Customer Experience
No doubt you’ve heard a ton of buzz surrounding “personalisation”. Trouble is, surface level personalisation, like adding name tokens to emails, won’t get you very far with today’s customers. You need true personalisation that evokes what’s best about old-fashioned, in-person retail to succeed. For an example of the ideal business-customer relationship, let’s look no further than the local grocer.
They are able to make knowledgeable recommendations and provide relevant, up-to-date information about what they have in stock and helpful hints. The relationship is personal.
Digital businesses have historically struggled to make this personal connection, and for a long time, it has frustrated growth across a number of industries: for groceries or fashion retail, for example, where the tactile experience is an important component of making a purchase. It has traditionally presented a major hurdle for, say, a perfume company seeking to expand beyond bricks-and-mortar.
To clear this hurdle and tap into the wider potential of digital commerce, businesses have adopted a number of solutions that fall under the wide umbrella of personalisation.
The term gets thrown around a lot but personalisation is fundamentally the process of tailoring an experience based on information collected from the customer - as in the grocer example.
There are two parts to personalisation. The first is learning about a customer's needs and preferences and, the second is using that information to tailor the product, service or merely the interaction with the business for the consumer.
The field has advanced a fair distance from where it started.
Whereas once a ‘personalised’ approach to e-commerce may have been as simple as including a first name in the address line of a newsletter, advances in processing data have created the possibility of a deeper, more involved relationship with consumers: effective product recommendations based on online and offline purchase history; websites that mould themselves to repeat consumer shopping journeys to offer more relevant information.
Changes in trends and advances in the field, especially around how data is stored and analysed, have given rise to the more refined: ‘hyper personalisation': using this advanced data processing to get ahead of the competition.
It is fairly intuitive to understand that a more personalised experience leads to happier shoppers — who will then be more likely to make purchases and return in future.
But there are other advantages that may immediately go unnoticed. Customer service is generally improved through personalised recommendations: directly addressing them by name and acknowledging their history with the company, allowing incidences of support to become more involved and more useful, leaving customers feeling more supported and cared for.
A smart recommendations system allows for less wasted sales time: a company like Boozt, for example, uses site cookies to recall whether a shopper goes to the women’s or the men’s section on the site, and what they shop for. The landing page is then made more relevant upon repeat visits and streamlines the purchasing journey for the customer. Research shows companies that implement personalisation in their relationship with customers see greater conversions and more time spent on site: a dynamic landing page, for example, increased transactions by nearly a third.
The greatest winner out of all this is, of course, the customer. The desire for personalisation has allowed for a more granular, tailored service, giving customers the potential to make more informed, satisfying and — not to be redundant — more personalised experiences when shopping.
Though they might not know it by name, many customers know to expect a degree of it. Nearly three-quarters prefer more personalised messaging from brands. More than half of customers (56%) are more likely to shop at a retailer in-store or online that has previously recognised them by name, according to data from Accenture.
They also much prefer it when the company keeps a record of purchases (65%) and makes recommendations based on that information (58%). The majority of consumers now expect a degree of personalisation when shopping as part of the service.
Personalisation has revolutionised e-commerce in another important way. It allows online businesses to recreate some of the intimacy that brick-and-mortar has by having store clerks and real conversation and allow businesses traditionally slow to embrace e-commerce - wholesale businesses and beauty, for example - to reap the rewards as well. It also accelerated the growth of industries that, having maintained a presence for a decade or more, like groceries, are now able to expand far more aggressively.
The intimacy of your local grocery shop may be some way off yet, but personalisation has brought it a great deal closer than it was, even a few years ago. The process of tailoring purchases, online and at scale, has allowed businesses traditionally kept out of the space to take advantage of online commerce. Consumers are quickly getting used to the good treatment - and even those who haven’t taken notice before, are doing so now.
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