As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance in sophistication and acceptance, robots and technology are taking on more human characteristics and responsibilities in daily life. So ubiquitous has AI become that one Danish study even wonders if robots could be considered our “friends” in the future.
Though making connections with machine sounds extremely futuristic, one customer experience (CX) technology available today has improved our ability to get to know our customers on a more intimate basis. Modern digital experience (DX) technologies are changing the game when it comes to making a personal connection.
Enhance customer intimacy using digital experience (DX) technologies.
CX Technology Improvements
In recent years, Forrester Research has made a concerted effort to increase the awareness of customer experience (CX) indicators since technology investments in this arena have shown a significant return on investment (ROI). In the age of the tech-reliant consumer, it’s getting easier for brands to know their customers at a more intimate level.
Though customer experience often requires a human touch, the ability of smart tech to help us personalize our online interactions with customers can’t be overlooked. In this regard, customer communications management (CCM) technology tools burble to the top as perhaps the primary key to unlocking increased personalized interactions.
Technological advances allow us to track, record, and make small but important changes that personalize customer communications. This kind of technology makes each touchpoint more meaningful. There are a few different tools that improve CX, but none are as easily understandable and impactful as personalization. Let’s look at how to increase personalization with smart content.
Smart Content
Smart content is a savvy form of personalization where content on a website, advertisement, or in the body of an email is so “smart” that it can be changed depending on who the audience is. In the old days trying to do this granular delivery of customer communications meant corralling countless content variations and managing mail merge-style mechanisms. Thanks to central repositories for data management, today’s smart content is...well, smarter.
Smart content can be thought of as a personalization facilitator. Imagine the main photo in an email that welcomes a new customer. Now imagine there are 20 different photos that business logic can chose from to further personalize the communication: each one differs by setting, season, time of day, climate conditions, the number of people in the image, the type of people represented in the photo, and so on. The lifestyle reflected in the image can be finely tuned to the individual recipient based on data gathered by their interaction with a myriad of other technologies. This includes dynamic data such as device used and IP address; stored data such as interests and communication preferences; as well as other information about the recipient available at the time the communication is created and sent. One single photo gives your brand the power to immediately reflect (and WOW!) your customer.
Now imagine that you can provide this kind of real-time, personalized content throughout your customer communications. This is what smart content is all about. This level of personalization is one of the easiest aspects of CX to understand. From images to text, smart content allows you to be precise in emails, web content, and chat bots. It elevates all your customer communications to a deeper level of one-to-one interactions with each individual.
Capitalize on Communications
Smart content allows you to engage with your customers faster and better than ever before. Though the experience can (and often does) improve over time, smart content begins at a data-rich starting line that wasn’t possible without the integration offered by modern tech.
While smart content is essential for fully automating customer communications at scale, it can even help customer-facing employees to individually author ad-hoc customer communications faster and more accurately. With INTOUCH®, we provide the integrated platform that delivers the user experience and capabilities that give end-customers the personalized interactions they demand. In an increasingly digital world, personalization through smart content is just one more CCM tool that helps our clients create a human connection behind the brand.
To read more about how technology tools can improve your customer experience, check out our predictions about CCM Trends to Watch in 2019 on the Topdown blog.
Image: Unsplash
