Personalized Customer Experience at Scale

Stand out from the crowd: an intelligent platform to scale personalized customer experience.

With so much digital “noise” out in the marketplace, companies must make the most of every opportunity they have to connect with customers. The priority? Solving for individual needs and preferences – with the customer experience right at the center.

In the wake of COVID-19, people are relying on digital interaction more than ever. For businesses that’s both a challenge and a huge opportunity. A challenge because, in an increasingly digital world, consumers have grown much less tolerant of over-communication. Digital fatigue is setting in and there’s rising demand for relevant, timely, value-adding services – presented to customers wherever they are, based on their data, preferences and needs.

In tandem, we’re seeing the sales and marketing landscape shift inexorably from product push to customer first. And for companies that can deliver on this new dynamic by initiating and sustaining personalized customer conversations at scale, there’s an extraordinary opportunity to stand out from competitors, increase customer satisfaction and improve digital completion.

Experiences delivered by the “entirety of the business”

Customer experiences today don’t just have to be more relevant than ever. They must also be empathetic. Whether a customer is trying to right-size their monthly subscription service, address an incorrect billing, increase network bandwidth or modify a loan payment plan, companies have to understand the individual customer context in real time – and respond to it intelligently and with a conscience.

The goal? To be indispensable to customers – creating immediate, predictive and personalized omni-channel offerings. And the only way to achieve this is by becoming a truly “experience-led” business. This means bringing everything together – business model, employees, operating model and technology – all aligned in the service of experience.

There has to be an infrastructure underpinning all that – a reference architecture to which everything anchors and through which everything seamlessly connects. That’s key to overcoming a common challenge confronting many companies today: making the right selections from the enormous choice of technology solutions available to them for marketing, sales, service and support.

Bringing it all together

From “traditional” CRM technology to campaign management and personalization, as well as analytical and orchestration platforms, there’s a very wide range of technologies out there to help companies develop products and services around the customer experience (CX).

But what’s increasingly critical is the role played by each of these tools to provide winning capabilities as effectively and efficiently as possible. And right now, there’s a lot of confusion around this. What’s urgently needed is an architecture that allows companies to harness exactly the technologies they need to replace legacy campaign marketing with a single, cohesive and holistic approach – built around the customer.

That’s the challenge we set out to solve. To do so, we’ve developed the Accenture Intelligent Personalization Platform, a reference architecture that allows companies to:

• “know” their customers by integrating multiple sources of information and signals from each interaction
• use that information to generate relevant insights that can be acted upon, and
• communicate with customers consistently across channels.

Crucially too, our architecture enables companies to react rapidly so that, whether a customer is on a company’s website, or interacting via live-chat, phone or email, they’re always receiving relevant communications, offers and services – at the very moment when they need them.

Five layers for intelligent personalization

To do all this, our customer experience architecture combines five key layers. First, it gathers data from companies’ source systems, along with third-party information. Next, there’s an intelligence layer, applying analytics, CRM and cognitive technologies to identify and understand the information that matters and use it to decide how to act.

With next-best actions identified, the architecture enables companies to understand how to orchestrate their responses across different channels, figure out which rules to use and develop and execute campaigns.

Then it helps them make sure they’re engaging with customers through the right channels at the right moments. And finally, it allows them to measure performance – customer satisfaction, net promoter scores (NPS), profitability and so on – and feed those measurements back into the overall process.

Drawing on a deep understanding of the various technology vendors’ strengths (and how they fit together), we can help companies to develop new CX strategies and map the technologies they need – like Pega and Adobe – to deliver these essential customer experience-focused approaches.

One of our clients, for example, is currently using Pega Customer Decision Hub™ as its omnichannel decisioning “brain”, in combination with Adobe as the engine for content personalization. The graphic below demonstrates the complementary capabilities (and overlap) between the two.

Figure 1: Complementary capabilities between Pega Customer Decision Hub™ and Adobe

Getting started: actions to take now

So how can companies move forward from here? There are several key steps. First, assess your current CX strategy. Then identify opportunities for additional value, review the ecosystem options and develop a roadmap. Finally, move to execute – and keep fine-tuning and improving.

It’s a mission-critical journey. Companies that can empower their channels with immediate, predictive offers will reduce churn, increase transaction value and conversion rates and build long-term customer relationships.

That’s why it’s so important to get going now. Don’t wait to have everything figured out. Start executing with proofs of concept and pilots by channel, product and customer lifecycle stage – and build from there.

Trusted relationships and customer experience have taken on new definition and dimension in these uncertain times. Leading businesses that care and innovate will build stronger relationships that will endure well beyond the current crisis. Find out how we can help put the customer experience at the heart of your business.

Disclaimer: “This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.” 

Disclaimer: “Copyright © 2020 Accenture.  All rights reserved.” 

Disclaimer: “This document is intended for general informational purposes only and does not take into account the reader’s specific circumstances, and may not reflect the most current developments. Accenture disclaims, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, any and all liability for the accuracy and completeness of the information in this presentation and for any acts or omissions made based on such information. Accenture does not provide legal, regulatory, audit, or tax advice. Readers are responsible for obtaining such advice from their own legal counsel or other licensed professionals.”