Personalizing CX: From initial lead to customer success

People are immersed in personalized content all day, whether they’re scrolling through their Twitter feed, listening to Spotify, making a purchase on Amazon or binge-watching Netflix.

If you’re reaching out to prospective customers using digital channels, you’ve got to personalize outreach to be competitive. As one Adobe survey found, 67% of consumers expect content to be personalized.

Ideally, the customer experience (CX) will be personalized from the first encounter and throughout the customer lifecycle.

If you’re looking for ways to increase sales and deepen customer relationships, there are techniques you can use to move leads through the sales pipeline, ensure a successful handoff from sales to the customer success team and expand customer relationships.

Work smarter with marketing to convert leads to customers

“Lead magnets” are a great way to connect with prospects. But once a prospect fills out your form or requests your download, the following interactions — whether automated, or executed by sales — must be direct, personalized, and aligned to the value your solution provides.

Because sales team resources are often limited, it’s important to prioritize how and when to follow up by scoring leads.

So how do you decide which leads are most likely to turn into business for you? At ActiveCampaign, we recommend a more flexible and modern lead qualification approach that revolves around the concepts of fit and intent.

• Fit: how well our product(s) fit the needs of a given customer or prospect. Can the solutions that ActiveCampaign provides improve that business’ ability to make money, save time, or deliver better CX. If so, we would consider them to be a ‘fit.’
• Intent: how actively a given customer or prospect is pursuing a solution. Have they recognized that a problem exists, identified that they need to make a change in their environment to address it? If so, we would consider them to have ‘intent.’

In addition to prioritizing prospects based on fit and intent, you also want to tailor your outreach based on the customer’s specific preferences. This can include communication style, preferred channel, past purchase history, and more.

Most importantly, you must create context around your solution, understanding that your prospect doesn’t care about your generic value prop, they want to know how you can help them specifically. Therefore, your messages should clearly convey your value proposition in the context of their current circumstances.

Make the sales to customer success handoff a win

Many teams forget that, once the deal closes, the work is just beginning. A key success factor in driving retention, growth, and advocacy is alignment between the sales and customer success teams. New Business Sales are great, but you’ve got to make the customer successful and keep customers on board. You can’t underestimate the importance of what happens after the sale.

Customer success teams are not only vital for helping customers succeed, they play a critical role in the overall success of the company. A great post-sale experience doesn’t only help you retain more of your customer base, it drives customers to increase their usage, and even become an advocate for your brand.

Better retention, better expansion, and more referrals are all forms of growth and all areas where effective Customer Success teams can have an impact.

Automate customer interactions to create a more personal experience

From a customer success perspective, onboarding is simpler when you understand customer expectations. This requires a full view of all prior and concurrent customer interactions. Your business has multiple operating units where customer conversations are taking place.

To personalize communication with customers, you need to integrate data and connect the conversations that are taking place across all channels, be it email, chat, or social.

With the context provided by the customer’s history with your company, you’ll be better equipped to support the problem they’re trying to solve. If you have access to the questions customers have asked before, you’ll be better positioned to predict what they need now.

When you track past clicks, purchases and live chats, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of what the customer is looking to get out of the relationship with your company.

Personalization isn’t just for the customer acquisition phase — it’s important to continue it at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Remember that great customer support happens at every stage.

Provide support across multiple channels, including automated chat, multichannel help technologies and email workflows so you can provide a consistent CX, no matter which channel the customer uses. That’s how to personalize the CX and smooth the transition from initial lead through customer success.