Anticipatory Personalization: The Key to Intelligent Service

A Frost & Sullivan White Paper

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ANTICIPATORY PERSONALIZATION: THE KEY TO INTELLIGENT SERVICETherefore today’s customers expect to be treated by businesses as “the segment of one,” as uniqueconsumer and business buyers in accordance to their value, i.e., personalization. A powerful marketingstrategy, personalization has strong potential as a customer experience and service strategy. Andcustomers are, by and large, willing to exchange and permit access to personal information withtrusted brands in order to obtain personalized service that meets their needs and wants.

Customers want businesses to know them, just as they know about businesses before contacting them.They want to be consistently recognized and remembered, on digital channels as they would if theywalked into a business. They want products and services that fit their individual needs and budgets, andtailored suggestions and recommendations based on those needs. They seek customer service on theirterms, including channels, availability, and how and when to contact them.

The Challenges of Personalization

The challenge is then how to personalize each and every interaction, as if the interaction is betweena customer and an in-store visit with a small shop. Very small businesses know their customers byname. They have to, as customer experience and personalization is their prime competitivedifferentiator. These businesses treat every customer well, but also according to their value, such asthe “old school” counter staff paging the owner when a valuable customer walks in. In turn, frequentcustomers know every employee by name, have relationships with the staff, and feel free to interactwith them.

Smart owners, employees, and reps know the value of making conversation to create and smoothcustomer relationships. The banter will often uncover customer needs and issues that can beimmediately addressed.

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As businesses grow, however, they often fall short in providing informal personalized service. There isa limit to how much information about others that people can instantly recall. When businesses divideinto departments and business units it often creates data silos that inhibit personalization and timelyinformation access. A growing installed base of customers can also lead to commoditization of thecustomer relationship. Finally, in a small business, every employee knows that excellent customerservice is everyone’s business, but that focus can become quickly lost as the business expands.

Today’s data explosion is both a boon and a bane to personalization. Businesses have unparalleledaccess to evolving customer intelligence through transactions, conversations, social media, acquiredlists, and external data sources. Consumers and agents self-report their demographics, interests, careerchanges, and life events. Businesses and business media report expansions, purchases, and productknowledge. These and other data sources provide a rich landscape from which businesses can infercustomers’ preferences, sentiment, and buying intent.

But that data can become quickly outdated, or is embellished and in some cases, false. Data frominteraction recordings and social media is unstructured, unfiltered, and may require normalization andintegration when obtained from multiple sources.

The Need for Anticipatory Personalization

Most critically, personalization by itself is not enough to engage with today’s empowered customers.Instead, they insist on businesses anticipating their needs, wants, purchases, and inquiries. This alsoincludes their next questions in customer conversations.

This practice is known as anticipatory personalization (AP). AP uses technologies such as AI, machinelearning, and predictive analytics to glean actionable and customizable data from multiple data sources,including customer history and profiles and behavior data to personalize the customer experience.

There are powerful benefits to be obtained from AP. It enables more accurate, flexible, relevant, andsimpler customer prioritization based on customer value compared with legacy and impersonal, rules-based methods. AP aims to systematically formalize, replicate, repeat, and share the “real” intelligenceanalysis, leading to the next best actions by businesses and their representatives. In summary, AP aimsto provide that deep individual customer engagement that very small business owners and their staffprovide.

Anticipatory Personalization, then, is the key to Intelligent Service. Here are several examples:

• Delivering targeted offers to customers who expressed strong satisfaction on service and support interactions

• Proactive automated or live agent chat at web transaction/point of sale to prevent shopping cart abandonment and to drive impulse buying, cross-selling, and upselling

• Sending remote fixes to Internet of Things (IOT) connected products in a consumer device,connected home product or vehicle in order to improve the customer experience and encourage greater product use, hence increasing their utility

THE FINAL WORDCompanies are facing the challenge of how best to engage with today’s empowered and digitalcustomers. With new and aggressive competition in an overall slow growth market, they cannot affordto miss profitable opportunities to serve them. Anticipatory Personalization empowers companies togrow their customer relationships by enabling them to fully understand their customers, and then to treat them as valued individual buyers with Intelligent Service. Intelligent Service equips companiesto become productively proactive with customers, including their IOT devices.

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