Personalising the customer experience

Making your brand stand out in the customer's mind is key to driving revenues and carving out a strong position, argues Simon Robinson, Marketing Director EMEA of web expert Vignette.

Making your product, service or brand stand out above those of your competitors is becoming harder in industries such as banking, utilities and telecommunications.

The services these companies provide - from mortgages to broadband subscriptions - are often so similar to each other as to appear indistinguishable to the customer.

Providers therefore need to focus on differentiating themselves in a new way to encourage customer loyalty.

At the same time, consumers are becoming more demanding, and expecting a higher quality of service.

So, it is logical that organisations turn to developing the quality of the customer experience as a way of making themselves stand out.

This means nurturing customers' preferred channels of communication, such as phone calls to the contact centre or discussions online, as well as ensuring all requirements for information and services are recognised and met.

Businesses are already thinking about these challenges.

A recent survey by The Economist (May 2007) showed that 90 per cent of executives think engaged customers are important to their business, with many believing that engaging customers would result in improved loyalty along with increased revenue and profits.

However, 80 per cent also said that they are not doing a good enough job of engaging customers at the moment, and it's costing them sales.

These sales do not just have to come from new customers.

It is recognised that it is easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to a new one, so a key aim of customer engagement should be retaining and nurturing the existing customer base, as well as expanding it.

So we can see that there is a potential goldmine of opportunity to be accessed by improving the customer experience.

The task now is to identify the best way of delivering the best results for the business, and superior service for the customer.

For a customer to be engaged, they need to feel valued on an individual basis.

The first step towards this for the business is to recognise the ways in which the customer would prefer to communicate.

With the emergence of an increasing number of online channels and devices - mobile, email and RSS for example - the ability to access services through any number of combination of these as and when it is convenient, is something that the customer is coming to expect.

This flexibility of channel is just one of three key aspects of enriching the customer's online experience, however.

We have seen the internet grow, from being predominantly a platform for advertising, to being used for e-commerce.

The next stage is for companies to use it as a personal channel of communication with its customers.

They must therefore look to ensuring that the online experience is personalised, with intelligent delivery of content based on an understanding of individual user behaviour.

Thirdly, it is important that their experience is community-centric to make the user feel like an active member of a group, using blogs, tagging and online communities to generate discussion and feedback.

This can be a daunting challenge, and should not be embarked upon lightly.

Businesses need to think about what would be the best methods for them of meeting these needs in line with corporate priorities.

An effective approach is to develop a customer experience management strategy, which will evolve over time as technology develops and both users and businesses become more savvy and familiar with the options available.

This evolution can be broken down into three phases: recognition, engagement and anticipation.

There are already a number of websites around exhibiting the first, Recoginition phase, such as Amazon, which greets a returning user by name.

The next phase, Engagement, is key.

It builds on recognition of users to make the experience richer and is embodied by Web 2.0 features like tagging, blogs and wikis.

Like communities or social networks, these are effective ways of generating feedback from customers.

This makes a company's communication with them more of a two-way process than has traditionally been possible online.

The Sun Online is engaging its customers and converting casual readers into loyal contributors with a number of these features, like blogging and communities.

We then move on to the third and final stage of customer experience management - Anticipation.

This involves analysing a user's previous behaviour and interactions online to establish their likes and habits and therefore pre-empt requests in the future.

This is moving into the next stage of the next-generation web - Web 3.0 - and will enable organisations to target users with advertising and services that are directly relevant to their personal interests, for example.

So once the customer is engaged, what next? Unfortunately it's not just a case of sitting back and watching the revenues shoot up.

Like any relationship, it requires ongoing input from both sides.

Engaged online customers will provide a wealth of feedback and suggestions on products, services and the company itself, and the company needs to be prepared to respond - to get involved in the debate.

It is essential that the valuable information generated by customers is captured effectively, and fed back into the organisation, where it can be used to inform future decisions on new service development and company strategy.

Without this final step to leverage the content generated by its customers, any action taken to engage them will be wasted.

It is vital therefore, that any company looking to develop a customer experience management strategy builds this final capture and response stage into its plans from the very beginning.

Web analytics can be a useful part of this strategy, providing a more informed view of customer trends which can be fed into its understanding of the individual to further increase the relevance of information targeting them.

By combining a highly engaging online experience with effective responses to feedback, organisations can build a deeply personal customer experience that will drive loyalty and have a real impact on the bottom line.

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