Every company wants its customers to be successful. Every company wants its customers to have good experiences, accomplish what they’re looking to accomplish, find value in the product or service they’ve purchased, and become long-term, loyal advocates.
Companies typically employ a variety of tools and techniques to keep their customers happy and successful. But many don’t consider how they can use personalization technology to do this. We recently published a new eBook that provides marketers and customer success leaders – across industries – with 15 examples of how to use personalization to create more successful customers.
Avoid Overwhelming New Users
The onboarding period is a critical time in any new customer relationship. It’s so important to make sure that each new customer feels comfortable getting started with your product or service and that she understands how to incorporate it into her day-to-day life. If the initial experience is overwhelming or disorienting, she may become too frustrated to continue.
For SaaS companies and other businesses with web applications, a good way to help keep customers focused and comfortable is to hide some advanced features until they are ready to use them. Think about your product and how your users get value from it. Are there any features that can’t be used successfully or will cause confusion if another action hasn’t been taken first? Consider hiding features that are unhelpful to first-time users to focus their attention only on what needs to be done first. Then, when they’re ready, expose those advanced features and offer tips for using them.
For example, in this image below, the company hides the Advanced Analytics tab until the user has first explored the basic Reports feature.
Proactively Address Support Questions
Whether your customer experience is a SaaS product, a banking account, a subscription news service, or a retail site, it’s inevitable that some of your customers will experience a problem or have a question they can’t address themselves. Taking care of these issues quickly and painlessly is a must for any good customer experience. One of the best ways to do this is to use personalization to deliver appropriately timed messages that anticipate common issues to address them in the moment the customer is experiencing them.
For example, HostGator displays callout messages that appear based on behaviors — in this case detecting keywords or phrases associated with commonly encountered problems. Once a potential problem arises, it dynamically presents messages to direct the user to the most appropriate resources. With this approach, the company has substantially cut down the number of support calls and online chats it receives.
Capitalize on Upsell Opportunities
For many companies, upselling or cross-selling existing customers is a huge opportunity for growth. But it has to be done right. You don’t want to spam your customers with generic sales pitches, because you don’t want to risk losing the business you already have. So you need to make sure that you find the customers who are a good fit for an upsell and reach out to them at the right time and in an acceptable way.
With behavioral tracking or targeted survey questions delivered through your personalization platform, you can easily identify which customers are interested in or a good fit for complementary products or services. Then you can follow up in the moment with a relevant message or you can alert the right salesperson.
For example, iPage delivers a survey to first-time users who have never spoken with a salesperson. If the answers to those questions indicate that the user would be a strong candidate for an upsell, an opportunity is automatically created in Salesforce and the appropriate salesperson is alerted to the opportunity. This campaign has driven a 34% increase in upsell lead volume from marketing-driven sources.
Final Thoughts
Done well, personalization is what happens when you take everything you know about your customers — including the digital behavioral data you accumulate when they interact with your app or website plus any relevant data you have residing in various systems — and use it to provide helpful, tailored experiences. Hopefully, these three use cases have given you a few ideas about how to leverage personalization to deliver better experiences for your customers.
