Going beyond personalisation... to deliver truly individualised customer experiences

How do you create a customer experience that really meets the needs of your users beyond just presenting your proposition, products or service and hoping customers will engage? Make it personal. Make it individual.

Individualisation, unlike personalisation, is where you deliver a personal experience based on your customers past behaviours and preferences across their journey.

Let’s use buying a coffee as our analogy.

Without personalisation, things are a bit dry...

“Hi there, how can I help you?”

With personalisation - as standard, we get a bit more friendly...

“Hi Joe, the usual? Skinny white?”

If we help to turn decision moments into actions that are likely to transform into revenue…

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… and cream cheese bagel again?”

And if we anticipate Joe's needs before he needs them...

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… we owe you a refund for your last order - We’ll take that off this bill.”

And using other factors and enable adaptive content, functionality and interaction in real-time… we get individualisation...

“Hi Joe, Skinny white?… It’s raining in your area - we have a fast delivery service!”

Personalisation is no longer a competitive edge – it's now the norm. Data collected through click patterns, transactions, AI and machine learning can all enable getting the right content to the right person at the right time and help tailor content for customers throughout their lifecycle of interactions with the company.

Here are just a few ways to individualise your digital offer to help change your customers behaviour and help make repeat visits more useful and reduce choice fatigue:

• By traffic source

• Visitor location

• Purchase history

• Previous browsing behaviour

• Aggregated customer data

These can all be used to predict each customer's needs and target them across your service ecosystem; through emails, a change in content surfaced on repeat visits to your website or app, or assistants like Alexa, or digital physical spaces - all being smarter about the recommendations they make to engage them.

Finding ways to make experiences as individual as the customer and ultimately scale the empathy with which brands understand and tailor the relationships they have with their customers that will increase customer loyalty and in turn revenue.