Humanizing the Customer Experience with Technology

Technology enhances business. It allows companies to operate faster, more efficiently, encourages collaboration, and in return creates growth. However, human interaction is still key in creating a positive customer experience. Taking into account of the last year, with companies forced to rapidly digitize, many business leaders have grappled with the challenge of humanizing customer experience with the new technologies that have been implemented.

Yet, in order to create a customer experience that streamlines the buying process while customizing to fit the consumer’s needs, companies must focus on an effective personalization plan that encourages customer loyalty, customer growth, and an increase in revenue. Personalization and customization are key in targeting a customer base and to make sure a business is serving their specific needs.

According to a Gartner survey 88 percent of consumers report not receiving “tailored help”, and to make matters worse brands are at risk of losing 38 percent of customers because of poor marketing personalization efforts.

Businesses often get consumed by return on investment metrics and pressure to show results, but before the focus on this, business leaders must hone in on serving their customers to seamlessly guide them through a personalized journey. Like the saying, “if you build it, they will come”, taking the time to personalize the customer experience will in return create increased customer loyalty, increase in driving sales, and positive customer experience within a business.

How to Humanize Customer Experience

Create a Hyper-personalized Customer Journey Plan

Companies tend to forget the minutiae included in one single customer journey. When generating a plan to enhance personalization and efficiency, business leaders must take into account aspects such as how interactive and easy to use the website is, how products or services are outlined, the sales process, invoicing process, communication and support.

Customers are looking for companies that provide personalized experiences that are relevant to them specifically, rather than repetitive processes that make the journey seem robotic.

A way to make hyper-personalization naturally occur is by using technology tools that remember documentation when needed the most. For example, if a sales person is on a call with a customer and can see in their CRM tool that the customer had a support ticket two weeks ago on the same issue, they’ll have better context and be able to provide a more customized experience.

Another way to hyper-personalize and humanize customer experience is through technology that provides suggestions based on buying patterns. For example, if a business sells clothing and the user has viewed a specific style of clothes on the site, the technology can generate a suggestion such as, “Since you viewed this, we think you may also like this”.

By using tools that are completely customized to the consumer’s preferences, the business achieves a hyper-personalized and streamlined customer experience. While it may seem like a lot of work to take inventory of these individual aspects, having a plan in place with technology to assist will help businesses create customer experiences that impress and keep customers for the long haul.

Use Smart Technology to Enhance Personalization

Using technology that connects with your customers on multiple channels such as telephone, email, live chat, and social media ensures strong communication so that customers are left with all their questions and needs met. Additionally, utilizing workflow automation will help streamline the lead nurturing process, which is important when wanting to make things as easy as possible for the customer.

AI is also a way to increase efficiency and help enhance personalization. AI can be used in the customer journey to generate advanced lead and deal predictions to help businesses identify specific leads and where they are in their customer journey. It can also help with finding important information from the CRM, sending task reminders, alerts, and suggestions for the best times to contact leads based on your past interactions so that you can provide a preferred experience for your customer.

Also, businesses can utilize AI for sentiment analysis to prioritize which emails should be addressed first. For example, if a consumer sends an email about a negative experience with the business, AI will identify the displeased feedback and flag the email so that it’s addressed first. There are so many technology options out there that help with streamlining and automation, by discovering tools that also help with customization will be essential.

Analyze to Nurture New Clients and Current Ones

While metrics and data points are vital in showing ROI, using analytics to detect buying trends and other data trends around the customer will enable your business to gain new clients and current ones. Using analytic tools that track key performance indicators, including current trends and future predictions will be a critical aspect of the data strategy.

Yet, before diving into the technology, business leaders must ask themselves what key information about the customer they’d like to understand and how this data will help to create a more personalized experience for the customer.

For example, analytics can be used to find out what patterns are critical for customer satisfaction. If the analytics tool detects that consumers that purchased a specific service keep submitting support tickets for the same problem, having that data will help the business quickly find a solution to avoid customer churn.

Along with these questions, business leaders must recognize how they are collecting data to uphold ethical data privacy principles and strong security measures. With the surge of customer data being tracked and collected for monetary gain, companies must consider privacy concern and scrupulously examine the technology vendor they decide to use.

Consumers are rightfully concerned about how their data will be used, and it’s important to ensure that customer data stays private. At the same time, customers are more willing to provide personal information if their customer experience is hyper-personalized. With this in mind, businesses must aim at finding a harmonious balance with creating a personalized experience without jeopardizing consumer data.

Saying technology can make business more human sounds like an oxymoron, but when used the right way technology can enrich the customer experience to fit the unique needs of an individual customer. Because most companies have digitized in the last year, competition for enhancing the online customer experience has risen drastically. This means having a streamlined customer journey is not enough to set a business apart.

However, the core lies within personalizing the customer journey so that consumers can have their unique needs met and exceeded. When it comes to humanizing customer experience, people want to feel special and taken care of; creating a personalized experience with technology that streamlines the buying process for your customers can achieve this, and in the end will be the crux of what sets businesses apart.

This article, "Humanizing the Customer Experience with Technology" was first published on Small Business Trends