Ambitious marketers recognize the power of customer
experience (CX) to differentiate and have a material impact on revenue.
However, achieving this outcome is easier said than done: Today’s always-on,
continuously connected consumers expect brands to orchestrate interactions
across multiple channels, in a personalized and relevant way. Anything less,
and brands run the risk of introducing friction into a customer experience
which will quickly drive customers to a competitor.
Consider a 2019
Harris Poll, where 63% of consumers surveyed said that a personalized CX is
now part of the standard service they expect, and 37% claimed they would stop
doing business with a company that fails to offer such an experience. Brands
though, struggle to meet this expectation; marketers in the Harris Poll survey
said that real-time engagement (50%) and customer understanding (48%) were the
top challenges in providing an exceptional CX.
See also: More Than Personal: Customer Experiences in the Post-Digital Age
What Do We Mean By “Real-Time”?
The simplest answer to this question is that real-time is
whatever you need it to be to move at the speed of the customer. For all
intents and purposes, this usually eliminates batch processing of customer data
as sufficient to deliver a personalized, relevant experience that is in the
cadence of a customer journey – particularly as consumers are moving to more
digital channels and a digital-first experience.
A typical website browsing experience, for instance, may entail
a visit to numerous landing pages, a chatbot session, a filled and abandoned
shopping cart, or even a timed-out browser as a guest checks out a competitor’s
website. A consumer may even bounce in and out of the website to check emails
or engage with a mobile app. A brand that possesses a single view of the
customer by integrating every conceivable piece of customer data, and makes
that single view accessible in real-time, is capable of intelligently
orchestrating the entire experience to provide the customer with a next-best
action the moment the customer appears in a channel, or even on a specific
landing page.
Ensuring the single view accurately reflects the behaviors,
preferences, wants and needs of the customer at the precise moment a real-time
decision is rendered requires not just real-time access, but that all the
underlying customer data that constitute the single view is also in real-time.
A real-time decision made on data that is minutes or in some cases seconds old
– as a website browsing experience shows – may not be relevant to the
customer’s journey in the precise moment of interaction.
The above scenario illustrates the power of real-time to
drive revenue by optimizing the omnichannel journey at the cadence of the
consumer. In the Merkle 2019 Q4
Customer Engagement Report, the survey found that retailers using advanced
personalization techniques, as described above, drove 17% higher revenue than
those using basic personalization techniques.
Real-Time, Real Customers
Web Services: This is certainly true for one of our customers, a web services company with millions of customers in dozens of markets known for its web presence and 24/7/365 call center operations. To support tens of millions of decisions a day, the company required a real-time decision throughput measured in milliseconds.
To achieve this goal, the company integrated customer data
from 20 distinct databases of online and offline data into a single customer
view. This golden customer record, updated in real-time, includes every
customer behavior, transaction, and preference; with structured, unstructured
and semi-structured data, and first-party, second-party and third-party data,
it lets the company know everything there is to know about the customer – which
in this case is a mostly digital experience, as well as call center
interactions. Built upon singular identity resolution capabilities, the Golden Record
combines customer data with every customer identifier – addresses, emails,
devices, social, phone numbers, etc. – that deliver the context gives the
single customer view its value.
Automated machine learning models enable the company to
render a next-best action at scale –
millions of decisions a day, every day – by intelligently orchestrating
each decision in the right context, based on the up-to-date Golden Record. With
omnichannel orchestration and real-time decisioning, the company provides its
customers with relevant, deeply personalized offers and messages within
milliseconds of an interaction across multiple channels – including abandoned
cart offers that are now made up to 20 times faster than before. The company
reports a significantly enhanced marketing program ROI, and it attributes
personalized campaigns to a double-digit revenue growth largely due to increasing
attach rates and average deal sizes through smarter cross-sell and upsell
programs.
Healthcare:In the healthcare industry, a regional healthcare
organization and Redpoint client that offers primary care, urgent care,
laboratory, diagnostic, observation, and disease management services through a
network of advanced medical centers – has realized dramatic results for
patients and medical center operations through real-time customer engagement.
With a Golden Record and industry expertise for implementing
an omnichannel approach, the organization has experienced several positive
outcomes for patients by adapting to changes in the record at the moment of
interaction. Successes include a 4X improvement in closing care gaps for
high-risk patients, a 3X improvement in new patient wellness visits, and a 320%
increase in program enrollment for on-demand telehealth services.
Core Principles of Real-Time Customer Engagement
The web services company and healthcare organization are in
completely different industries, but they have in common the five core
principles needed for authentic, real-time customer engagement that drive
results.
Link CX Strategy to Results
Perhaps this goes without saying, but real-time customer
engagement breakthroughs only happen with a well-defined strategy in place and
linked to specific targeted results. What business outcomes are you trying to
reach? What type of experience do you want to deliver using real-time data? How
will you measure success?
Setting a clearly defined strategy helps secure enterprise
buy-in, which is especially important for the simple fact that because a
real-time, personalized CX delivers revenue, delivering this capability is not
just a marketing initiative. Rather, because it is mission-critical to the
enterprise, it is important that the outcomes, use cases, and capabilities are all
well aligned in a detailed and cohesive way.
Connect Any and All Relevant Data
With a strategic direction in place, determining all the
customer data and sources available is a key exercise to ensure that a unified
customer record is an accurate portrayal of a customer as they engage with your
company across channels. This will include behavioral, transactional, and
demographic data; purchase history, interests, preferred channels and devices,
interaction patterns, and any information about how the customer interacts and
engages with the brand.
A full picture will include first-party, second-party, and
third-party data; unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data; and data
across both a customer’s anonymous and known journeys.
With a strong data foundation in place, it’s then important
to institute a data governance approach that ensures data breadth, depth, and
quality. In addition, establishing a culture of data ethics that respect the
rights of the customer (right to erasure, right to be informed, etc.) will
inspire confidence that a customer record is collected, stored and used in a
way that will abide regulations, benefit the customer and positively reinforce
the relationship between the customer and the brand.
Establish a Golden Record/Single Customer View for Each Customer
Because the Golden Record infuses context into every
customer interaction, it is the key for data-driven marketers to provide
relevance in real-time and to coordinate consistent messaging across all
channels.
As illustrated by the web services company and healthcare
organization, the Golden Record combines properly aggregated and managed
customer data (cleansed, matched, merged) with a complete identity graph. The
unified, real-time profile resolves a customer’s identity across all devices,
ID’s, behaviors, transactions and preferences and is instantly accessible the
moment a customer appears in a channel, providing marketers with the ability to
deliver a next-best action or offer that is always in cadence with the customer
throughout an omnichannel journey.
Scale a Personalized CX with Automated Machine Learning
Automated Machine Learning (AML) generates value from the
Golden Record by using the data to make decisions at scale – for hundreds,
thousands or – as in the case of the web services company – millions of
customers, who may each have their own next-best action as determined by
embedded AML models that continually optimize relevant communications for a
segment of one.
Because machine learning latency is as antithetical to
real-time engagement as data latency, driving intelligent decisions at scale
depends on models that are developed, updated, and applied in real-time on an
ongoing testing basis. Code-based models go stale over time, and the rebuilding
and retraining process devalues the power of machine learning to produce a
next-best action in cadence with a customer.
Models that are instead configured correctly in a
closed-loop system will continually look for incremental changes to optimize.
These systems can be set once and guided to produce results against specific
business metrics. When every record is tracked in the system, insights are
pulled easily, and recommendations can be made automatically – and effectively managed
by business staff, not limited to data scientists.
Intelligent Orchestration
Intelligent orchestration produces a next-best action
independent of channel, at any stage of a customer journey, and factoring in every
engagement and interaction up to the moment the real-time decision is rendered.
The ideal customer experience is
produced by intelligently orchestrating all communications – inbound or
outbound, digital, or traditional channels – relevant to the precise moment of
an omnichannel customer journey.
Real-Time is How Your Customers Interact, and Why You
Should Too
When all five core elements of real-time customer engagement
are satisfied, the end result is a superior customer experience that drives
revenue. Customers consider interactions with a brand as a holistic experience,
and real-time engagement is how data-driven companies meet this expectation for
a seamless experience on any channel.
Today’s digitally-savvy, continuously connected consumers have no patience for data latency and data silos that are the main obstacles to a relevant, personalized CX. Presented with a fractured, disjointed experience, a customer will simply move to a brand capable of providing the type of experience that matches their expectations. This presents tremendous opportunity for innovative, ambitious marketers to create transformative experiences that make a true difference for the customer and the business.
