Today’s consumer is inundated with communications from the brands they engage with – or even from the ones they don’t engage with. Many companies claim to “personalize” their customer interactions, but are they really personalizing with any value? Do they define personalization as simply adding the customer’s first name to a message or blindly recommending the next product in a series? Maybe companies change their offer depending on marketing personas or demographics. But not every 35-year-old living in a particular region is the same, and their buying propensities certainly aren’t the same. So personalization in the broadest sense is not enough to keep your customers loyal and engaged.
Value of hyper-personalization
Personalization is most typically deployed in targeted marketing programs, which are programs underpinned by data that are aimed at improving messaging and making marketing programs more effective.
Hyper-personalization takes that one step further by applying AI to deepen customer engagement. This approach creates a one-to-one experience as unique as every customer, by analyzing data to determine the right course of action. Hyper-personalization occurs in real time, to respond to customers’ real lives. An offer that may have been relevant the day before, may not be appropriate anymore. The real power of hyper-personalization is being able to adapt experiences to fit customers’ ever-changing needs, to interpret customer behavior in the moment, and have relevant conversations.
One of the main benefits of hyper-personalization is the ability to deepen customer relationships. With traditional marketing segmentation aimed at similar groups, a customer may be sent irrelevant offers on channels that they do not even interact on. These customers can quickly grow annoyed with marketing communications that do not seem to take their personal preferences – or specific situation – into account. Over time, this annoyance can completely turn a customer away from a brand. Then a competitor steps in at the right time with a more attractive offer or communication, and the relationship is gone.
Hyper-personalization, on the other hand, helps to predict a customer’s behavior by analyzing their data signals and anticipating a moment of need before it occurs. This allows the brand to deliver the right offer, at the right time, on the right channel. Customers value this deeper level of engagement; it demonstrates empathy and care by responding to an individual's unique needs and delivering much more than just a sales-related experience. In this situation, customers gladly accept hyper-personalized offers, become more loyal, and have a larger customer lifetime value. The customer is happy, and the brand has nurtured a deeper relationship with lasting benefits.
How do you hyper-personalize a customer experience?
The best way to achieve hyper-personalization is to optimize every interaction with the customer in real time. Pega’s AI-powered technology helps brands engage with the next best action most relevant to consumers across all stages of the buyer’s journey, enabling personalized experiences throughout. But how do you accomplish that? It can be accomplished by:
- Understanding an individual’s propensities, behavior, and needs in real time.
- Creating and implementing predictive and adaptive models in minutes, putting all available data to work by analyzing and re-decisioning on the spot.
- Personalizing engagement with real-time decisioning and AI at the moment of need.
- Improving conversions across every channel, making each engagement more relevant and meaningful to build a connection at every touchpoint.
- Building more sustainable, compassionate relationships with always-on insights.
- Serving empathetic next best actions that align with what customers really need.
How some of the top brands are hyper-personalizing
A number of well-known companies across a variety of industries are already benefiting from hyper-personalization. With over 70 million customers, Wells Fargo struggled to personalize their day-to-day engagement, requiring them to connect and analyze billions of digital interactions in real time. Wells Fargo installed Pega Customer Decision Hub™ to provide real-time modeling and adaptive machine learning. With the solution in place, the bank can constantly recalculate each individual’s “next best conversation,” while those individuals are interacting with the brand. Wells Fargo is now able to analyze four billion digital interactions to identify the “next best conversation” for each individual, and successfully personalize messages and experiences for 70 million customers.
Bupa Australia has a simple mission – to help its customers live longer, healthier, happier lives. However, as a healthcare payer and provider, Bupa faced the industry-wide challenge of meeting ever-rising customer expectations. Bupa Australia implemented Pega Customer Decision Hub to achieve its vision of personalized, two-way customer conversations enriched with empathy and emotion. In the first six months after going live with Pega, Bupa saw more than 50% uplift in delivery efficiency and more than a 30% increase in customer responses to targeted conversations.
Hyper-personalization: A win for everyone
When it comes to your customers, a single moment can mean everything. What if you could sense those all-important moments and meet their needs in real time? That’s the real power of hyper-personalization, the ability to create highly relevant interactions with customers based on their unique needs, characteristics, and behaviors – from product recommendations to real-time personalized experiences and beyond.
Learn how to deepen customer connections and fuel real-time responses to customers’ real lives with Pega Customer Decision Hub.