Watch out CX Industry -- Omnichannel Personalization, Data and AI Are here

Mike Gadsby, Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at O3 World discusses,  why customer experience will continue to be driven by hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences in 2020 and beyond.

As we get further into 2020 and welcome in a new decade, the driving trends behind some of the most innovative marketing, customer and product experiences are beginning to take shape. We’re witnessing a sea change in customer engagement fueled primarily by omnichannel personalization, data and AI. 

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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Here are five trends CX and marketing leaders must keep up:

Omnichannel Focus on CX Will Drive Engagement Strategy and Operations

As customer expectations continue to skyrocket around cohesive, hyper-personalized brand experience across channels (what we call omnichannel customer experience or CX), there is now more of a focus on journeys NOT touchpoints. So, now more than ever, it is imperative that companies invest in process, products and infrastructure to support this new reality. This starts at the core of the org chart, where omnichannel delivery is forcing businesses to consider ways to break out of traditional departmental silos. Marketing and sales teams, product and engineering groups and support and customer success will find new frameworks where everyone is collaborating and aligned on a unified customer vision. It is necessary to lay a foundation by making sure data and infrastructure are in place to support customer needs in real time.

An organization like Slack is an interesting example of omnichannel CX in action. While Slack’s messenger and workflow platform is terrific for creating seamless communication across a business, Slack’s focus on developing organizational frameworks to support cross-functional teams in support of a single customer vision is a sign that the focus on CX is impacting a more fluid org chart. You’re now seeing successful companies using team structures, processes and products that embrace cross-functional knowledge sharing and ideating around the customer experience.

Learn More: Connecting with Customers in 2020

1. Hyper-personalization across channels
 

Personalization in CX, the action of customizing an experience to a particular demographics preferences, or even hyper-personalization where that customization is specific to the individual, is starting to become old news. Delivering a hyper-personalized experience across the entire customer journey - from marketing to product to brick and mortar - will become the expectation. The purchase decisions I made this week should carry over and create context for every other experience I have moving forward. Because I’ve given you a piece of data in one channel, I will expect you to leverage that information in each interaction I have moving forward.

Amazon is the absolute leader within retail. Once I search a topic or poke around for a product in the app, they then deliver that product and/or relevant products as an email or advertisement somewhere down the road. What I like about their approach (which I assume has been tested and refined a million times over), is that their timing isn’t too aggressive. They “politely” follow me and deliver content at appropriate times with meaningful results. 

However, end-to-end hyper-personalization is no easy task. It will require that businesses make investments and plan across their organization to create offerings that dynamically change as the customer’s needs dictate. To that end, it’s important to take a more holistic view of the customer. No longer can an organization live and die on a handful of archetypes. Real data needs to drive content delivery.

2. Dynamic, data-driven customer personas to support CX delivery
 

Omnichannel CX is complicated. It requires a single data profile of a customer that travels across channels and develops over time. The complex nature of this process is making traditional UX planning mechanisms like personas more and more outdated. In a world of hyper-personalized expectations, thousands - if not millions - of actual personas exist. Since people are not static and their use cases and needs evolve quickly, an adaptive, data-driven persona is necessary and becoming the norm.

As an example, let’s say I was interested in renovating my kitchen. I might be typically classified as a DIY’er at a store like Lowes. As time progresses though, I may figure out that I am in over my head with certain parts of my project, and need a professional to help me complete the more tricky tasks. Traditional persona tactics would have put me neatly in either the DIY or “needs a professional” category when the reality is that many more people may live somewhere in the middle. This complex identity is true of most buyers, and the real CX winners will have solutions that evolve dynamically to meet those needs.

3. Predictive insights will become more automated and actionable
 

Currently, most personalization or even hyper-personalization tools require a degree of human interaction to deliver content, products, etc. that make sense. What we’re seeing now are predictive technologies that automate these processes and create complex offerings based on success metrics. Automated feedback loops are making predictive insights more dynamic and actionable. 

Recently, McDonald’s purchased an AI-powered personalization platform called Dynamic Yield. The goal is to have McDonald’s digital drive-thru menus dynamically update based on everything from time of day to the weather to current trends or even restaurant traffic. A customer’s specific order will also suggest items based on “affinities, context and real-time intent.” These sort of real time, automated predictive insights will deliver highly custom CX at scale.

4. Chat and voice will cross channels, become multi-modal and be your best friend
 

By the end of this year, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent. It’s fairly safe to say that the bots are here to stay. As we become more reliant on chatbots and voice technology to be the voice of brands that handle repetitive human tasks, customers will continue to heighten expectations regarding their performance. A bot can remember every discussion you’ve ever had, pull and respond to data in a split second and be polite and courteous at all times.

While bots typically exist in a single channel (an app, for example), in the future, you’re going to see these experiences transcend channels. Third party platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp or voice technologies like Alexa can make bots somewhat channel-agnostic, but what’s key is the data they leverage across your experience. Past conversations and customer profile data will drive context for future engagement regardless of the phase of your journey.

Combining conversations with media will also become more ubiquitous. For instance, voice commands that act as your user interface (like the McDonald’s example above) or a chat interface that alters your shopping experience will become more and more common as people get used to chat or conversation as their natural UI. This makes CX development not only omnichannel but now multi-modal where customers could be interfacing with two devices at once.

Learn More: Making ‘Real-Time’ Personalization Possible

No Time Like the Present

As these trends and technologies begin to take over and our expectations as consumers evolve, it is important that every business consider their strategies and investments for the coming world. Too many companies have avoided the large investment of time and resources necessary to make this a reality and are now playing catch up. A messy, fragmented infrastructure can certainly make this all challenging, but not impossible. Every brand should create a roadmap to develop solutions that embrace a cohesive customer experience built on data, personalization and AI. Even small steps can make huge gains.