Use real-time data to personalize how you connect with customers throughout their journey
More than half of global executives — 58% — said that customer experience is the number one business priority facing their businesses, according to a recent report published by Harvard Business Review Analytical Services.
As companies attempt digital transformation and automation at warp-speed, and as they cut costs to remain nimble, their customers may not feel as cared for as they once were. To continue to compete, executives must find ways to prioritize personalization and customer empathy.
Digital empathy is a critical piece to the CX puzzle often missing in the C-Suite as most executives are not their customers, which hinders empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Digital empathy is the ability to humanize customer behaviors, preferences, and aspirations through the connection between human-centered data, insights, and the meaningful customer engagement powered by those insights.
Any executive decision made about investments that touch customers without empathy will risk relationships. And this comes at a time when retention is an urgent business mandate. In the last year alone, 71% of consumers switched brands at least once.
Even though executives use data to make CX decisions at scale, data often presents itself in a very black-and-white format that doesn’t inherently highlight the nuances which can create personal moments for every customer. As a result, empathy divides appear between data, insights, and the ability to personalize engagement across the customer journey. As a result, executives make decisions, investments, and bets about the business and its performance, removed from the everyday environments affecting customer decisions, what they value, and why. The speed and breadth of digital transformation only widens the empathy divide without a thought, personal approach.
Digital Empathy Inspires 360-Degree Customer Experience Innovation
According to a recent Salesforce study, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. That means no one touchpoint or business function — whether marketing, sales, commerce, or service — defines the customer experience. It’s the sum of every engagement along the customer journey.
In a separate Salesforce study, customers revealed that they expect personalized, empathetic, and connected experiences. More so, they’re losing patience with siloed and disconnected journeys. Of those surveyed, 66% expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations (personalization), 68% expect brands to demonstrate empathy (understanding), and 76% expect consistent interactions across departments (integration).
The customer expectation for empathetic, connected experiences further increases the need for digital empathy, which can create closer connections to connected customers by translating 360-degree data and insights into a “love language” that personalizes engagement. The result allows companies to speak the language of their individual customers, making touchpoints personal and connected, building more meaningful relationships in every engagement.
Digital Empathy Becomes a “Sixth Love Language”
The 5 Love Languages
This may seem like an out of the blue question to ask, but have you read the “5 Love Languages,” by Gary Chapman?
The book’s premise is that we each have our own special “love language” in how we express affection and communicate with our significant others and how we’d like others to love us back.
The five love languages according to Chapman are:
- Gifts
- Acts of service
- Words of affirmation
- Quality time
- Physical touch
By learning to recognize these engagement preferences in yourself and in your loved ones, you learn how to intentionally invest in your relationships, express yourself, listen, engage with one another, resolve conflicts, and grow closer.
Different people with different personalities and love languages give and receive love in different ways. The same is true for customer relationships.
When it comes to delivering purposeful customer experiences, digital empathy represents an addition, sixth love language.
Digital empathy builds on the “golden rule” we’ve come to learn in life. But rather than treating others the way you want to be treated, digital empathy asks you to treat others the way they want to be treated. This is why having a 360-degree view of the customer is paramount. You have to understand them to know their feelings and meet or even exceed their expectations.
Through data-driven insights and insight-driven engagement, digital empathy opens the door to relevant, hyper-personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. The results are meant to foster more loyal customers and more fulfilling relationships.
In a recent conversation about connected customers with Seth Godin, world-renowned marketing guru, serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author, he shared a poignant observation that amplifies the contrast between how companies and customers perceive “personalization.”
According to Godin, “No one wants anything to be personalized, they want it to be personal, and those are two totally different things.”
How to Communicate and Actions to Take
Digital empathy as a love language changes how you communicate.
New research found that 81% of consumers are reassessing their overall spending budget over the next 12 months across every industry.
Over 60% of consumers expect companies to react instantly with the most up-to-date information about them when interacting across departments. And 65% will remain loyal to companies this next year if they offer a more personalized experience.
The days of batch and blast are over. Impersonalized messages in an era of hyper-personalization is beyond outdated. CDPs, third-party players such as Fetch, existing loyalty programs, there are so many ways to start to connect the dots and tell a more relevant story to customers.
The actions you take also look different in that you communicate with them in ways that they prefer. It starts with personalization and it resonates through relevant outreach, offers, value, and validation.
Like with CX and empathy, Chapman’s book reminds us that in relationships, we are not typically empathetic in understanding other people. This leads us to communicate with others in ways we assume works, rather than how they prefer to be communicated with. At the same time, we expect them to understand and support us using the communication paths we’ve laid out for them. But in reality, they receive and perceive your interactions through their filters.
When there isn’t intentional alignment in understanding and delivering personal value in every touchpoint, from others’ point of view, businesses create empathy gaps. But digital empathy and the expression of love languages are the means in which to close those divides.
Effective CX Begins with a Unified View of the Customer
In its research, HBRAS identified two sides of successful CX: data-driven insights and insight-driven engagement. The report found, however, that just 17% of executives say their organizations are either excellent in both insight and engagement or excellent in one and good in the other.
At the same time, HBRAS found that leading companies integrate data across departments to gain a 360-degree view of the customer and develop the operational capacity to engage customers using those insights. But most organizations aren’t at this level, yet. The research found that only 15% of companies have a single view of customer data and the organizational structure to make use of those insights.
With limited data inputs and fragmented operational silos in place, personalization engines are not really set up to engage customers personally. As such, companies are unable to genuinely understand their customer’s love language.
Making Personalization Personal
For customer relationships to flourish, companies must listen and understand how different customers want to be valued. Companies must become customer companies. This is where 360-degree, single customer view plays a transformative role.
Marketers, service reps, salespeople, they must also learn how to express value in each touchpoint personally through means that customers will appreciate and act on. This is where the art of love languages — or customer engagement — comes into play.
In business terms, real-time data-driven insights enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) become the gateway to empathy, amplifying the voice of your customers and their desired outcomes. Those insights represent opportunities to improve digital empathy in order to foster deeper relationships through relevant, hyper-personalized content, touchpoints, and journeys, which add up to meaningful and sought-after experiences.
Start by asking:
- Who is it you want to reach?
- What is their desired outcome?
- How do they define personalization, or personal engagement?
- What do they value?
- What are creative ways to communicate value-creation in exchange for personal information?
- What stories and content formats resonate with them?
- What devices do they use and what do best-in-class, native experiences look like in each journey?
- What is their preferred form of communication?
- How is your technology and operational process and structure adding to or taking away from experiences, today?
To execute CX to the expectations of connected customers and speak their love language, digital empathy must be a two-way street at all touchpoints.
Foundational elements for empathetic personalization also include:
- Integrating the right technology, powered by a single view of the customer, AI, automation and workflows help make targeted, 1:1 experiences scale
- Real-time data analytics based on user data, CDPs, and complementary data sources (for example, weather) to deliver tailored, connected, consistent engagement in all channels, especially throughout complex customer journeys
- Customized experiences based on past search behavior, activity, purchases, interests, and preferences
- Contextual relevance determined by intent, device, and desired outcomes
- Converting real-time insights into anticipated engagement, even before customers know they’re in need
- Direct engagement through surveys or games to earn access to inputs that unlock new dimensions of value-added engagement
Digital Empathy Leads to Customer Experience Innovation that Makes Business Personal
Remarkable customer experiences happen when you speak the customer’s love language, making it personal, experiential, beyond transactional. The path to doing so begins with understanding the love language of digital empathy and then connecting data, insights, touchpoints, and operational functions across the customer journey.
Digital empathy allows executives to see other perspectives and communication styles, helping them understand customers and be inspired by them. It is the foundation to deliver better products, services, and experiences. But more so, it inspires innovation to the ability to discover new ways to give customers what they’ll truly love before they even realize it’s what they wanted.
How is your business going to learn the love languages of your customers to personalize customer engagement and make experiences more beneficial for everyone?
