Developing a brand’s best possible customer experience is a lot like coaching a football team. Sounds crazy, probably. But think of it this way—the head coach of your favorite NFL team is developing their strategy to beat the week’s opponent. Coaches don’t develop a strategy for the entire season, they base it on each opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. Their playbook each week could fluctuate dramatically, with emphasis on the pass or the run, offense or defense, the options are endless but all catered to personalized gameplay to snag the W.
When developing a brand’s best customer experience, decision makers have to act like the head coach. You can’t craft a singular growth strategy based on all your customers, but instead determine the best way to win over each individual. Your customers’ interests and behaviors will vary widely and you’ll have to personalize your efforts to make all your customers happy.
Some of the best head coaches of customer experience come from digitally native companies, focusing on personalization for each customer. Spotify creates personalized playlists based on their listeners’ past music interests. Netflix recommends content based on recent watches to help avoid an endless search. They make it personal.
Service providers need to learn from these industry disruptors’ head coaches if they want to better harness and leverage customer data to drive greater personalization with their customer engagements.
Telcos are uniquely positioned because of the enormous quantity of customer data at their disposal. They know your frequently called numbers, websites visited, social media preferences, when and where you experience service degradation or poor video quality. The list goes on…
We all know we are addicted to our devices, just take a look at this:
That’s an extreme amount of data. But consider it like your unlimited game footage. The answers are there in how to create a game-winning personalized customer experience.
Most service providers are in agreement that this needs to happen. However, there are two thorny issues that can slow progress.
First, service providers need to assure the use of customer data is done in a socially responsible manner with customer consent. According to Inc., 61% of customers want brands to use their data to provide a more personalized service. This should motivate service providers to act faster.
The second challenge, and possibly the larger of the two, is the sheer quantity of data to be harnessed. The amount is mind-boggling and the ability to operationalize and transform this data into actionable insights is no small feat. Service providers are overcoming these hurdles by leveraging cloud computing, in-memory computing, and artificial intelligence to transform the entire customer experience.
But technology alone will not create great personalization. Service providers need to perform life cycle assessments for all customers to determine what data creates the greatest value along the customer journey. Creating customer journey maps that clearly identify what data is required where and when at each customer touch point is critical.
For the most part, service providers have deployed mobile apps for account management, upgrades, and service requests. Providers need to take that to the next level and make greater strides in personalization to increase user penetration of their apps. Usage is still too low to enable service providers to affect significant change.
There is also the opportunity to leverage customer data being collected in other areas of the organization—call centers are a prime example of an area that could be utilized. If leveraged correctly and paired with first party customer data, these customer insights can showcase pain points along the customer journey. You can improve the customer experience and reduce call center traffic through greater personalization.
A very simple but real example—a network issue has caused an outage. The operator can identify the issue and the geographic area that is being negatively impacted. The service providers ability to proactively notify all customers in the affected area can significantly decrease call volume traffic to CSRs. It’s the most basic form of personalization. They have been apprised of the situation and know the service provider is taking corrective action.
And that’s just the beginning. The more nuanced data you use, the more personalized you can be. You can customize frequency of communication, cater to their interests in messaging, and more. Customers who use a whopping amount of data on sports apps and websites could be prompted to add data to enhance their sports streaming experience. The possibilities are endless.
Localytics’s digital intelligence enables you to create more personal, meaningful, and contextual customer engagements. Using first party data, you can identify and execute opportunities for cross-app engagement, cross-selling, and cross-adoption.
We also ingest third party operator data and correlate it against first party data to enable you to compete more effectively with digitally native brands. By introducing customer data like geo-location, viewing habits and behavior of video and non-video content, you can construct new service offerings and drive more engagement with your customers.
You have to be the best coach if you want the best customer experience. When you go deeper into your customer data, you can create the best personalized customer experience. The more you know about your customers, the more you’ll cater to them, retain them, and add more—and you’ll be on your way to the Super Bowl in no time.
