Personalization Is the Key to the Modern Digital Customer Experience

No one likes to be thought of as a collection of 0s and 1s, but in today’s digital world, that’s what it sometimes feels like when we interact with businesses that treat us impersonally.

Businesses that want to transform their relationship with customers need to create more personalized experiences, speakers said at a recent CDW SummIT “Transforming the Customer Experience with Digital Modernization,” in New Orleans.

To do that, organizations need to know what their customers want and to be able to give it to them when they want it. Data analytics and other technologies can help make this process more seamless, resulting in happier and more engaged customers.

Meeting Customers’ Needs

To Preston Harris, mobile wireless senior field solution architect for CDW, transforming the customer experience really boils down to “delivering the right information, the right way, at the right time.”

Harris, who spoke at the summit, said customers expect a personalized digital experience, and organizations need to meet that expectation.

This means designing mobile applications to fit how users interact with their mobile devices — such as by voice or touch. It also means using location-based services to make the in-app experience more efficient and personalized.

“These things matter, and the closer you can aim to providing the right information at the right time … the more adoption you’ll get,” Harris said. That feeling of satisfaction will lead users to provide more feedback so that organizations can continue to refine and hone their digital experiences.

Analytics Enables Customization

Organizations should be proactive — not reactive — about creating personalized experiences, said summit speaker, Kate Collyer, an enterprise mobility management channel specialist at Cisco Systems.

Businesses should be thinking about how to deliver their goods and services to customers in a way that will give the business information back about its customers, Collyer said. They can then process this information and “offer the best quality of service” to customers.

“We do that through analytics and things like knowing exactly what our customer base needs, and then we react to that as quickly and as humanly possible,” she said.

Data analytics about customer preferences can be used to inform everything from the floorplans of store locations to creating more efficient manufacturing processes. And analytics can also make it easier for employees to help customers, Collyer said. In healthcare, for example, this goal can be as simple as making sure that our doctors have the information that they need to do their job effectively, efficiently and at a moment’s notice, she added.

All of this is achievable even for small and midsized organizations, Collyer said, noting that Cisco Meraki’s cloud-based Wi-Fi technologies were designed for companies with lots of branches and small IT teams.

These cloud management capabilities allow IT administrators not only to put out fires easily but also to look at customer analytics — including heat maps of customer traffic in stores — and then “create an even smarter, faster, learning environment, so that we can become even more effective.”

Learn more about how CDW can help your organization enhance its customers’ experience.

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