Forrester research reveals a stark truth: 63 percent of consumers will abandon a trusted brand after just one poor experience. But what defines “poor”? It’s subjective. Imagine receiving an offer for a product you just bought or being bombarded with upsell offers while trying to cancel a subscription. These are classic examples of irrelevance.
Irrelevance is a common thread in poor customer experience. A brand may have all the data and be able to recognize the customer, yet still fails to deliver the next best action in the customer’s journey. The next best action is delivering a pitch-perfect offer, message or content that resonates with a customer in the moment of interaction. Inbound or outbound, it’s an engagement that perfectly captures a customer’s interests and intent. In a word, it’s relevant.
In our previous blog on the Three ‘Rs’ of Personalization, we focused on recognition as the first of three pillars that constitute next-level personalization — recognition, relevance, and right time. Here, we turn our attention to the importance of relevance. It’s one thing to get your data right and know a customer inside out, but it’s another to use that knowledge of a customer – that deep, personal understanding – to enhance a customer experience with a next best action.
How to be Relevant
You have a Customer 360 (not the dreaded “Customer 90”). You recognize an individual customer in the context of a business or household. With a Golden Record, you know their past actions and current behaviour, giving a fair estimation of what they might want to do next. How well a brand applies the Golden Record across a journey is the secret to consistent relevance. Included in that calculation is a contextual understanding of the customer derived from preferences and other information, but it’s also derived from immediate actions within the current interaction, e.g., the click to cancel a contract, a comment to a call centre agent, etc. For instance, if a customer’s current behaviour indicates a high propensity to churn, it is not an ideal time for an upsell.
External context also often influence customer behaviours and thus play an important role in being relevant. Factors such as weather, fashion, politics, pop culture, etc., all have the potential to steer a customer in a new direction. Relevance, in turn, often depends on how well a brand links these external factors to an individual profile.
The Customer Sets the Parameters for Data Usage
Delivering a relevant customer experience also means respecting privacy concerns. A great offer on an unwanted channel introduces friction. Relevant personalization must account for an individual’s stated preferences. Studies show that customers are willing to share more data when data is used respectfully within boundaries set by the consumer. This value exchange amplifies relevance, showing that it’s not just the right offer or message that counts, but also respecting an individual preferences.
AI and Relevance: Keep the Customer Top of Mind
Discussing relevance in personalized experiences is incomplete without AI. There are a few points to consider here. One is that when you’re using data to train AI models on generating a next best action, it’s important to take a step back and really think about what relevance means. One mistake a lot of companies make is that they think about relevance in terms of what’s relevant for the company vs. what’s relevant for the customer. When this is the case, it’s easy to introduce bias into AI models, steering decisions that will produce favorable outcomes for the company (enhanced lifetime value, upsell, cross-sell, etc.) instead of a primary focus on the ideal interaction for the customer.
Another point to consider is the data you will present to your AI model once it is trained to make sure that the results are relevant. It seems obvious that the quality of the data is critical for success, but the current hype in the AI space appears to downplay this factor.
Relevance = Knowing When to Hold Back
Sometimes, relevance means taking no action. Personalization for its own sake can lead to poor experience. An action, offer or message may be hyper-relevant, perfectly capturing the context and ready to be delivered in the cadence of a customer journey, but if it’s the sixth message of the day it is intrusive. Sometimes we are creating so much noise in our attempt to personalize across so many channels that we are drowning out the one key message that we need to deliver.
Relevance, Making Customers Feel Special One Interaction at a Time
Relevance is the heartbeat of personalization. It leverages a Golden Record to create meaningful, timely interactions that resonate with each customer. By harnessing deep insights into a customer’s history, context, and preferences, brands can craft experiences that feel intuitive rather than intrusive.
When every touchpoint is aligned with the customer’s current journey, it prevents the over-communication and misaligned offers, building a bridge of trust and loyalty. In an era where a single misstep can drive a customer away, focusing on relevance is not just an advantage, it’s an imperative for creating genuine, memorable connections.
In the third and final blog in this series, we will focus on right time as the final pillar of a superior customer experience. For more on the role relevance plays in the creation and execution of a personalized CX, join Vice President of Marketing Beth Pfefferle and me in the second of a three-part webinar series on the Three “R’s” of Personalization. To view the webinar, click here.
