In today’s competitive digital world, personalizing customer experience (CX) has become essential to increase customer engagement, drive conversations, provide better customer service, and foster loyalty and customer retention. Most customer engagements today are ‘Digital-First,’ and this has spiked the demand for personalization at scale. According to Gartner, personalization is “a process that creates a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties designed to enhance the experience of the recipient.” In simpler words, personalization is the act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual.
Provisioning for a personalized CX means developing products, services, and interactions to meet your customer’s unique and individual requirements. Right from greeting your customers by their first name to designing offers that meet their likes and interests, personalization has become the new brand differentiator.
Business Benefits of Personalizing Customer Experience
Consumers are more likely to purchase from businesses that know them by their names and prior purchase history. Personalization drives performance and positive customer outcomes. Some of the immediate business impact areas of personalization are:
- Higher engagement level (click-through rates and open rates)
- Higher per-order value
- Higher brand loyalty
- Higher Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Higher Marketing ROI
How does Salesforce drive Personalization?
Salesforce coupled with Einstein (AI) helps in personalizing CX across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Retail & Commerce touchpoints. A few relevant examples where Salesforce has been at the forefront of personalizing customer digital experience are as follows:
Sales:
- Combination of Physical & Digital experiences: In-store sales agents use AI-enabled next-best actions to provide accurate product recommendations based on customers’ online activity and preferences.
- Personalized Website Experience: Salesforce Interaction Studio and Einstein Personalization Recipes can enable websites to show a specific home page image or blog content based on the customer’s past online activity history and past purchases. Customers are shown relevant offers based on past purchase history.
Service:
- Omnichannel Personalization can enable effective customer service, by collating the data across various communication channels and assisting the service agents in providing comprehensive and proactive customer service.
- Email communications can be personalized, enabling the Knowledge Article recommendations for solutions to customer challenges.
Marketing:
- Personalized Campaigns: Trends are shifting from mass email marketing to 1:1 personalized marketing. Salesforce Einstein can understand each customer’s interest so that no two customers receive the same campaign messaging.
- Personalized Emails at Open time: Email messages can be personalized with recommendations based on a customer’s latest actions, product purchases, or browsing history, from the moment they open the email. Additionally, customer segments from Interaction Studio can be leveraged within Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to place customers into journeys based on their actions.
- Distributed Marketing: Personalized messages can be sent to individual customers by leveraging the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builders.
Retail & Commerce:
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a platform that combines backend data (inventory, pricing, etc.) and front-end data (customer information, loyalty programs, etc.) from various departments, delivering a personalized online shopping experience. Different departments have a single, unified view of customer interactions, orders, and inventory. The experience can be extended to personalized loyalty, reward & discount programs.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud can also tailor product recommendations based on a customer’s shopping behavior. Predictive sorting and provisioning of highly relevant & related products result in simplifying shopper’s decisions thereby leading to higher conversions.
Customer & Partner Portals:
- Einstein Web Recommendation engine enables the most relevant Products & Services ranking and Predictive Content display. Services can also be extended for Personalized Trends & Market Insights.
- Personalized Search Results that consider each person’s preferences and intent will show products that are relevant to the individual, apart from the search term.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help you personalize your customer digital engagement, email us at Salesforce@coforge.com.
Other useful links:
https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/personalization-definition/