Customer centricity and personalisation are heavily discussed these days, more so than ever before.
But most organisations work round internal structures rather than customer needs, so how can we change that? Well, when it comes to customer centricity, it can be split into:
- The Reality (of being commercially focused)
- The Holy Grail (truly putting customers at the heart of your CRM strategy)
The majority of organisations are firmly in reality, so if you’ve not reached Holy Grail stage – you’re not alone. In fact, most companies have pockets of customer actions that are captured and multiple data systems driving different parts of the CRM strategy – and you’ll often find that they rarely work together!
In e-commerce, for example, we still see there’s a commercial focus rather than a customer centric focus in CRM strategy. CRM stakeholders work in silos, usually focussed on channel performance, promoting certain products and focussed on one-to-many, week-to-week campaigns.
The biggest challenge this will cause is that KPI’s become insular and result in internal commercial competition, rather than external collaboration for the benefit of the customer.
There may well be areas of CRM optimisation and good practice in journeys across acquisition, retention and win-back etc., but by not treating personalisation as a process, these journeys will always be inconsistent.
Inconsistency is the antithesis of personalisation. To gain a greater control of consistency, the focus should be on becoming best in class when it comes to being truly customer centric in personalised CRM.
So how do you define the steps in the personalisation process to nail your data driven strategy? There are four core categories of strategic capability that are needed to enable truly customer centric personalisation:
4 core categories to enable customer centric personalisation
1. CRM Data Application
Action Capture
Action capture allows you to, well, capture actions from each touchpoint so it can be attributed to an identifiable person. This will then create an understanding of the attributable motivation for the engagement, for example, if a call to action leads to engagement, what the action related to, how long the interaction lasted, which content is it related to, etc.
Content Engagement Attribution and Delivery
Next up, content engagement attribution and delivery lets you track and serve messages and brand experiences that support all customers so you can provide experiences they would recommend to others.
2. Customer Journey Execution
Testing
Testing different variations of content, messaging and CTAs allows you to see what influences the next best action. This gives you the ability to select the best performing combination and apply it to all subsequent relevant engagement.
Customer Journey Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration allows you to define customer contact rules that connect all technology and systems. As a result, you can then provide personalised customer experiences wherever your customers are in their journey, across all devices, in sequence.
Next Best Action Strategy
This will let you define rules to determine the most appropriate action to take for a specific customer, enabling you to select the right message, personalisation or experience from all the possible options.
One-to-Many Segmentation
One-to-many segmentation is when you use logic to allocate records to specific journey groups or target communications/experiences. For example, “Any customers who have transacted in between 31 days and 60 days ago, spending between £50 and £150, who have not transacted since” – this micro segment could then be used to allocate them to certain communications, personalisation, or automated journeys to try to influence engagement.
3. Data Science
Analysis that Curates Actionable Insight
By building diagnostic and predictive analytical models, you can clearly show why an action or engagement occurred,for example, a recommended personalised product failing to create an engaged action from the segment it was targeted at.
You can then use that insight to be able to predict what’s most likely to happen next based on previous data – this is insight that is actionable in its truest form.
One-to-One Segmentation
One-to-one segmentation uses data science to group customers into larger categories based on their individual profiles, so you can bring together people with similar characteristics based on the data held about them. For example, where customers are allocated to high, medium or low lifetime value segments based on their anticipated value to the brand.
4. Customer Data Strategy
Unified Person Record
You can create a unified person record by assembling your data into a single view of the person by applying matching and merging processes that can then be optimised through gathering learnt, asked, and given data. This allows you to personalise a customer’s experience in the most meaningful and timely way.
CRM Data Enablement and Alignment
Finally, by combining a deeper understanding of customer needs, behaviours, and value with tech, you can use your CRM to communicate with customers with the right message, at the right time, across all touch points.
Customer Centricity in CRM
Personalisation should be a process that captures every customer interaction; where every new journey is optimised through an automated personalised next best action – either unified in one platform or shared across separate martech applications.
Here at Edit, we believe that the next best action should be the next best action for the customer and the business, with the customers’ needs coming first. By aiming for this “North Star” of dual-purpose next best actions, the process starts to become an organic, in-built, organisational customer centric focus that dictates customer journey design.
Data driven strategy frameworks can then be created to reinforce a connection with cross-organisational, unified customer centric experiences. Put simply, this means showing what journeys are working and having an understanding of why they are working – then having a crystal-clear, data driven methodology of how to do more of it!
This is what CRM strategists like us mean by moving from one-to-many to one-to-few, to one-to-one CRM.
Need more help with the personalisation process?
If you’re looking for further help or advice on customer centricity and personalisation, you’ve come to the right place.
At Edit, we are a truly data driven company. That’s why, when you work with us, we’ll help you to optimise your customer connections through the application of strategy, data and marketing technology. So you can deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences that give you the results you need.
If you’d like to learn more about our services and how we can help you use data-driven analysis to become truly customer-centric, contact us today to see how we can help.
