Long before the internet was born, you walked into your local shop and got advice from your favorite salesperson. They knew your face, and perhaps even your name and preferences, and could make the right suggestions for your needs. Flash forward a few years, and shopping became an anonymous, transaction-focused experience. You clicked a link and pressed a buy button, and a package appeared on your doorstep a few days later.
But it’s all come full circle: sales interactions are personal again, from retail to SaaS to grocery delivery. Customers expect the businesses that sell to them to have detailed profiles of their likes, dislikes, past purchases, and online behavior. What’s more: they want their favorite companies to anticipate and cater to their needs. Here’s how you can use tech to provide a top notch experience that makes your customers feel truly seen.
1. Take a Hint From Your Competitors
Customers want to hear from their favorite brands — in their email inboxes, on social media, through blog posts, and even the occasional SMS. They also expect the companies they follow or do business with to have insight into issues they care about. If your competitors are beating you to the punch when it comes to consistently engaging with consumers, it may be time to conduct a competitive content analysis.
The bottom line is, traditional information sources like magazines and even personal blogs are out. Consumers are getting their information from sources doubling as marketing channels — like your company’s website or marketing emails. This type of content can help your brand develop the perfect strategy to fill in those information gaps.
2. Use Social Listening to Understand Your Audience
AI content tools scan your and your competitors’ content to determine what’s missing from the conversation. But social listening tools do the opposite: they determine what your customers and prospects are already talking about. These tools monitor and track what’s happening in the social media ecosystem. They can help you find out what people are saying about your brand and what your customers want to hear and talk about.
With the info you learn through social listening, you can craft relevant, topical marketing campaigns or viral social media trends. For example, you can capitalize on a noteworthy TikTok dance or partner up with an influencer who likes your products. You can re-shape your brand perception, if necessary, countering any negative messaging you find with positive information about your company.
3. Hyper-Personalize Your User Experience
Personalization tech comes in a variety of forms, but they all have the same basic end game. The idea is to serve each customer a tailored experience, based on each new detail you learn about them. Companies like Netflix do this by offering ever-more accurate movie and television recommendations. Others, like Lululemon and Stitchfix, remember what clothing you bought last time and suggest complimentary items to fill out your closet.
A smaller, growing business might not have the resources to build this level of complexity into their personalization. But personalization engines are becoming more affordable and accessible to a variety of businesses, including SMEs. These tech tools can be used to deliver more fine-tuned customer service experiences or help associates choose the right sales tactics. They can also deliver segmented landing pages or targeted discount offers to prospects.
4. Optimize for Accessibility
To truly cater to your target audience, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to connect with your brand. But companies often overlook one of the most basic ways of making themselves available and approachable to potential customers. Around ten percent of U.S. adults have either a vision or a hearing disability. Still more have cognitive or motor disabilities, or forms of neurodivergence that could benefit from the availability of accessibility features.
Most brands could be doing a lot more to provide multi-sensory and accessible experiences to cater to their audiences. For example, more brands could be making their sites voice search accessible or offering blog posts in spoken or podcast form. On the flip side, transcripts of podcasts and captions for ads aren’t nearly as prevalent as they could be. Poor store and even product design can prevent disabled customers from being able to use certain items or services.
On a Silver Spoon
The famous expression “The customer is always right” was coined over 100 years ago. In that time, no one could’ve ever imagined a world in which each customer experience was as unique as it is today. Sure, a sales associate could provide a friendly experience that felt personal to the customer. But they couldn’t know the customer as deeply as AI, machine learning, and other tech tools allow for today.
Today’s tech allows companies to be more than just friendly faces offering the customer what they might want. It creates opportunities to get closer and closer each day to practically reading the customers’ mind. Companies should protect this knowledge and be sure to use all the insights they glean responsibly. But customers have a powerful desire to be known and understood, and companies shouldn’t be afraid to heed that demand.
