Personalization is only as good as a brand’s ability to recognize its customers. Get it wrong, and you risk sending irrelevant offers, creating friction in service interactions, and ultimately driving customers away. According to a Capco survey, 72% of customers expect brands to recognize them across all touchpoints, and rate personalization as “highly important.” Yet many brands still struggle to achieve this. Why? Because true recognition requires more than just a name; it demands a complete, unified view of the customer.
Digging deeper into the capabilities required for a brand to recognize a customer, there are three components that constitute “personalization.” Those are recognition, relevance and right time.
In a series of blogs, we will break down these three pillars of personalization, detailing how each contributes to a superior customer experience (CX) and why the combination of all three is essential in the era of dynamic customer journeys consisting of a multitude of online and offline touchpoints.
Recognition: Do You Know Who I Am?
Recognition. There’s a famous scene in the movie “Goodfellas” where the protagonist, trying to impress his date, skirts the enormous line outside the Copacabana nightclub by escorting her through the kitchen to the restaurant. From bouncers to busboys, everyone greets him personally, and the maître d’ orders that a table be set up for the couple directly in front of the stage. OK, so he’s not a model citizen, but the scene perfectly captures the perks that come from being recognized and the exemplary customer experience that goes with it. He and his date are made to feel important.
Duplicating that type of experience in a digital setting is the goal for brands intent on competing on CX. Customers made to feel important become repeat customers. And it’s often the little things that customers notice. A push notification reminding us of items left in a shopping cart. An email from our health plan to inform us about a new benefit we’ve become eligible for. Product recommendations that perfectly match our physical and digital journey with a brand – what we’ve purchased, what we’ve expressed interest in, and what we may not have even considered but seems right up our alley.
These and other personalized touches provide value to a customer in that they demonstrate a brand’s interest in knowing the customer beyond a transactional basis, and using that knowledge to deepen the relationship. It is all based on recognition, which itself is achieved through data.
Recognition 1, 2, 3
Recognizing an individual customer, up to and including recognizing an individual customer within the context of a household or a business, begins with collecting and connecting all available data. Customers leave digital signals every time they interact directly with a brand or elsewhere in the digital world; a social media trail, a visit to a third-party website, a chatbot encounter, a call center interaction, a browsing session, etc. Some engagements may even be anonymous, such as with an unrecognized device.
Distinguishing one customer from another begins by collecting every signal and beginning to build a unified customer profile, also known as a Golden Record. A unified profile is the key to recognition because it contains all customer identifiers – devices, nicknames, addresses, email addresses, etc. The combination of a full contact graph with all data aggregations and an extensive list of attributes becomes a digital stand-in for a customer, a household, business or other entity that a company is trying to understand. To trust that a Golden Record is an accurate representation of a customer, data quality processes must be completed as data is being ingested and updates to the Golden Record made accordingly.
A Golden Record is never static but rather mirrors the typical changes – big and small – that represent the typical customer, and the customer’s journey with a brand. That is, customers move, change jobs, break apart relationships and form new ones. An anonymous customer becomes known. Interests evolve. True recognition extends beyond distinguishing one customer from another to also understand a customer in the context of those changes. A contextual understanding refers to, say, a car rental agency knowing that a customer is renting a vehicle for personal travel or for business, or even reserving the car on behalf of a colleague. The same holds true for a hotel or travel company; is the person making the booking doing so on their behalf, or for an executive at their company?
A Golden Record that is continuously updated as new signals emerge is the window to recognizing a customer not just as a name or identity, but as someone with specific interests, preferences, and a unique cadence. This deep understanding is often referred to as a Customer 360, which implies a brand has complete knowledge of a customer.
Recognition Barriers
Too often, brands still operate with less than a full customer understanding. Call it a “Customer 90.” Perhaps they recognize a customer only through association with an email address, and communicate in that one channel. Or they know what device is linked to a credit card and a POS system. A brand knows what the customer buys, but is uncertain about the customer’s return history and has no view into product reviews on social media or the brand’s website. But an email address – or even a transaction history – are not representative of a person, and certainly not reflective of a person’s interests or intent.
A main barrier that prevents brands from having a complete, single customer view is the quality of the data. It is either incomplete, meaning there are important signals that are not taken into account, or data is siloed in various channels. Or it is inaccurate, which is a result of poor data quality, i.e., data that has not been cleansed, normalized, or otherwise been made ready for business use the moment it enters the system.
Whether incomplete or inaccurate, the result is the same – a lack of true recognition. Perhaps a brand is 75 percent sure of the identity of a person making an online reservation. Or 80 percent sure that they’re engaging with the head of household. Anything less than 100 percent certainty, however, runs the risk of introducing friction into the customer experience.
Recognition and Relevance
The consequences of failing to accurately recognize a customer in the context of a customer journey brings us to the next pillar of personalization – relevance, or a lack thereof. In our next blog on the “Three ‘R’s’ of Personalization” we will highlight the many advantages that result from being able to recognize a customer in the moment, and to use that recognition to deliver a hyper-relevant experience.
For more on the important role recognition plays in the creation and execution of a personalized CX, Vice President of Marketing Beth Pfefferle and I discuss the topic in the first of a three-part webinar series on the Three “R’s” of Personalization. To view the webinar, click here.
