How to Achieve Organizational Goal Alignment Amid Personalization Challenges

The world’s most successful brands don’t just claim to be “customer-obsessed,” they are customer-obsessed — and they prove it with every online, in-person, and voice interaction. These are the brands that identify returning customers by name, recommend products or services based on what a customer has already purchased or expressed interest in, and optimize each touchpoint across the customer journey. Not only do these brands know the best practices in personalization, but they use them to deploy the best strategies for each individual customer and deliver the right content at the right time. 
 
Personalized customer experiences are no longer nice to have, nor are they just competitive differentiators in the omnichannel battleground of brands and retailers — they are essential to attracting and retaining customers. Salesforce research from 2022 shows that 73% of customers expect their unique needs and expectations to be understood and met. Furthermore, 83% count on immediate, personalized engagement when they first interact with a company, up from 78% in 2019. If your brand doesn’t meet those expectations, customers won’t hesitate to find a competitor that will.
 
Why Are Personalization Goals Important?
 
Just like any important business initiative, personalization goals help companies to:

Meet and exceed customer expectations: Customers have come to expect personalized experiences across all touchpoints, and 60% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that provide highly personalized experiences.

Improve customer engagement and loyalty: Personalization leads to improved customer engagement and loyalty, as customers respond positively to relevant and tailored interactions. In fact, 61% of consumers say they’d pay more for excellent CX.

Increase sales and revenue: Personalized experiences result in increased sales and revenue, as customers are more likely to make a purchase when they feel that their needs are understood and addressed. Dedicated efforts toward an optimized CX experience can result in a 10% increase in revenue, the fastest path to growth.

Gain a competitive advantage: Companies that invest in personalization positively differentiate themselves from competitors and gain a competitive advantage in their market. Leaders in CX personalization generated three times the return than laggards.
 
How to Align Personalization Tactics With Strategic Personalization Goals

While there are many advantages to following trends in personalization, your business needs to be sure that your goals and efforts are aligned. Companies that achieve strategic organizational goal alignment with tactical personalization goals grow 40% faster than lagging industry competitors.
 
So, how do you make sure your organizational goals are aligned amid personalization challenges? Here are a few tips:
 
1. Prioritize strategic goals. Focused goals can guide your customer-facing tactics into alignment with your larger objectives.
 
2. Involve key stakeholders. Gain input from sales, marketing, customer care, product, IT, and operations. Their varying perspectives can accelerate personalization initiatives and help remove obstacles.
 
3. Define success metrics. It’s critical to decide which key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll measure. Core KPIs can tell you if your tactics are moving you toward your strategic objectives and how you can leverage short-term wins for long-term success.
 
4. Consider customer experiences. Input from your customers can help you develop the strategy based on what they care about, including what problems they need help solving and what they look for in a brand or retailer.
 
5. Invest in the right technology. Personalization requires constantly gathering customer data from multiple private and public data repositories. Seamlessly gathering and integrating your tech stack enables companies to illuminate the funnel and enhance personalization with AI and ML in real time.
 
6. Continuously evaluate and adjust. Consistently running, assessing, fine-tuning, and renewing your personalization tactics and strategy is critical to continued growth and success. AI can track what works (and what doesn’t) and automate decisioning so you can continuously optimize without friction or lost effort.
 
Using AI, you have all the tools you’ll need at your disposal to personalize more specifically and across all channels. The right tech can help maintain alignment across all your efforts by monitoring for new opportunities for CX improvement, enabling you to run more experiments concurrently, testing all sides of the experience at once. AI’s automated decisioning capabilities can save everyone time, as well as locate and cut poorly performing CX without additional testing. With less guesswork and more streamlined decisioning, you’ll see more favorable results and be closer to hitting those KPIs. (Your customers will notice the positive change, too.)
 
The most successful brands in CX have a vision, and every goal is a single step toward that vision. When they’re all aligned, the magic happens. When they’re not, you risk lost engagement, loyalty, and overall disorganization. Recognizing your customers’ unique needs and preferences and catering to them is critical in today’s hyper-competitive business climate. Customers have more choices and are better informed than ever, so creating an experience with impact is crucial.
 
Investing in an experience-optimization platform can help you deliver marketing campaigns and personalized content. This helps win the loyalty of customers during their experiences with your business. It also helps you to make tactical decisions that help attain your strategic personalization goals.

Contact us to learn how your brand can increase your customer retention and overall CX journey.