Marketers associate personalized experiences with well-targeted advertising while consumers associate their customer experience (CX) with support and purchases. In fact, 45% of consumers prioritize having a personalized experience for support interactions over those dealing with marketing or purchase process personalization.
The gap has been identified and fully documented in a new international study from InMoment, The Power of Emotion and Personalization: How Brands Can Understand and Meet Consumer Expectations. In every country surveyed, brands and consumers did not align when asked about personalization. The findings point to both the problem and opportunity with regard to personalization.
While there are variations from country to country, global customers are far more alike than they are different. They want brands to keep their promises and make an effort to personalize the support they offer across the entire customer journey. James Bolle, VP, Head of Client Services, EMEA at InMoment
This points to an issue that we don't scream about enough – marketing is dependent upon a product meeting expectations and a customer service department providing exceptional support. If either is lacking, in this social world it will have a detrimental impact on your overall marketing efforts.
The findings for improving customer experience utilizing personalization point to some obvious keys to success, but quite a few more will be unexpected to many organizations. Consumers want:
- Personalized Experience – If you're going to collect information, consumers expect you to utilize that data to personalize messaging and promotions accordingly.
- Transparency – Brands must keep consumers informed on the ways their feedback is being used to improve or change the product or service.
- Feeling Trumps Function – Brand differentiation will be more a result of relationships and the customer experience than of product features or selection.
- Shorter Surveys, More Listening – Shorter feedback surveys with comment fields allowing consumers to share stories in their own words. Increased use of the monitoring and aggregation of social, voice, and mobile channel data.
- Mobile First – Ensuring 24/7 mobile support to address increasing consumer mobile habits.
- More Reliable Online Reviews – Brands helping consumers see better peer information about purchasing decisions by supporting verified online reviews.
The study included responses from 20,000 consumers and 10,000 brands from 12 countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The report tracks six benchmark questions and in addition, and explores the role of personalization and emotion in the brand-customer relationship.
Download the Full InMoment Report
About InMoment
InMoment™ is a cloud-based customer experience (CX) optimization platform that helps brands leverage customer and employee insights to inform better business decisions, and create high-value relationships.
