Marketers have been talking about personalizing the customer experience for years; however segmentation has been practiced instead, because it was too complex to provide a one-to-one, personalized experience. With the advent of more sophisticated and yet easier to use search & relevance technology in combination with content management platforms, today organizations can leverage existing knowledge about customers, combined with the information that can be inferred from their journey to your website to finally provide the experience customers are looking for: One in which they feel known, and which is consistent across any channel. Knowledge managers can step up and help their partners in marketing leverage the rich information under their stewardship.
Here are three steps knowledge managers can help marketers with to truly personalize the customer experience for greater engagement (it goes without saying that a responsive website and search design are necessary for the mobile customer, these steps will work across all channels with that caveat):
1. Combine digital clues about the customer in near real time with information from within your company (for example in the CRM, marketing automation system, customer communities and more) and all available content/assets, catalogues, etc., via a unified index. This doesn’t involve moving data, simply indexing (crawling) it from where it resides normally. The index should be always-on, so it is always up-to-the-minute to enable a dynamic personalized experience.
2. Make the customer and his/her actions the query with search & relevance technology. The Amazon experience provides an example of technology’s potential to enable interactive, real-time customer experiences in which the customer feels known personally—and enjoys the interaction. That predictive element of what the customer may like or want to buy, based on their behavior and attributes, is now available to every marketing organization. The customer becomes the query, and so his or her digital actions and clues drive invisible search queries conducted in the background. The customer simply experiences the content, the offer and the product most likely to convert them. Search & relevance technology also enables the same, seamless, personalized experience via any channel, because it connects the customer attributes and experience data with company data, so every front-line employee and every interaction point become opportunities for conversion.
3. Employ experience analytics to continually hone the customer experience. Customer interactions with data reveal significant intelligence about their preferences and needs, and about the relevance of the offers, content and assets being offered. Analytics show how customers engage with data and information to allow marketers to continually hone offers, content and other assets to create the highest possible conversion rates.
Make the most of the rich information your organization already has about your customers and their interactions with your organization. It’s part of the great asset that is your collective enterprise knowledge and knowledge managers can contribute to the bottom line by helping their marketing colleagues utilize predictive intelligence to more personally engage customers.