Customer experience personalization is powerful stuff. It can transform a generic customer interaction into one that will leave the customer engaged and enthused about doing business with your company again. There are two reasons that a personalized customer experience is so powerful: practicality–the empirical value to the customer of having an experience tailored to who they are and what they’re looking for–and psychology: the warm feeling that flows over a customer when they are properly recognized and catered to as an individual, rather than as part of the teeming mass of consumers.
There’s no escaping the phenomenon that I call my Red Bench Principle: the belief of customers that the world is (and should be) centered on them. Customers almost wholly lack awareness of, or interest in, your other customers and your other priorities as a company. And their expectation, often thwarted, of course, is that the companies they do business with will design a world that matches their own worldview: entirely Jerry-centric (if Jerry is the customer), entirely Julie-centric, and so forth. When this doesn’t happen, it’s disappointing, even jarring. When it does, it feels as if all is right in the world.
“Looking back three, four or five decades, personalization was simply the way business was done, at least by the best merchants of that time,” says Chris Shaw, the Director of Product Marketing at Manhattan Associates, a supply chain and omnichannel commerce technology company whose mission, Shaw tells me, is to “provide retailers with the insights into individual shopping experiences that allow them to deliver exceptional, personalized service.”
"When my grandfather, who was an engineer and a mechanic, would walk into his local hardware store, the people who worked there knew who he was and knew the kind of products he bought. They would go so far as to stock certain brands of tools simply because they knew that Hugh Shaw would buy those tools when he came in, and that he was dedicated to that brand. They would even, sometimes, drop a purchase off at Grandpa’s house on their way home if that was helpful to him,” providing both the practicality of a very early version of omnichannel (more on this later) and the psychological boost of feeling that the owners knew him and had organized their business around his needs and desires.
However, there were limitations to this mom and pop model of personalization, even when realized perfectly. Such a store had limited suppliers, limited hours of operation (though thoughtful owners, as in the example above, extended those hours on occasion with at-home deliveries and other thoughtful exceptions), and it most emphatically wasn’t a scalable solution; if Pop or Mom or their loyal associate was out for the day, or took, heaven forbid, a week off for vacation, then the personalized model pretty much broke down. So today, while there is much that larger operations can learn from these earlier years of merchandising, there no reason we can’t both deliver on and even improve upon that personalized experience some customers remember from the golden age of independent merchants.
Before getting into that, I want to reiterate (iterate, actually) that today, as in all eras, properly hired and well-trained human employees are the most powerful force you have for personalizing the customer experience; there’s no better way to build a bond with your customers than through fabulous employees, a point that my readers and customer experience consulting clients know I take great pains to hammer home. And happily, today’s technology affords the opportunity to fortify this human-driven model. Intelligently designed and deployed digital assistance has the potential to bring personalization even further, especially the kind of personalization that can most directly drive the bottom line: recognition–meaning that either a human employee, or technology, or both, acknowledge and recognize the particular customer and what they’re looking for. The studies that have been done on the subject (not to mention common sense) show that recognition increases the amount of time and money a customer wants to spend in an establishment and the speed and enthusiasm with which they want to return (to spend more of both). Shaw: “This is where we are striving to go with nearly everything that Manhattan Associates offers: to understand who that customer is and to make their experience as frictionless as possible, so they don't have to say the same thing five or six times, don't need to ask a question more than once, and to and help create great buying experiences irrespective of how or where they want to shop or receive their items.”
A personalized experience that is both human- and digital- driven can feature, on the human side, a lightly trained, perhaps barely trained, employee at a big box store, or a meticulously hired, exhaustively trained clienteling associate (personal shopper) such as can be found at Nordstrom. While obviously the Nordstrom or Nordstromesque experience may be ultimately more satisfying, either scenario can be enhanced by the addition of digital tools, if properly deployed. The more the associate knows about a particular customer, the more they can direct that customer to where they want to go, the more they can understand the way that particular customer likes to buy, the better the customer experience is going to be, however the retailer manifests it.
Achieving omnichannel
Part of the value of the new digital tools and backend coordination comes in their ability to reset the informational balance to favor company associates who have been losing the informational battle to customers who are oftentimes better-informed than even a store associate about a store’s services and product line. And the digital tools, and the backbone that supports them, can bring a retailer closer to achieving a true omnichannel experience [for an overview of omnichannel, here’s my original article on the subject, Imaginary Expert 'Meghan Millennial' Explains the Omnichannel Retail Customer Experience]: the ability for a customer to, say, order on the phone, follow up on that order via email, pick up that order in one store, return a portion of that order—for example, one out of three pairs of shoes–at a different store, and have the customer’s record and the company’s inventory stay up to the minute throughout.
In order to pull this off, says Shaw, requires focusing with laser-like precision on the following: “When the customer places that order [online] or calls the contact center or walks into the store, we try to do everything we can to put the customer and the order back together again, because they don't make any sense without the context of each other. Not just the transactions the customer has had at the particular store they may be in right now, but all the interactions they’ve had outside that store: the times they’ve interacted with the call center, when they've interacted via social, when they’ve interacted via chat.”
None of this is easy, but all of it is essential to make retail work the way customer are hoping–and, more and more, expecting–it to. Shaw has a particularly apt way of stating this: “Today, customers don't want ‘great experiences’ in quotes, whatever a person sitting in the computer system or the marketing team at the company may think a ‘great experience’ is. Rather the customer wants ‘my experience,’ because a great experience for me as a customer is different from what it would be for the customer who’s parked one parking space over.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/06/05/personalization-and-omnichannel-bringing-retail-customer-experience-full-circle-and-then-some/#537fc1177f6b
