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Steve:
It's been said that the best gifts are those that are made specifically for you. Well, the best experiences are often those tailored to each customer's preferences.

Saari:
Imagine you purchase from a brand and every interaction or touchpoint feels like it was intended just for you and your unique needs and preferences. And that's an area you have a relationship, not just something transactional. And it really has significant implications on how you as a customer feel about that brand.

Steve:
Personalization as one of the eight essential themes driving CX evolution on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and I'm glad you're listening. As we like to say on the podcast, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we explore the topics and themes to help those CX leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. We're continuing with our series CX Now: Eight Essential Themes Driving CX Evolution. We launched the series back in October to take a close look at today's current topics and trends that CX professionals need to embrace to be better leaders and take their programs to the next level. Developed in collaboration with our partners at Qualtrics, we included feedback from more than 50 CX leaders to bring you this helpful advice. In our last episode of the CX Now series, we focused on the digital experience. On this episode, we're going to focus on personalization, designing and delivering that holistic experience tailored for each customer. And to help us understand why this theme is essential, I can't think of a better person than to welcome one of our other experts here at Walker. Saari Gardner is a vice president in our Advisory and Managed Services group. Saari, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Saari:
Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve:
Well, we're really delighted to have you and I know you're a passionate about this topic, so I can't wait to get into it with you. But just for background, you're relatively new addition to our talent here at Walker. But why don't you just for context, give our listeners a little bit of your background and then how you got to Walker.

Saari:
Sure. So I've actually worked in customer experience management for more than 18 years and I got my start actually doing phone surveys. So helping to build out a VOC program for an organization from nuts to bolts, basically doing all the surveys and the analytics, etc. And as the CX discipline has grown, so has my ability to do new and different things in it. And in April I made the move over to Walker was super excited, as I've always admired Walker, and so here I am.

Steve:
Well, we're delighted to have you, and it's just such a pleasure to be able to have you on this series. We try not to have our people on the podcast all the time, but by golly, they are super smart and work with great companies every day and so they just have a lot of expertise. So I'm looking forward to talking about personalization with you today. So in this series we kind of start with let's get a definition of the term personalization and how it applies to CX. So Saari, let's just start there. How do you define personalization and how should a CX leader kind of go about thinking about this topic generally?

Saari:
Sure. Well, any list of CX trends in the last few years, as you know, probably includes personalization on it. And when you hear that word, it's really easy to picture someone what someone's talking about. You really gravitate towards, if you like this, you might like that. So when you're shopping online and you get presented a similar product or on your social media feed, you see ads based on your activity or even news sites that serve up articles. But a lot of those examples are more or less personalization from a marketing lens. And the goal there is obviously to attract new and existing customers and generate demand. But while research supports that, marketing, personalization helps create a better customer experience, A lot of companies are realizing that experience personalization is really much broader and introduces some exciting possibilities. So imagine, for example, you purchase from a brand and every interaction or touchpoint feels like it was intended just for you and your unique needs and preferences. And that's an area you have a relationship, not just something transactional. And it really has significant implications on how you as a customer feel about that brand.

Steve:
Well, let's talk about that. I love your first example because I think we can all relate to that and actually ties back to our first episode where we talked about digitalization and you know that if you bought this, you bought that. But it really is it's much broader than that, isn't it, the personalization of the whole experience? So what would be some enhancements off of that beyond just sort of the marketing?

Saari:
Yeah, so thinking about experience, personalization, like to frame it around three levels actually. So reactive, customer selected, and proactive. So if a company hasn't already done it, they should be sure that they're implementing reactive personalization. So when we think of this, it's really that mechanism for listening to customers and demonstrating and showing that understanding of where their interactions with your brand have had issues or complaints so that you can take action on those and report back to the customer how you resolved it. But in this context of personalization, take it a few steps further. And there's two considerations I'd like to mention for that. So first, you also need to be sure that you have a way to segment those customers and look at their responses by segment. So when you do this, you get a line of sight to whether that opportunity in the journey is affecting all customers or just a specific segment. And then you can really design solutions that feel personalized in how the issue or situation is addressed. And when you say you really want to do that with the goal of being able to group customers into really distinct cohorts based on their unique needs gaps and opportunities.

Steve:
So let me just break that down because again, one of the reasons I love having our people on is you guys have really great frameworks of how to think about this. So reactive, customer selected, and then proactive. And there's a hierarchy there, correct?

Saari:
A little bit, I think overlap between each, but yeah, a bit of a hierarchy there.

Steve:
Yeah. So kind of the reactive is just break fix type of hey, it didn't work working for this type of customer then customer selected is kind of driven by what they're doing and how we're looking at their behavior. And then the proactive one is really sort of moving it to, as it says, proactive. Like you're almost anticipating what the customer want before they can even say it. Do I have it?

Saari:
Yes.

Steve:
All right. Well, let's talk that a little bit. So what what are the implications then, for a CX pro of of thinking about this from a personalization standpoint? How would that translate into kind of what they're doing today?

Saari:
Well, I mean, I think CX pros are very well positioned just based on what they're doing already. They are probably some of the individuals in their organization with the deepest insight about what their customers are experiencing, often get involved in the design of some of those experiences and so have that baseline information to do the reactive personalization. But really, I think there's a second consideration there, which is that you're not just looking for what you need to fix. To create a personalized experience, it's, I would argue, almost just important, as important, if not more, to identify what's going well in that interaction. And so understanding what the customer preferences actually are. And, you know, if you think about personalization, a really important aspect of that is that you're evoking an emotion in the customer and building on and activating those things that, you know, they are already enjoying about the experience with you so that you can bring forward those positive emotions. And so if you take those learnings that you have in that reactive stage, you can begin to really orchestrate that customer journey, which basically when we say that, that means that we're taking what we know about the ways the different customers want to move through an interaction with the organization, and we use that to offer them choices or paths that are going to resonate with them based on their previous activities. So a really basic example of that is, let's say a customer has a high level of satisfaction completing their support requests through a channel like chat, so you can orchestrate further interactions to ensure that they're offered that channel.

Steve:
So that might be like a customer support example, right? So, you know, you actually are looking at this person and they really would prefer to self serve using some sort of chat feature and doing it themselves online with the assistance of the chat. Right?

Saari:
Right.

Steve:
But what happens if, like I get frustrated with the chat, then what would happen there?

Saari:
Well, hopefully you've got the other options. And that that journey, the way it's been orchestrated, allows you to move between those different areas. But I think this kind of leads into that next level of insight and personalization, which is that proactive personalization. So this is where our systems understand the experiences that meet a specific customer needs and then they help deliver and help our people deliver the right experience at the right time. So orchestration is great because you're presenting those options and then that customer can kind of select into those. But you know, you've got that third level, which is that proactive personalization and you move to the journey optimization where instead of just showing them any path you're presenting to them the best path so that they're going to be able to really have success in the interaction that they're having. So you shift it from essentially making it a good experience and making it easy to get to them actually being able to be successful in getting their goal met.

Steve:
So, yeah, so if I'm hearing you right, so if you're if you're sort of on this customer selected personalization and you see kind of what their preferences are now, you can kind of move to the proactive and you're going to create a process that actually fits for how they like to interact.

Saari:
Right, Exactly. And then I think another example of that, too, is let's say that you are you can be proactive even before you get that feedback that there was an issue. So if you can detect that, there are certain things happening, for example, you've been transferred three times or your customer has been transferred three times, and you know that that's probably creating friction in the experience to put workflows in place where you can basically step in and try to resolve that before it happens. And one example I think of that happened to me recently was going through a drive thru and they said, Hey, we don't have your food, you've got to go park and had to park and sit there for 10 minutes for them to bring the food. And they proactively gave me a gift card and said, Hey, we're really sorry for your wait. And so they were able to understand that that was not a ideal experience. And before I could even be angry and fill out a survey proactively offered something to improve that.

Steve:
Yeah, a little service recovery there.

Saari:
That was in the budget.

Steve:
Yeah, I like that. And it's actually goes back to I mean, that is a personalized experience that you might share that with other people as opposed to saying, Hey, I had to wait 10 minutes, but look what they did for me.

Steve:
You know, we're always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and we'd love to get your thoughts on how we're doing. If you have a minute, go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey. Tell us what content you feel will help in becoming a more effective customer experience leader. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and we look forward to hearing from you.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is my friend and colleague Saari Gardner. She's a vice president of advisory and managed services here at Walker, and she is taking on the topic of personalization. It's part of our series on CX Now: Eight Essential Things that are Driving the Evolution of CX. And and really there are eight categories that any CX pro should be thinking about. Now, you've given us this framework for how we sort of think about personalization. Let's apply it to a couple of common practices that we have in sort of the customer experience I have in my notes here, maybe ordering process. So we just talked about fast food, but how would you maybe apply some of this personalization to say, the ordering process?

Saari:
Right? So I think, you know, being able to fully leverage omnichannel and if you are working through an online channel and you're not getting to where you need to be, having the ability to call in somewhere and have that agent pick up right where you left off. I think another example that's really interesting is what if you every time you called, you had a certain group of people that you could talk to or who knew you or there was some level of recognition to be able to intelligently route to people who were going to be able to connect with you on some level. And maybe it's even personality based, you know, being able to build this persona of a customer and connect them with somebody in your organization who is going to be able to connect with them on that better level.

Steve:
No, it's a great example. I mean, and I won't name kind of names or industries, but I think most of our listeners could kind of think about that. But, you know, the difference between you call in to the call center, you enter your contact phone number on the keypad, then you'd work through the automated system, then you end up going to a rep and then they say, Well, what phone number are you calling from? And you say, Well, I already input it. Well, I don't access that information. And you contrast that with where you actually have your own rep and you can call them and leave them a message or something and then they get back to you. Yeah, I mean, it's a totally different and that might be a little too old school for a lot of people. But again, it's personalized, right? It's that's what we're talking about is really making the customer feel special. We talked a little bit about customer care. That's another area where I think we could talk about how this applies.

Saari:
Yeah, and I definitely touched on the omni channel and the idea of that routing cases. We hit on that. And then again those company initiated interventions. So if based on all of the information that's being input real time, you know, you kind of hit this level of recognition that your experience is going in a negative direction to have these systems in place to be able to note for that type of customer based on their journey. You know, how can you, as we talked about before, how can you recover that in the moment?

Steve:
Yeah. So let's start to talk now about how a CX pro might action some of these concepts that you've shared today on personalization. So let's just say I'm relatively new CX Pro and yeah, I mean I know some of the stuff that Saari's talking about today. Yeah, I could see how that kind of plays out in my organization. Where should they start? What's kind of the first thing they ought to do to start exploring this topic about how they could bring more personalized customer experience activities to their product or service or their company?

Saari:
Yeah, well, I love this question because it really gets at the heart of my favorite thing about the experience management discipline, which is that it touches every aspect of the organization and CX leaders are they're so entrenched in understanding what's working or not working for their customers that they're really, really well positioned to participate in conversations about personalization, if not actually lead those conversations. They probably are already thinking about it, even if they don't attach that word to it. So I think one thing that they can do that's very important is be a champion about thinking beyond marketing personalization, to experience personalization and cast a vision for the benefits that can be had from using attitudinal and behavioral data as a means for segmenting customers. So a lot of the time our segmentation strategies address the usual areas like geography, product or service use, customer spend. But CX leaders have all of this great information about attitudinal factors that they can then bring into that segmentation and they can help tell those customer stories that shine a light on the difference. That using that data to really personalize on the experience is going to have and help provide the insights to their colleagues that will allow them to incorporate that knowledge into how they're designing things in their own departments or areas.

Steve:
So just to take that example a little bit further, like if you're using NPS, for example, just to contrast like the promoters versus detractors, right?

Saari:
Exactly. And a lot of times we look at, well, what are the drivers of satisfaction? What's the driver of a promoter or a detractor. But looking and then taking that and adding it into the segment, so you're looking at, Okay, well, customers who have bought this during this time and had these service interactions, you just get more of a holistic picture of all of the data points that are going into that and producing what type of customer you have. It's not a customer that is purchasing widget A and they only spend, you know, X amount of dollars a year and that that person is no different from somebody that may purchase a lot more. So only segmenting on one of those areas like geography or or again spend those those basic areas, you're really missing a lens where you can understand what they actually care about. And so you kind of shift your segmentation to the things that that customer actually cares about versus what they're spending or what they're buying.

Steve:
Yeah, and it's a really powerful concept. And I think that what's really interesting is you can find that there are customers that demographically or firmagraphically may look very similar, but their attitudinal segmentation might be totally different. And I bet you that would predict that their outcomes, their business outcomes are very different too. And so it really is that's a, that's just a really great way that we can offer kind of an enhanced analytical capability within our organization. The other thing you said I thought that was interesting is, you know, to be a champion, a CX leader, and really the kind of the information that we possess in the in the enterprise. And I think that ought to give us confidence as as business people, not just the CX leaders, but actually as business people, because, you know, really it is our responsibility to advocate for the customer. And, you know, to the extent that you're enhancing the customer experience, it's going to be good for the business and we can prove that out. So I don't know if that sparks any other thoughts in your head, Saari, about kind of what a CX pro could do, but I'll just kind of throw that back to you.

Saari:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think making sure that they are working to break the silos down in their organization, I think that's another factor that's always important as a CX leader, because what we do touches everything in the organization. And so making sure that we're breaking down those silos and finding ways to show the value proposition of this level of personalization, of this data to all of the different stakeholders in our organization.

Steve:
I really appreciate, Saari, the effort and time and prep that you put into this, because I think you've given our listeners a great deal of things to think about and and so forth. But we've reached that part of the podcast where I ask every guest, and even though you've only been at Walker for a few months, you know, you have to come up with take home value just the same. And so, you know, as our resident expert on this trend of personalization, what's your take home value? What should the listener really take from this time they spend on this podcast and even more importantly, what they can do about it in relatively short order to improve their company's customer experience?

Saari:
I think personalization, it's been somewhat of a buzzword for a while and technology today is really enabling us to do personalization at scale. Companies have a lot of have access to tools more than ever that help them to actually serve a wide range of customer personas and do that really well. So I think from a practical standpoint, it's really important to remember that even if you achieve that level of proactive personalization, it's hard for an organization to be everything to everyone. And so going back to basics and thinking about your company's mission and values and how that personalization strategy actually fits into that I think is an important first step because at the end of the day, you have to know who are your target customers and how your company values align with their personal values to begin to develop that authentically deep relationship that you're aiming for through all of these personalization actions.

Steve:
Yeah, it's really well put. I mean, one of the things I've always tried to relate to is, you know, if you think about your customer relationships, like you think about your most important personal relationships, it kind of takes it to another level. Right? And of course, people that you care about deeply or that you love, you know, you would treat them very personally. And that's, I think, what we're doing. And then to be able to do that at scale by leveraging technology and and the data and the expertise that we have, it's really powerful concept for for where we're going with this thing we call experience management. Hey, Saari. Thank you for being a great guest on the podcast and I hope it won't be too long till we can have you back again. If one of the our listeners would like to continue the dialog, can you just give us your Walker email or your LinkedIn profile so that they can connect with you?

Saari:
Yeah, saari.gardner@walkerinfo.com or LinkedIn under Saari Gardner, so happy to connect with anybody there.

Steve:
And I would encourage you to, if you heard anything you like to hear, Saari is a is an excellent resource. So hey, thanks for being on the podcast. Hopefully get to do it again soon.

Saari:
Thank you so much.

Steve:
Hey, it's my pleasure. And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your businesses customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listeners. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing or suggest an idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. So go out there and do it and make your organization more personalized. Thank you for listening and we will see you again next time.

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