CX in Action: Real-Time Solutions for Personalized Experiences

The CX in Action blog series is designed to help you upgrade your customer experience strategy with examples from leading enterprise brands. Check out our post on real-time solutions for personalized experiences below.

Delivering extraordinary customer experiences (CX) means engaging customers in the right way, in the right place and at the right time. And for many customers, that time is right now — hence brands’ focus on real-time experiences to elevate their CX.

Meeting customers where they are — no matter where or when — allows you to give them the care and convenience they expect. But exactly how you meet them is as important as how fast you do it.

Speed is easy enough. Responding to straightforward “if-then” scenarios is a simple matter of automating pre-planned interactions based on triggered events. But delivering real-time customer experiences that are personalized to the individual is more complex — it requires using the full customer profile to power every interaction.

To create real-time experiences that matter and show you understand your audience’s needs, you have to collect and unify real-time events, power decisioning with the full 360 customer view and deliver personalized experiences across channels.

Read on to see how leading enterprise brands use real-time solutions to delight their customers through real-time experiences.

Hear how Albertsons Companies meets its customers in the moment in the video below:

CX in Action: Real-Time Solutions for Personalized Experiences

Collecting and Unifying Real-Time Events

Real-time experiences revolve around detecting an event, quickly deciding how to proceed and then taking action on it. This starts with gathering real-time event data to power detection and centralizing it in a single location to fuel decisioning and activation.

That’s why brands such as grocery retailer Albertsons Companies invest in the ability to repeatedly ingest real-time data from multiple sources, such as user behavior related to website visits and application usage. By rapidly interpreting and activating data based on web and mobile activity, organizations can quickly capitalize on new opportunities.

For example, cart abandonment is a “huge revenue opportunity for a grocery chain,” according to Albertsons Companies’ Director of Marketing & Advertising Platforms Sankett Deshpande.

Giving business teams the ability to automatically engage high-intent customers — such as by reminding them of items they added to their online carts but didn’t purchase — is an easy and effective way for brands to drive more conversions.

Other examples include quickly responding to subscriber sign-ups with real-time welcome messages.

“[W]e were able to send out real-time communications to our customers as they sign up within the store to our FreshPass initiative or even to any of our subscription initiatives that we have with Albertsons,” Deshpande said.

Powering Decisioning With the Full Customer View

Real-time event data is crucial, but it’s only a starting point.

To provide personalized customer experiences in real time, brands must be able to go beyond contextual clues. They need to inform next steps based on customers’ wants, needs, preferences and historical behaviors.

This requires complementing real-time data with historical customer information, which allows them to resolve anonymous identities and gain a full view of a customer’s history with the brand. Here’s where real-time solutions make all the difference.

Combining real-time event data with historical customer data helps organizations replace fragmented snapshots with a clear picture, giving both brand representatives and automated systems the information they need to determine appropriate responses.

That’s why cosmetics retailer e.l.f. Beauty prioritizes real-time access to detailed customer profiles, which allows it to craft real-time experiences based on existing audience segmentation strategies.

“[W]e’ve connected all the data sources to be able to create [customer] segments and use them for real-time marketing,” said elf Cosmetics’ Chief Digital Officer Ekta Chopra.

By enriching real-time event data with historical information, organizations can enhance real-time experiences as well as future orchestrated customer journeys across different marketing, sales and customer service use cases, tailoring each interaction to the individual based on past actions and existing insights.

“[W]e are now able to have a unified customer profile platform that combines traditional transaction data and behaviors, all focused on the customer at the center,” Deshpande said. “We can now truly get a deep understanding of customer behavior intent to make every interaction the most meaningful experience for our customers where they are.”

Delivering Personalized Experiences Across Channels

Customized real-time experiences require reaching customers on their channels of choice — something that’s easier said than done with so many customers to consider and so many channels to choose from.

To reach customers in real time where they are, organizations need the ability to orchestrate outbound experiences across every channel at scale, using triggers to automatically push the right messaging to the right people no matter how they prefer to engage with a brand.

With real-time solutions that offer access to both streaming data and historical customer profiles, brands can determine not only which channel makes the most sense for real-time journey orchestration, but also how to tailor messaging and timing using both in-the-moment customer signals and in-depth analysis of past interactions.

It’s this level of personalization that maximizes the impact of real-time experiences, helping brands like Albertsons Companies drive better business results.

“Personalized messaging … drove approximately 30% weekly click rate and 37% weekly redemption rate,” Deshpande said.

And by giving business teams the ability to activate personalized real-time experiences across all channels from a single location, organizations can eliminate the need for costly channel-specific tools while ensuring experience orchestration is holistic and not siloed.

This is how real-time solutions help brands not only meet, but also exceed customer expectations. The key is not to sacrifice personalization for speed.

Impactful real-time experiences aren’t just about reacting quickly — they’re about taking the right action in the right place at the right time. To drive the best results, you have to put the unique wants and needs of your customers at the center of your real-time strategy.

No matter what real-time solution you use, be sure it not only helps you move quickly, but also enhances your decision-making and empowers you to activate personalized customer experiences across channels at scale.

Learn More About Real-Time Solutions

We invite you to download The Enterprise Guide to Real-Time CX Powered by Continuous Intelligence or simply get in touch with our experts to discover how you can provide real-time experiences using the AIQ CX Hub.