The Symphony of a Unified Customer Experience: The Experience Business Series, Part 5

Com­pelling, per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ences are no longer option­al. They’ve become a crit­i­cal core com­po­nent of every suc­cess­ful brand’s over­all strat­e­gy, inte­grat­ing data, tools, and per­son­nel from a wide vari­ety of depart­ments and teams. For busi­ness­es that achieve this trans­for­ma­tion, the rewards are tremen­dous: hap­py cus­tomers are more like­ly to buy soon­er, make repeat pur­chas­es, and spread the word to their friends.

In short, we’re in the midst of the expe­ri­ence busi­ness wave, and all signs point to the con­tin­ued growth of that trend. Accord­ing to the 2016 Temkin Expe­ri­ence Rat­ings (TxR), com­pa­nies with high cus­tomer expe­ri­ence rat­ings have net pro­mot­er scores that aver­age 22 per­cent high­er than those of expe­ri­ence lag­gards. How­ev­er, while 50 per­cent of exec­u­tives agree that a sin­gle cus­tomer view is crit­i­cal to long-term suc­cess, far few­er are tak­ing con­crete action to uni­fy cus­tomer pro­files and deliv­er per­son­alised expe­ri­ences across all chan­nels at all stages of the cus­tomer journey.

Through­out this series of blog posts, I’ve walked through the essen­tial ingre­di­ents in any cus­tomer expe­ri­ence trans­for­ma­tion. Here’s a brief recap of what we’ve cov­ered, along with an overview of how it all comes together.

Follow the four imperatives

Every great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence depends on four key imper­a­tives. First, con­text must be the start­ing line. Every expe­ri­ence must take the sur­round­ing cir­cum­stances into account. Sec­ond, it’s essen­tial to design for speed and scale to deliv­er the right mes­sage in response to each cue, mil­lions of times at any giv­en moment. Third, you’ll need to mas­ter the mil­lisec­onds to meet each cus­tomer pre­cise­ly where they are in real time. And fourth, you’ve got to inte­grate to inno­vate by plac­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the cen­tre of all you do, and uni­fy­ing data, con­tent, and work­flows around that sin­gle-cus­tomer view.

Close the personalisation gap

As you fol­low the four imper­a­tives, mov­ing clos­er to a uni­fied, real-time view of each cus­tomer, you’ll soon dis­cov­er that yesterday’s meth­ods of per­son­al­is­ing mes­sages just don’t mea­sure up to the sheer vol­ume of con­tent demand­ed today, or to the speed at which it needs to be deliv­ered. To close this per­son­al­i­sa­tion gap, you’ll need a mar­ket­ing plat­form that can A/B test in real time, auto­mat­i­cal­ly shift­ing traf­fic to the best per­form­ing expe­ri­ences. You’ll also need to take advan­tage of item-based col­lab­o­ra­tive fil­ter­ing to make sure you deliv­er the right rec­om­men­da­tion to the right cus­tomer, every time. And most of all, you’ll need to start opti­mis­ing not just for the right pieces of con­tent, but for the right holis­tic expe­ri­ences, deliv­er­ing per­son­alised ver­sions of entire web­pages and apps.

Take control of journeys

Empow­ered by your new­found under­stand­ing of every cus­tomer in your inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing plat­form, you’ll be well-posi­tioned to begin build­ing per­son­alised cus­tomer jour­neys that con­nect across all touch­points. This starts when you engi­neer a sim­ple path from the creative’s desk­top all the way to final deliv­ery of each expe­ri­ence, and pro­vide your teams with easy-to-use tools. The goal is to stream­line the process­es of cre­at­ing and deploy­ing con­sis­tent arrays of per­son­alised assets for each cus­tomer, on the web, in-store, and across all oth­er touch­points. Once you’re deliv­er­ing those assets at scale, you’ve begun to take con­trol of your cus­tomers’ journeys.

Deliver experience-driven commerce

More than 40 per­cent of buy­ers start their jour­neys on one screen, and fin­ish on anoth­er. This means it’s cru­cial for your brand to dis­cov­er new ways of con­nect­ing every step of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle, no mat­ter when or where each inter­ac­tion takes place. Once you’ve switched from lega­cy sys­tems to cut­ting-edge mar­ket­ing tools, you’ll find that much of the infra­struc­ture for con­nect­ing online and offline expe­ri­ences is already in place. All that’s left is for you to build the cus­tomer-fac­ing side of those expe­ri­ences and you can expect your cus­tomers to delight in the difference.

The road from out­dat­ed, siloed expe­ri­ences to inte­grat­ed, per­son­alised ones is rarely a short or sim­ple one. It requires inten­sive coop­er­a­tion across man­age­ment, sales, cus­tomer ser­vice, and IT, and may even require the onboard­ing of a ded­i­cat­ed team of data ana­lysts think­ing about a broad­er dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project with­in your busi­ness. But once you’ve begun to make this trans­for­ma­tion, you’ll begin to see lifts in rev­enue and stronger cus­tomer loy­al­ty. You’ll also have the thrill of watch­ing real-time cus­tomer inter­ac­tions turn into action­able insights before your eyes.

When you’re ready to take your next step toward becom­ing an expe­ri­ence busi­ness, Adobe is here to help. Get in touch and let’s talk about how an inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing plat­form can trans­form your cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ences for the better.