In business relationships, especially in business – there is a natural push and pull. One person wants something – the other party provides something. This is also true in our personal lives. We build relationships with others that are mutually beneficial, even if the want and the fulfilled want are emotional connections. In business, if you are the provider it is much easier to provide the same thing to everyone. Providing something different to everyone that walks through your doors is time consuming. It can be expensive. It can cut into your profits.
But providing something different to everyone is the future of customer experience. Why? Simply because everyone wants something different, and they are now able to get it. Thanks to the sharing economy and other start-ups that bloomed out of the internet, business is no longer the same. Customers crave tailored products and experiences, when they want them.
Enter The Challenge Of Mass Personalization
Typically, the business is working to service and scale its customer operation, focusing on standardizing processes and driving efficiency. Today most companies are set up to easily scale. They seek to push large numbers of customers through processes that are as efficient as possible. Any kind of variation can throw off the operation. The idea is to make a profit while spending as little company time and money as possible. As authors Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, and Melvin Brand Flu discuss in Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing Experience, there’s a natural friction between the customer and the business.
Here’s the point of friction: customers are individuals, and they want their specific needs met. The organization is built to manage demand, and the more the company relies on operational efficiencies to manage those demands, the more impersonal and mechanical the experience feels. Unfortunately, impersonal and mechanical customer experiences are real mood killers when it comes to building relationships. To be successful today brands must invest in their customer experiences at the exact time they don’t feel like doing so. Companies today must figure out ways to create personal, tailored experiences even though everything they’ve been taught about business emphasizes the opposite. Most business lessons teach operational efficiency – how to manage demand pushing as many customers through your doors as possible with as little work as possible. This is done in order to maximize profits.
In order to create more tailored, personal experiences the company must start by talking to its customer-facing employees. What are customers asking for that’s not on the menu? What is the frequent feedback coming in through the contact center? There is a treasure trove of feedback on social media and in the contact center. Does your executive team train in the call center like they do at Amazon, where executives must spend a few days every year on the phones? Call up Amazon customer service and you might reach Jeff Bezos himself.
The companies that don't create personalized experiences are in danger of being disrupted. Simply because their most important stakeholders will quickly leave for those personal experiences they crave in a relationship. If companies would simply slow down, they would have the time to be methodical. Gretchen Rubin, habits expert, calls this “going slow to go fast.” Creating personal, tailored experiences can be sped up with technology like machine learning, but not all of us have access to that now. Personalization is still in its infancy. Most companies have not mastered personalization yet. What we do have access to is the ability to create policies that account for variation, that consider customer tastes. Big brands can create innovation hubs, or even lean on start-ups, to learn how to create more personalized customer experiences. Try doing the opposite of what the entire business world does, and see what results you have. Your profits may surprise you.
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