(Under Rachel Illingworth)
“The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”
– Max Levchin, PayPal co-founder
If companies don’t take steps to understand their audience, they’ll lose those customers to companies that place greater emphasis on a strong Customer Experience (CX). Today’s most successful companies design their CX based on their customer’s needs, which encourages customer satisfaction and loyalty. Gene Alvarez, Gartner’s managing vice president, explained that “customers believe that they have a relationship with a provider once they have transacted with that provider. They believe they should be recognized by the provider, and the experience should be mutually beneficial, and therefore designed with them in mind.”
Data insights build CX
Customers expect customer-centric marketing, so companies need to be prepared with the right tools to create original marketing content specific to their target audiences. Platforms equipped with predictive intelligence capabilities (like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein) can inform companies about their target users.
Predictive Intelligence gathers information, maps customer interactions, engagement, and awareness, and provides opportunities for delivering CX-specific campaigns. Companies bolstered by predictive intelligence build out individualized customer information, which enables them to deliver unique content to customers in real time.
Customers want to be remembered
“Customers will not tolerate companies that have amnesia when it comes to remembering them and their preferences for recognition,” continued Alvarez. “This makes it imperative for companies to recognize their customers and to serve them pertinent content that demonstrates the proper recognition and treatment.”
Salesforce Einstein AI creates and compiles reports that provide data about potential and current customer preferences, along with providing personalized recommendationsand offers. That’s because predictive intelligence algorithms anticipate the intent of the customer — and provide a unique recommendation, based on what has been observed.
Misused data can backfire
Conversely, if the data collected on customers aren’t used to inform marketing and enrich CX, customers tend to feel exploited … and rightly so. Many customers feel that if a company is going to collect data on them, they should use that data to understand the customer better. Because of this, it is important to only use data from predictive intelligence to find commonalities between prospective customers and assist in assembling reports of customer interactions with your brand.
The internet is large, public, and sometimes overly-accessible. And because of the viral and often messy nature of the internet, companies can no longer afford to provide customers with negative, broken experiences. Unhappy customers don’t just tell their close friends about bad customer service or faulty products — instead, they publicly air their grievances on social media sites (like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Yelp, and Tumblr). Fortunately for us, we can use predictive intelligence to continue to combat unhappy customers and drive customer awareness.