An easy way of winning customer heart in loyalty program or in retail is not about dominating in one space or another. It’s about understanding the entire customer lifecycle and continually finding new ways to serve customers wherever they go, buy products and services.
For the past 12 years, personalisation has largely taken place in fashion and lifestyle industry, food and restaurant industry, Home appliance industry as well as in e-commerce based business. But today, it’s everywhere. Personalisation is all about understanding what the most relevant items and brands are for the right consumer, at the right price, at the right time, but also in the right channel. Personalisation is also a popular trend that enhances the customer experience. It starts with knowing the customer or maybe a better way to say it is remembering the customer.
The four Rs of personalised services can improve your organization’s ability to recognise, remember, reach and relevance.
Recognise: Know customers and prospects profile.
Remember: Recall customer’s history especially how they act Reach: Deliver the right promotion to your loyal customers based on actions, preferences, and interest
Relevance: Deliver personalised products within the contexts of the digital experience, based on who customers are, where they are located and time of the year.
It’s becoming more critical to take the widest view possible of how consumers engage with your brands. If we don’t think about what the customer is doing at every point in the path to purchase, we’re missing out on key opportunities.
There are five key points to keep in mind as we push forward.
Begin with analytics: it’s no longer a nice-to-have. It has to start with a solid foundation of analytics. This is no longer a competitive advantage; instead, it’s quickly becoming table stakes. To survive in the next 5-7 years, every company will need an agile analytics system that allows it to understand consumer behavior at a very granular and dynamic level.
New skills development to survive: A customer-focused, personalized strategy requires new skills, new processes and new ways of thinking. The time to invest in new skills, through training and hiring, is now. The field will only get more reasonable, and the pace of change will only quicken.
Don’t try to be perfect: It can be tempting to dive in and do everything immediately, be all things to all consumers, transform the business from top to bottom, but that’s often a path to failure. While it’s critical to have a bold long-term vision, most successful initiatives are based on a focused and phased plan with achievable short, mid and long-term milestones. Make a plan, stick to it, see what happens, adjust as needed and try again.
Accept this is the new normal: Be honest about existing capabilities and seek help. Not only do you need to invest in building capabilities, you also need to think hard about ability to take on a business transformation while still running the business
Personalization has been on the horizon for the past 15 years. The moment of truth has arrived, and the pace is daunting. But the promise and potential for growth through personalization is worth the challenge. It’s time to jump in. One more important aspect of personalization is to do it in Real-time that helps you listen to customers, identify customer interests and preferences as they unfold, and understand and map customer behavior. Organizations will consider the individual characteristics and needs of their customers and prospects and then advise and assist them in various ways throughout the entire buying cycle. This enables them to create persuasive messages to facilitate the customer journey.
For personalization, it is all about understanding what the most relevant items and brands are for the right consumer, at the right price, at the right time, but also in the right channel. If you can do this perfectly the end result will be sweeter than what we expect in real life.
The writer is customer loyalty and CRM professional
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Editor : M. Shamsur Rahman
Published by the Editor on behalf of Independent Publications Limited at Media Printers, 446/H, Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1215.
Editorial, News & Commercial Offices : Beximco Media Complex, 149-150 Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1208, Bangladesh. GPO Box No. 934, Dhaka-1000.
Editor : M. Shamsur Rahman
Published by the Editor on behalf of Independent Publications Limited at Media Printers, 446/H, Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1215.
Editorial, News & Commercial Offices : Beximco Media Complex, 149-150 Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1208, Bangladesh. GPO Box No. 934, Dhaka-1000.