Expertise
Personalizing the customer experience in the digital world: a trend or a necessity ?
6 minutes
Personalizing the customer experience has become the key factor for companies to succeed and stand out from the crowd.
As technology advances, consumers expect a personal relationship with their favorite brands.
To satisfy this growing customer demand, companies need to embrace new trends in customer experience personalization, and understand how they can use them to develop stronger relationships with their audiences.
In this article, we’ll take a look at this trend and see how it can help improve customer relations by offering a unique customer experience perfectly tailored to consumers’ needs.
What do shoppers expect in terms of experience?
Consumers are increasingly demanding and expect a personalized experience when interacting with a brand. According to a recent study by Fevad, News Innovation du LAB Fevad n°77 of March 2023:
• 85% of consumers expect a personalized experience, whereas only 10% of companies think they offer this type of experience.
• 80% of customers say that the experience provided by the company is as important as its products and services.
Most e-commerce companies compete on price and product range, but it’s the consumer experience that will make the difference, because 80% of consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase with brands that offer personalized experiences (Source: Forbes).
Another major point is that 83% of consumers, who are often reluctant to share their personal data without having a real vision of how it will be used, are ready to pass on their personal data to a brand in order to access a personalized experience. With one sine qua non condition: that it be used wisely (Source: Accenture). And by sharing this data, they create value, as 40% of shoppers spend more than expected when the customer experience is personalized (Source: Business Impact of Personalization in Retail).
In other words, investing in technologies to deliver a personalized experience has become an absolute necessity for retailers and manufacturers alike, as long as consumer demand is clear: they want to be treated as unique individuals, and no longer as anonymous customers, a large, fictitious audience. To understand their expectations in terms of customer experience, it’s important to focus on their buying journeys and their interactions with brands.
And are these expectations really that new?
Over the years, with the arrival of new technologies, the advent of digital and the rise of e-commerce, consumer expectations have changed.
Mass marketing is well and truly a thing of the past, replaced by the personalization of the customer experience, and the figures mentioned above only serve to support our point of view! These new uses are changing paradigms, needs, desires and expectations too.
In parallel with these changes, and because the dogma of the multiplication of channels available to customers has recently taken hold, with, in particular, the promise of omnichannelity, the challenge is not to multiply points of contact, but to engage the customer in a single, seamless conversation, whatever the channels used.
“64% of customers are ready to switch brands if the experience they are offered is not optimal.”
Stéphanie Lafontaine, Director of Accenture Interactive in France (Accenture Living Business study)
Customers are increasingly demanding when it comes to digital experiences, and expect a perfect, frictionless experience. To deliver a truly bespoke experience, it’s becoming essential to personalize the customer experience, through the customization of products and content.
To meet these strong desires, advertisers can use solutions such as real-time personalization, based on available browsing information for example, via predictive personalization using collected first-party data, or personalization based on behavioral data.
A wide range, diverse propositions with a single goal: individualizing and personalizing the customer experience to maximize conversion.
And how do you personalize the customer experience in the digital world?
A positive customer experience increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. This leads to repeat sales, positive comments and reviews, and increased customer lifetime value.
Retailers and e-tailers therefore need to offer a fluid, intuitive, fast and personalized experience according to the needs and behaviors of the user/customer. Personalizing the customer experience is essential to remain competitive in today’s marketplace.
To do this, implement targeted product recommendations at critical touch points throughout the buyer’s journey, such as the home page, product pages and shopping cart…
A tailor-made approach to maximize your business?
Retailers have clearly understood the power of personalizing the customer experience. Without divulging the next advances in this field, we all know that to improve conversion rates and build customer loyalty, the intelligent personalization of a website, adapted to the uses of each shopper, each purchasing habit… is going to become indispensable. Especially when you consider that 95% of all purchases will be made online by 2040, according to Kinsta. That’s tomorrow, or almost!
Personalizing the customer experience is at the heart of all marketing strategies, not only for French retailers, but also for big bets like Amazon and other giants such as Netflix and even Starbucks. Personalizing the customer experience is a major challenge to emerge tomorrow, a current trend that will be the gauge of successful conversion to purchase? The next few months will tell, but there’s no doubt that if all the giants and not-so-giants are getting on board, it’s because the trend is becoming a major news story. Competition is fierce, the players are numerous, and each one’s value proposition will have to be adapted and personalized to attract the digital shopper today and even more so tomorrow.
Going back to the original question: is the personalization of the customer experience in digital a trend or a necessity? It’s an absolute necessity to emerge and remain competitive in your business.
Personalizing the customer experience is a key factor in economic performance. To successfully deploy these personalization tools, however, it is essential to adopt a strategic approach that addresses two issues:
• How to optimize both the message and the channel of expression?
• How do you organize your teams and tools to meet these new challenges?
Now it’s up to the brand to demonstrate loyalty to its customers. How? By constantly and rapidly adapting to users’ demands, and offering them experiences they’ll love.
Choose Lucky cart to implement a personalized customer experience strategy
At Lucky cart, we work with first-party data gathered from our retail partners, to provide shoppers with an individualized response. We’re not talking about enhanced targeting, but about each individual, each shopper, each digital shopper arriving on his or her favorite drive-through platform.
Thanks to our business expertise, our in-house tools and our knowledge of retail and its inner workings, we can analyze the data we collect and understand it down to the individual.
Once this in-depth analysis has been carried out, we set up digital activations with retailers and manufacturers. We use the media inventories at our disposal to propose the right offer, to the right shopper, at the right time to encourage conversion. Isn’t this just the beginning of the answer to your challenge of personalizing the customer experience?
Lucky Cart’s mantra for the months and years to come is to be at the heart of the story, with our own technologies and business experts to take things even further.
What about you?
