How Custom Software Drives Personalized Customer Journeys?

Loyalty isn’t something that businesses can take for granted. In fact, marketing platform Blackhawk Research highlighted that 25% of customers have stopped spending on brands they prefer. 

This could be just one of the indicators of inflation, but there’s also clear evidence that consumers prefer a more personalized approach. 

New Epsilon Research also stated that four out of every five customers would buy products only when a brand offers them a personalized customer experience. 

What this means is that a lack of personalized customer experiences can, and will, negatively impact your business. It can also create generic customer journeys, the results of which I’ve already touched upon.  

Custom software development solutions—tailored to fit your specific industry—are the best vehicle to deliver personalized customer journeys, and create an environment conducive to growth. Read on and learn how. 

What is CX Personalization?

You’re expecting an interview call or you’re waiting anxiously for some news from a loved one, and your phone starts lighting up with irrelevant texts about offers and coupons you don’t care about, or you don’t need. While you could say it’s just bad timing, the problem is that these promo messages aren’t even meant for you.

It’s what we call a horrible user experience. The sad part—most businesses don’t really care about or give much thought to how your interactions with their brand make you feel. 

Enter, CX Personalization. With personalized customer experiences—it’s all about you—you’re the center of the universe. 

Why is CX Personalization Important?

Bluecore’s Ecommerce and Retail Benchmark concluded that personalized promotional emails led to a 139% increase in click through rates, when compared to one-time, and generic sends. 

Along with other benefits, customer experience or CX personalization help your business- 

• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Increase brand loyalty
• Drive point marketing initiatives

But, every Batman needs an Alfred. And, personalized customer journeys need custom software. Here’s why.

What is Custom Software?

Any software that has been custom-built to solve key business challenges and work seamlessly within workflows and processes is called custom software, bespoke software, or even tailored software.

Unlike off-the-shelf software with predesigned workflows and limited integrations, custom applications solve key challenges for businesses. 

Every feature in custom software is designed to work seamlessly within a business’ workflows and processes. This is what enables custom software to personalize every interaction for customers on demand, and at scale. 

Custom Software – Key Features

While there are many elements that make up custom software, here are a few key ones – 

1. Functionalities not available in off-the-shelf software
2. Scale up or down, depending on your business needs 
3. Modular architecture, ensuring that modification of functionalities doesn’t affect the entire system 
4. Integration with existing systems and process automation for time and effort-intensive tasks
5. Clean, intuitive and easy to navigate user-friendly UI
6. Real-time analytics to easily monitor interaction and gather performance insights. 
7. 24/7 Support and Maintenance for effective and timely issue resolution
8. Future Readiness to evolve alongside business needs and technological advancements

How Custom Software Fuels CX Personalization?

A PWC report found that only 15% of consumers feel that companies use personal data to improve their lives.

Custom software一based on the tenets of delivering tailored experiences一is perfect for building delightful, and individual-specific experiences. It helps create unified cohorts that can surface a complete preference and behavior-based customer profile. 

Here’s how it helps deliver CX personalization – 

Anticipating Customer Needs – Custom software works seamlessly alongside tools that are built to crunch data and derive customer behavior, preference and other insights. So tailoring experiences and anticipating customer needs becomes easier than ever before.

Instant and Relevant Responses – Historical data and preference insights can help provide responses that save time and are relevant to users, directly improving CSAT scores .

Tailored Experience – Achieving hyper-personalization is easy with custom software. In fact, you can easily test between best case scenarios and make interaction adjustments on the fly. 

Cross-Channel Consistency – Imagine the joys of delivering consistent customer interactions across varied channels? It’s possible with custom software, which unifies customer interaction platforms. 

Increased Personalization Efficiency – Feedback helps everything improve, even the effectiveness of personalized CX. Custom applications help gather instant feedback, and iteratively refine strategies to improve personalization efficacy across different touchpoints.    

Key Merits of Personalizing Customer Journeys With Tailor-Made Software

As consumer trust continues to dwindle, it’s imperative that businesses rethink their customer relationships. The easiest way to solve this trust problem – Tailored Customer Journeys powered by bespoke software. 

Here’s why – 

• More customer interactions via custom messaging, recommendations and services. 
• Higher conversion rate via relevant and timely recommendations
• Increased Campaign Effectiveness via guided customer journeys and easier movement through the sales funnel
• Stronger customer relationships, and improved customer loyalty via behavior and preference analysis
• Deeper Customer Insights via analytics to easily enable customer delight across every touchpoint on the journey
• Operational Excellence via personalized experience automation, saving time and effort while increasing campaign and sales effectiveness
• Assured Quality while you scale up for a wider audience, whether it’s adding new features or channels

Real-World Examples of CX Personalization

Custom Software has been powering personalized customer journeys for a long time. Here are some real-world examples that you’ve probably come across – 

1. Amazon – Who doesn’t know about wish lists and product recommendations. Probably one of the most sophisticated engines that suggests products based on purchase and browsing history, this is one of the best examples of custom software delivering a personalized CX. 
2. Netflix – Going by who’s more recognizable, sorry Amazon, but even my grandma knows Netflix. When you take custom software and you ‘roid it up with one of the most advanced AI recommendations out there today, you get the Netflix app- a milestone in custom software for personalized customer journeys. 
3. Spotify – Wrapped which created a year-end audio track book of every user’s favorite tunes from 2023, is another example of custom software for delivering delight across the customer journey. 

Tips and Best Practices for Building Custom Software That Drives CX Personalization

Delivering the best and most relevant customer experience requires that organizations follow some industry-leading tips and best practices – 

Develop a Personalization Framework – Deploy flexible, easy to adapt process playbooks to match user preference data with offers

Customer Profile Building – Identify customers, analyze behaviors, demographics, and preferences to ameliorate approach

Take on a Holistic Approach – Consistency is the most important part in improving customer experience, so delivering the same experience across all customer touchpoints is key. 

Champion Data Insights – Implement tools, and analyze customer insights and to inform decision making

AI and Automation – Deploy chatbots to increase CSAT and improve resolution times

Pivot in Real-Time – Be ready to make adjustments on the fly, always stay relevant, and on time.

Feedback Collection – Make feedback collection easy and easily refine the approach in a phased manner. 

Data Privacy – Be transparent about data, and prioritize compliance with data protection laws

Cross-departmental collaboration – Unify the approach to personalization throughout the customer journey involving teams across the organization.

How Integrating AI and Data-Driven Capabilities Helps in CX Personalization?

Creating tailored experiences that meet customer preferences and needs of customers is dependent on how data is collected. By integrating data-driven practices with AI-based recommendations, your business can deliver the best customer experience. 

1. Improve CSAT and loyalty 

Using predictive analytics, businesses can easily predict which products a customer might buy next, allowing the system to offer real-time tailor personalized recommendations, and improve user satisfaction and improve loyalty. 

2. Easily drill down on customer segments

With AI-enabled customer segmentation, tailoring highly targeted experiences is fairly straightforward. For example, a banking app may provide users with options to open a trading account or a fixed deposit based on their life stage and their salary. 

3. Adapt interactions in real-time

Remember how everyone’s favorite marketplace dynamically lists only related products and other discounts. This is exactly how real-time interaction adaptation works, creating an experience where customer delight is placed at the heart of all interactions. 

4. Tailored shopping experiences

With AI algorithms matching browsing history, purchase preferences and buyer behavior to product recommendations, it creates a seamless and relevant buying experience for every single customer, ensuring that your customer always feels seen and heard. 

Exploring Unified’s Custom Software Excellence for Curating Personalized Customer Journeys

Read how Unified infotech boosted CX and increased operational efficiency for a Fortune 50 Media conglomerate, helping them achieve a 60% increase in CSAT surveys and 15% improvement in back-office operational efficiency.