By Yaniv Masjedi
Businesses are searching for ways to offer the most personalized customer experience. Overwhelmed with options, they’re spending time, energy and resources trying to choose a communications platform that will deliver results. When just about all the cloud contact center software on the market promises personalization, how can they decide?
New research provides crucial guidance. It combines 59 peer-reviewed studies to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Published in the journal Information, it issues a warning to businesses everywhere: When certain key conditions “are absent, personalization can shift from a value-creating to a value-eroding force.”
The study is 25 pages long, but here’s the upshot: three factors are vital in order to prevent your efforts from backfiring. “Personalization benefits are highly contingent on transparency, perceived control, and ethical alignment, rather than personalization intensity alone,” the study says.
It’s easy to give lip service to these three elements -- and unfortunately, some vendors do. In working with organizations of all sizes (from enterprises to small businesses and startups), I often discuss the importance of ensuring that the communications software they choose has robust measures in place to ensure all these benefits.
Transparency is multi-dimensional
The kind of openness that customers seek includes providing accurate, up-to-date information in response to anything they ask. It means admitting mistakes when they happen. And that's just the beginning.
In this era, it means informing customers how the AI tools they interact with work. This is a big reason to avoid “black box” scenarios, in which people inside an organization don’t know how an AI tool works. They might not even have access to the information. Customers are understandably wary of situations like this. Sharing data with a mysterious tool feels risky.
Transparency also requires making clear what happens with any and all of their information. “When you explain why you’re using data (e.g., “to surface your warranty details automatically”), customers perceive personalization as helpful, not intrusive,” Nextiva explains.
And transparency runs even deeper. Customers generally have three questions in mind during any journey. We think of these as things they’re asking silently: What happens next? How long will it take? What could go wrong? No matter how a brand is interacting with the customer -- by phone, chat, email, or any other way -- it should proactively answer these questions and provide follow-up messages with updates.
Putting the customer in control
Customers want a sense of agency over how an experience goes. “Hyper-personalization has the potential to deepen engagement and loyalty through highly tailored experiences, but it may also overwhelm users, reduce their sense of autonomy, and trigger privacy fatigue or surveillance anxiety,” the study explains.
One helpful measure is to provide easy-to-use self-service portals. A survey found that 78% of customers prefer finding their own solutions. The more information available in these ways, the more customers feel they’re getting what they need without giving up any unnecessary information.
Another piece of the solution is to give customers options for how they’d like to proceed. Doing so provides a strong reminder that they’re in the driver’s seat.
Operationalizing ethics
Delivering the trustworthy experience people seek requires key “foundational ethical principles -- fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability,” the study says.
These can be “operationalized through governance mechanisms.” The researchers recommend several, including: algorithm audits to ensure the AI is performing as intended; debiasing processes to identify and remove systematic discrimination; and vigorous privacy protection.
All of these structures must be updated frequently, as new discoveries are made about the power of AI, and as new risks arise.
UCXM trumps legacy infrastructure
The tech stacks that businesses have long relied on aren’t equipped to match today’s needs. But there's good news: All of these elements can be built into a unified customer experience management (UCXM) platform.
A well-designed UCXM platform pulls together each customer's data from across every touchpoint, and synthesizes it into a single record. Think of it as both corralling and protecting all that information. It also generates insights from each user’s journey to help answer even unasked questions and anticipate needs.
When a business adopts an AI-powered UCXM platform, it can get all the benefits of personalization without what the study calls “perceived creepiness.”
The shift toward cloud-based infrastructure has been one of the milestones reshaping AI-enabled CXM, this study says. It’s time for the next milestone: UCXM.