creating a tailored customer experience and the reason why we believe that personalisation must be top of the agenda.
In the second post of our MuleSoft Connect series (read part one: Key Takeaways here), we dive into MuleSoft’s session about the value of delivering personalised experiences, with a key focus on how data integration can help an organisation connect their data no matter where it resides and on how organisations across different industries can overcome their connectivity challenges, to create a single view of their customers.
What’s driving the need for personalisation?
The answer is simple. Rising customer expectations are driving systematic changes across organisations. In today’s business environment, customers don’t want to be treated like a number; they want to be treated like a person. At its core, it’s all about building trusted customer relationships.
Yet despite this need, many organisations are still failing to deliver. For example:
- 66% of customers feel like they’re being treated like a number. This is more than likely due to organisations using disjointed systems.
- 54% of customers feel like an organisations’ sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information. To enhance the customer experience through personalisation, it’s crucial for organisations to share data across the entire enterprise.
- 62% of customers expect engagement based on their behaviour. In other words, organisations should shift away from a generalised approach to more personalised relationships.
Customers ultimately feel like they share all their information with organisations, but they aren’t using it effectively. Although it can be challenging to implement, not having a single view of a customer hurts an organisation’s bottom line.
Therefore, it’s vital that organisations implement strategies to achieve the ever-elusive single or 360-degree view of its customers. And many organisations are implementing these strategies. In fact, in a recent cross-industry study by MuleSoft, they found that three out of four companies are seeing integration projects for personalisation as their number one priority.
And those that do implement integration strategies are able to not only deliver more personalised customer experiences, but also make their customer service, products and other teams more effective and efficient.
Yet, we have not seen the full extent of personalisation. Personalisation is evolving into hyper-personalisation and individualisation. Instead of providing products and services to customers based on their information and data, the industry is starting to understand what customers want without them needing to tell an organisation. In other words, applying individual context to information.
The data integration solution
The problem with personalisation is that unifying customer data is a challenge. Although most organisations have the necessary customer data, they can’t get to it. As Paty Riquelme, Industry Product Marketing Manager at MuleSoft puts it; “Sometimes trying to find that right source of data feels like an archaeologist digging in the dirt. You just do not know what you are looking for. You don’t know what you’re going to find.”
Ultimately, the goal for any organisation should be to create a single source of truth to continue to build trusted customer relationships. An organisation should connect all its systems to share data across the entire enterprise, whether through legacy systems, cloud platforms, or on-premises systems.
This is where data integration with APIs comes in.
It allows organisations to bring all their customer data, whether it’s their browsing data, demographic data, industry information, and many other forms of data, into one single source of truth. This eliminates the need for custom code integrations, especially where organisations still use many legacy systems. This brings about the ability to engineer more personalised customer experiences.
For example, at Splunk, their team focuses on building reusable APIs that fetches customer data from the right source and feeds it to where it needs to be. They have customer data across a wide range of systems. Putting the data into one source allowed Splunk to deliver a full picture of the customer to the right people, at the right time. As such, they can use customer data in the right way, and this in turn allows them to have a more successful customer journey.
Likewise, for AT&T, personalisation boils down to one simple question. How can AT&T find out more about its customers? When the customer goes to a store, calls in, or speaks to a sales associate, it can provide all the information they need from all the touchpoints where the customer has been. Ultimately, it’s about a complete view of the customer.
But how do they accomplish this? AT&T can achieve this by standardising its canonical data within MuleSoft and making assets shareable through MuleSoft Exchange. This means it can share data across all of its systems from system APIs to process APIs. This also enables AT&T to eliminate the need to develop new integrations as new features or products are added.
At Coforge we absolutely agree with the points raised in the MuleSoft Connect session about personalisation being about customer engagement, customer experience, customer service and bringing those three concepts together. As part of this discussion, they talked about how research shows that customers who are emotionally connected to an organisation spend two times more. That’s why a personalisation strategy should hinge on creating stronger emotional connections with its customers.
Key takeaways
Personalisation is here to stay, and in the coming years, we believe it will evolve to make the customer experience even more personalised.
- Personalisation is growing increasingly important because customer expectations are driving systematic changes across organisations.
- Despite its importance, many organisations are still falling short in their personalisation efforts.
- To give customers what they want, these organisations should use the data it aggregates from customers in the right way.
- This entails ensuring access to the right data and being able to share it across the entire organisation to form a single view of the customer.
- For this, organisations need a proper API strategy and tools like MuleSoft Anypoint Platform to make data integration easier, not only in the present but also in the future as new technologies and platforms become available.
In simple terms, organisations must implement the necessary tools and strategies to make their customer journeys more personalised in an increasingly customer-centric market. It’s not only what customers want, but also what they expect.
Look out for our next post in this series coming soon! If you want to catch-up on our first post of the series (Key takeaways) click here!
To find out more about how you can adopt an API-led approach to integration to enable personalised experiences, give us a call, or email us at Salesforce@coforge.com
Other useful links:
MuleSoft Connect 2021: Key Takeaways
Abcam case study: MuleSoft Anypoint Platform + Anypoint Monitoring
API Strategy - Why does it matter?
