Dazzling Customers: The 7 Principles of Personalisation

You know what customers want from their care channels, don’t you? You’ve read enough articles, enough white papers and sat through enough webinars to know that customers are demanding ever more personalisation. They want it here and they want it now. You’ve heard the cry loud and clear and your company has made strategic investments and stitched all sorts of technologies and solutions together to help you get closer to your customers with varying degrees of success.

However, customers approach their care needs in different ways. Some will engage in all channels –app, WhatsApp, website, call centre – and expect continuity in experience across them all. Some will have a favoured care channel and will only engage through that narrow path. Some customers will download the app and not engage with it, while others may not even get as far as downloading it, preferring to speak directly to someone for all queries. In 2020, the average smartphone user had 40 apps on their phone, but 89% of users’ time is spent on just 18 of those apps. It may seem like an obvious point, but the key to transforming your customers’ digital support relationship with you is through improving engagement with your digital channels and building trust.

Consumer trust and digital care are not synonymous, so a transformation is required. The traditional approach to personalisation simply isn’t enough to change customer perception of automated care and build trust. Through the course of our research, we developed three unique dimensions of hyperpersonalisation, which can be dynamically applied at every point of the digital customer experience.

• Context & Environment
  Does your digital support consider real-time diagnostics, the environment and the circumstances the user finds themselves in?
• Psychological & Behavioural
  Does it take the user on a one-size-fits-all linear path to resolve issues, regardless of their technical savviness or digital enthusiasm?
• History & Relationship
  Is decisioning logic the same for every customer, regardless of the frequency with which they have asked the same question? Are those customers with high churn propensity being delivered the same digital experience as those with a low CLV? 

Is the decisioning logic the same for every customer, regardless of the frequency with which they have asked the same question?

Serving individual customers and their personalised needs

Customer demand for next-generation personalisation is with us and it isn’t going away any time soon, which is positive news for Providers; the closer we can get to our customers, the better we can service them. McKinsey recently published a report  detailing how personalisation in customer care will look between now and 2025. They observed that “On digital channels, companies must meet a new standard: “the care of one,” an ethos that focuses all decision making on serving individual customers and their personalized needs.”

“On digital channels, companies must meet a new standard:
“the care of one”

Following McKinsey’s advice is easier for some industries than others, so what does that mean for ISPs and CSPs? Some data points are readily available to you, such as your customers’ diagnostic environment and their current package. There are other data points that can be observed by the way in which customers use your services and some that can be inferred through their care interactions. The challenge is ensuring that all relevant data points that contribute to the three critical dimensions of hyperpersonalisation as mentioned above are applied to both the decisioning and content of your customers’ experience. Done well, this will enable providers to reduce customer churn, upsell and cross-sell additional products and services, and better anticipate customer needs.

As McKinsey state in their report, “To achieve hyperpersonalisation and the advantages it confers, customer care organisations have much ground to cover in the next five years. When the only certainty is change, and the only speed is faster, companies that stand still will be left behind.”

Introducing the 7 Principles in the 3 Dimensions

To achieve the personalisation of digital customer care users are demanding, companies should approach it through the lens of the 7 Principles of Personalisation. These principles, when combined – backed by research – act as guidelines to optimise customer experiences.

Query History

Knowing what issues the customer has faced – and which issues are recurring – is a powerful tool for hyperpersonalisation. If the customer has already asked why their network is slow before, chances are that the solutions offered previously didn’t work and offering the same solution again will only antagonise them. By offering a different resolution, providers demonstrate that they are listening and taking notice of the issues faced by the customer, rather than sending the frustrated customer along the same resolution path each time. It may be the case that when a customer with low digital enthusiasm and high CLV, has asked the same query for the 5th time in 14 days, they are automatically triaged to a call centre agent.

Diagnostics

Gathering network and device diagnostic data and applying that insight to real-time decisioning logic enables accurate guided care. Proactively running diagnostics to optimise a service on behalf of your customers and engaging them in a digitally automated conversation whilst doing so gets ahead of any potential spikes in call volumes whilst providing customer service that will create trust and loyalty.

Digital Enthusiasm

Gauging digital enthusiasm can be tricky to do accurately, but the rewards are quite compelling. By measuring the willingness of an individual to engage with digital channels – and adjusting the interaction to take that into account – you can reduce churn, increase engagement and provide an opportunity to upsell additional products. For example, an individual with a high level of enthusiasm for digital channels would be more receptive to engaging in self-care, taking ownership of their products and upgrades, and making informed decisions about cross-sells. On the other hand, if digital self-care were pushed to an individual with a low level of digital enthusiasm, it may be the trigger for them to close their account and find a new supplier. By measuring and acting on customer preference, you can tailor the experience in the most appropriate way.

Query Prompting

As well as gathering and using data to best digitally respond to customer queries, it can also be used to pre-empt incoming queries. Has there been a global outage of a popular OTT service, which would affect a customer who has previously asked about that same service? Get ahead of the deluge of phone calls by proactively offering support assistance via a Query Prompt, to explain the cause and reassure customers that they aren’t alone.

Proactively demonstrating that the provider is ahead of the game has the ability to respond before the customer raises an issue builds trust.

Customer Circumstance

Each customer’s circumstance at each moment in time plays a significant role in what issues they’re seeing, how they view those issues and how they engage with digital care channels. By understanding whether the customer works from home or in an office, what OTT services they or their family use, at what times the load is greatest on their household network and what causes it, providers can more efficiently identify root causes of any issues faced and anticipate issues before they’re raised by the customer.

Aptitude

Customers’ technical aptitude correlates with their propensity to engage with automated digital channels. If they have a low level of aptitude, they may shy away from engaging in a fully digital exchange, preferring to pick up a phone or walk into a physical retail store.

By observing aptitude through each digital interaction – for instance, through the language used to describe problems, the speed with which they undertake tasks or how frequently they ask similar questions – and scoring accordingly, providers can adjust the content and pathways they use to resolve issues, improve the customer experience and cross-sell products to make their customers’ lives easier.

Customer 360

Applying different data points such as CLV, next best action or package and plan to the decisioning pathway for all of your customers’ experiences is easy to do and yet instantly creates a feeling of individualised care. A customer who demonstrates a high churn propensity would be delivered a different type of digital care to a new customer who may be eligible for an upgrade.

All of this data combined must then be used to create decisioning pathways and content that in turn are dynamically applied to
all customer experiences.

Weaving it all into a dazzling customer experience

This is all well and good, but how do you orchestrate these principles into a digital customer experience?

Providers need to invest resources in a platform capable of integrating with other components in the organisation’s ecosystem that can weave together all the data that is already available to them whilst also observing key customer context and behaviours during care interactions. All of this data combined must then be used to create decisioning pathways and content that are dynamically applied to all customer experiences. This will achieve truly Hyperpersonalised customer experiences, emulating the feeling of a human conversation in an automated transaction. The result? Improving the moment of ‘solve’, increasing engagement in digital channels, identifying and reducing churn, and improving digital cross-sales.

Book a tour to discover how Sweepr’s 7 Principles of Personalisation help CSPs hyperpersonalise digital customer care experiences.